Project Proposal

Commercialized Peripheries: The role of legal and illegal northern European trade in the colonial Spanish Southern Cone (1802-18077)     

The Atlantic Ocean is more than a stretch of water between continents. Rather, it is an arena for trade, migration, conflict, and cooperation. Notions of the Atlantic world originate with Walter Lippmann’s 1917 The New Republic, where Lippmann referred to Pan-America and Europe as an “Atlantic community.”^[1] Prompted by his characterization, historians like Fernand Braudel, Robert Palmer, and Bernard Bailyn have developed scholarship on the topic.^[2]

I intend to explore the Atlantic world through the trans-imperial interactions and flows of commerce with northern European merchants and port cities to and from the nineteenth-century Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata. With the Anglo-Spanish War (1796-1808) and the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) endangering Spanish-Atlantic commerce, Spain authorized colonial trade with ‘neutral’ nations and vessels with the Viceroyalty.^[3] Many scholarly works concerning Platine neutral commerce center on relations between Spanish, Portuguese, and American merchants. This literature has highlighted the importance of these nations’ mercantile interactions and routes in the Atlantic and beyond.^[4] Yet few scholars have published on the role of northern European trade, specifically from Denmark, Prussia, Hamburg, and Holland, in this region and period. Some historians, such as Hernán Asdrúbal Silva, have accounted for the participation of Hamburg and Hamburger ships within Spanish Atlantic commercial networks, but more research is needed.^[5] Thus, the essential question for this paper is: To what extent did northern European merchants and port cities exploit their status as ‘neutral’ nations to benefit from commercial trade in the Spanish Atlantic? Further, how did other nations and merchants utilize these ‘neutral’ northern European vessels to conduct both legal and illegal trade during times of Anglo- and Franco-Spanish conflict?

To answer this question, I will utilize global microhistory to analyze interactions of northern European vessels within the Platine trade system and other ‘neutral’ vessels’ relations with northern European ports. Focused on the first decade of the nineteenth century, I will examine ships’ entries, departures, cargo, and routes from the Platine newspaper El Semanario de Agricultura, Industria y Comercio (1802-1807). For deeper analysis, I will aggregate this information into an SPSS (Statistical Package for the Social Sciences) database to generate frequencies and patterns on cargo, ship ownership, and mercantile growth. Additionally, I will be cross-referencing these entries using the Slave Voyages Website.

Based on my current research, I argue that northern European merchants significantly increased their mercantile connections and revenue by taking advantage of their ‘neutral’ status with Río de la Plata’s port cities. As other national ships were either barred from ports or faced heavy duties, these ‘neutral’ nations served as middlemen for importing other nations’ goods to and from northern European ports or leasing their ‘neutral’ vessels for other nationals to transport their cargo. Thus, they profited by actively and passively participating in the Spanish American mercantile networks. Further, northern Europeans utilized their position and connections to engage in dishonest or illegal trade. French and Dutch ships were involved in privateering, notably with French Hipólito Mordeille capturing and selling British cargo utilizing French, Dutch, and Genoese ships. Hamburger, Prussian, and Danish ships also profited from deceitful trade as the dominance of rock or salt ballasts as cargo may indicate their transport of illegal goods, which they purposefully left undocumented in port records. In turn, northern Europeans’ participation in legal and illegal Platine trade demonstrates their ability to exploit their nations’ ‘neutrality’ and gain access to lucrative commercial networks.

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^[1] Bernard Bailyn, ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario, 20: 1 (March 1996), p. 21.

^[2] William O’Reilly, ‘Genealogies of Atlantic history’, Atlantic Studies, 1:1, (August 2004), p. 70.

^[3] Jerry Cooney, ‘Neutral Vessels and Platine Slavers: Building a Viceregal Merchant Marine’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 18: 1 (May 1986), pp. 25-26.

^[4] See Alex Borucki, ‘The U.S. slave ship Ascension in the Río de la Plata: slave routes and circuits of silver in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic and beyond’, Colonial Latin American Review, 29: 4 (December 2020; Fabrício Prado, Edge of Empire: Atlantic Networks and Revolution in Bourbon Río de la Plata (Berkeley, 2016).

^[5] Hernán Asdrúbal Silva, ‘HAMBURGO Y EL RÍO DE LA PLATA VINCULACIONES ECONÓMICAS A FINES DE LA EPOCA COLONIAL’, Jahrbuch für Geschichte Lateinamerikas, 21:1 (December 1984), pp. 189-210.