Reflections on Monopolies and Free Trade at the End of the Eighteenth Century: A Tobacco Trading Company between Puerto Rico and Amsterdam in 1784

Itinerario ◽  
2005 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 73-90
Author(s):  
Ana Crespo Solana
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
New World ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Trading Company ◽  
Economic Exploitation ◽  
Considerable Success ◽  
Direct Trade

Even after the passing of the ‘Free Trade’ acts in Europe and America between 1765 and 1803, colonisation still meant trade for European mercantile and maritime powers which were beginning to think of themselves as liberal in the politico-economic sense. As before, the only suitable way of obtaining profits appeared to be economic exploitation, albeit within a politico-institutional structure. This ideal had inspired the inflexible system that had dominated the relations of both Spain and Portugal with their respective transatlantic colonies. Likewise, ever since their first incursions into the New World, northern Europeans had encouraged the creation of commercial companies dedicated to monopolising any of the goods that colonies might possibly have to offer. Dutch, English and French merchants developed farreaching private and state programmes designed to direct trade and colonisation and to encourage the populating of the new lands. During the seventeenth century, some of these companies achieved considerable success. They were able to settle, with or without permission from the Spanish monarchy, in territories formally under Spanish control, such as Puerto Rico, Santo Domingo, coastal Venezuela or Guiana, regarded as areas eminently suited to business projects.

The Civil War in an Atlantic Context

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Don H. Doyle
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Civil War ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
Public Diplomacy ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
International Crisis ◽  
The Caribbean

America’s Civil War became part of a much larger international crisis as European powers, happy to see the experiment in self-government fail in America’s “Great Republic,” took advantage of the situation to reclaim former colonies in the Caribbean and establish a European monarchy in Mexico. Overseas, in addition to their formal diplomatic appeals to European governments, both sides also experimented with public diplomacy campaigns to influence public opinion. Confederate foreign policy sought to win recognition and aid from Europe by offering free trade in cotton and aligning their cause with that of the aristocratic anti-democratic governing classes of Europe. The Union, instead, appealed to liberal, republican sentiment abroad by depicting the war as a trial of democratic government and embracing emancipation of the slaves. The Union victory led to the withdrawal of European empires from the New World: Spain from Santo Domingo, France from Mexico, Russia from Alaska, and Britain from Canada, and the destruction of slavery in the United States hastened its end in Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Brazil.

Claiming the New World: Empire, Law, and Indigenous Rights in the Mohegan Case, 1704–1743

2011 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 333-373 ◽  
Author(s):  
Craig Bryan Yirush
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Indigenous Rights ◽  
Privy Council

In 1773, with the empire on the brink of revolt, the Privy Council gave the final ruling in the case of the Mohegan Indians versus the colony of Connecticut. Thus ended what one eighteenth-century lawyer called “the greatest cause that ever was heard at the Council Board.” After a decades-long battle for their rights, involving several appeals to the Crown, three royal commissions, and the highest court in the empire, the Mohegans' case against Connecticut was dismissed. The dispute centered on a large tract of land (~20,000 acres) in southeastern Connecticut, which, the Mohegans claimed, the colony had reserved for them in the late seventeenth century. Concerned that the colony had violated its agreements, the Mohegans, aided by powerful colonists with a pecuniary interest in this tract of land, appealed to the Crown for redress. As a result of this appeal, what had been a narrow dispute over land became part of a larger conflict between the Crown, the colony, and the tribe over property and autonomy in the empire.

The New World of Adam Smith

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Kenneth Galbraith
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Free Trade ◽  
New World ◽  
Industrial Revolution ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Standard Of Living ◽  
Wealth Of Nations ◽  
Trade Competition

This chapter examines Adam Smith's theories during the Industrial Revolution, which came to England and southern Scotland in the last third of the eighteenth century. During the Industrial Revolution, the workers who previously had been producing goods in their cottages or food and wool on their farms moved to the factories and the factory towns. Merchants began to invest their capital in factories and machinery or in the far from munificent wages that kept alive the workers. This change was made possible by the industrialist, whose orientation was to the production of goods, rather than their purchase or sale. The chapter discusses Smith's views on a variety of subjects, which he articulated in the Wealth of Nations, including borrowing, capitalism, free trade, competition, credit, distribution, innovation, justice, labor, manufacturing, merchants, monopolies, political economy, prices, production and productivity, profit, public policy, rent, standard of living, and value.

The World of Alexander Campbell: An Eighteenth-Century Grenadian Planter

2003 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 229-256
Author(s):  
Mark Quintanilla
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
British Empire ◽  
West Indies ◽  
New World ◽  
Economic Importance ◽  
The West ◽  
Tropical Crops ◽  
The World ◽  
Alexander Campbell

In 1763 few Europeans doubted the enormous importance of their Caribbean possessions, a fact indicated by the ready willingness of the French to cede Canada in order to regain British-occupied Martinique. The British were no different, and in the West Indies they were in the process of establishing a New World aristocracy whose riches were based upon African slavery and the production of tropical crops. The British prized their Caribbean territories, especially since the sugar revolution that had begun during the mid-seventeenth century first in Barbados where the crop had become dominant by 1660 and then in Jamaica. British planters continued their success in the Leeward Island settlements of Antigua, St. Christopher, Nevis, and Montserrat, where entrepreneurs converted their lands to sugar cane by the early 1700s. West Indian planters became influential within the British Empire, and exercised profound social, political, and economic importance in the metropolis. By the eighteenth century they were the richest colonists within the empire; they were landed aristocrats who could have vied in wealth and prestige with their counterparts in Britain.

Spanish Hispaniola and Puerto Rico

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francisco A. Scarano
Keyword(s):  
Puerto Rico ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Dominican Republic ◽  
New World ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Santo Domingo ◽  
Long Period ◽  
Historical Factors ◽  
Racially Mixed ◽  
High Degree

This article reviews scholarship on the history and historiography of slavery in Spanish Hispaniola and Puerto Rico. Santo Domingo, the Spanish colony that became the Dominican Republic, and Puerto Rico, its island neighbour to the east, rank as two of the Western hemisphere's most racially mixed societies. Historical factors related in one way or another to slavery account for the high degree of racial admixture. Both countries experienced enslavement and the Atlantic slave trade intensely in the sixteenth century. This was followed by a long period of economic declension during which slave imports were low and the exploitation of slave labour fell into relative obsolescence. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, virtual economic autarchy in both colonies allowed for greater rates of miscegenation than in almost every other New World society significantly influenced by the institution of slavery.

The Habsburg Monarchy and the Spanish Empire (1492–1757)

2021 ◽  
pp. 789-809
Author(s):  
Josep M. Delgado ◽  
Josep M. Fradera
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Turn Of The Century ◽  
Spanish Empire ◽  
Habsburg Monarchy ◽  
Philip Ii ◽  
Charles V ◽  
The World ◽  
Institutional System

In the sixteenth century the Spanish monarchy became one of the largest and most expansive political entities in the world. From then until the War of the Spanish Succession in the early eighteenth century, it synchronized a complex and entirely new institutional system in its European dominions with its vast American possessions. This system had been forged through conquest and rule over Amerindian and Filipino peoples since the Europeans’ arrival in the New World. The wars against European Protestant powers and the Ottomans in the Mediterranean during the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, along with inter-imperial conflicts with France and England, had enormous costs in terms of internal stability and in the shape of the colonial system in America. By the mid-seventeenth century, Spain’s inability to project its monarchical ambitions over Europe was obvious, and its efforts to recapture its lost powers were a failure, as was evident at the turn of the century with the arrival on the Spanish throne of Philip of Anjou, Louis XIV’s nephew, the next generation of the French dynasty.

Nicolas Gueudeville's Enlightenment Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 24-60
Author(s):  
Russ Leo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Original Length ◽  
English Law

Nicolas Gueudeville's 1715 French translation of Utopia is often dismissed as a “belle infidèle,” an elegant but unfaithful work of translation. Gueudeville does indeed expand the text to nearly twice its original length. But he presents Utopia as a contribution to emergent debates on tolerance, natural religion, and political anthropology, directly addressing the concerns of many early advocates of the ideas we associate with Enlightenment. In this sense, it is not as much an “unfaithful” presentation of More's project as it is an attempt to introduce Utopia to eighteenth-century francophone audiences—readers for whom theses on political economy and natural religion were much more salient than More's own preoccupations with rhetoric and English law. This paper introduces Gueudeville and his oeuvre, paying particular attention to his revisions to Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan's 1703 Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amérique Septentrionale. Published in 1705, Gueudeville's “revised, corrected, & augmented” version of Lahontan's Voyages foregrounds the rational and natural religion of the Huron as well as their constitutive aversion to property, to concepts of “mine” and “yours.” Gueudeville's revised version of Lahontan's Voyages purports to be an anthropological investigation as well as a study of New World political economy; it looks forward, moreover, to his edition of Utopia, framing More's work as a comparable study of political economy and anthropology. Gueudeville, in other words, renders More's Utopia legible to Enlightenment audiences, depicting Utopia not in terms of impossibility and irony but rather as a study of natural religion and attendant forms of political, devotional, and economic life. Gueudeville's edition of Utopia even proved controversial due, in part, to his insistence on the rationality as well as the possibility of Utopia.

To Sin No More

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rex Galindo
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Urban Areas ◽  
New Spain ◽  
New World ◽  
Spanish America ◽  
Rural And Urban Areas ◽  
Rural And Urban ◽  
Spanish Atlantic ◽  
Franciscan Order

For 300 years, Franciscans were at the forefront of the spread of Catholicism in the New World. In the late seventeenth century, Franciscans developed a far-reaching, systematic missionary program in Spain and the Americas. After founding the first college of propaganda fide in the Mexican city of Querétaro, the Franciscan Order established six additional colleges in New Spain, ten in South America, and twelve in Spain. From these colleges Franciscans proselytized Native Americans in frontier territories as well as Catholics in rural and urban areas in eighteenth-century Spain and Spanish America. This is the first book to study these colleges, their missionaries, and their multifaceted, sweeping missionary programs. By focusing on the recruitment of non-Catholics to Catholicism as well as the deepening of religious fervor among Catholics, the book shows how the Franciscan colleges expanded and shaped popular Catholicism in the eighteenth-century Spanish Atlantic world. This book explores the motivations driving Franciscan friars, their lives inside the colleges, their training, and their ministry among Catholics, an often-overlooked duty that paralleled missionary deployments. It argues that Franciscan missionaries aimed to reform or “reawaken” Catholic parishioners just as much as they sought to convert non-Christian Native Americans.

Common Law Constitutionalism

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
William E. Nelson
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Profession ◽  
Legal Institutions ◽  
Law System ◽  
The Common ◽  
Common Law System

This chapter shows how common law pleading, the use of common law vocabulary, and substantive common law rules lay at the foundation of every colony’s law by the middle of the eighteenth century. There is some explanation of how this common law system functioned in practice. The chapter then discusses why colonials looked upon the common law as a repository of liberty. It also discusses in detail the development of the legal profession individually in each of the thirteen colonies. Finally, the chapter ends with a discussion of the role of legislation. It shows that, although legislation had played an important role in the development of law and legal institutions in the seventeenth century, eighteenth-century Americans were suspicious of legislation, with the result that the output of pre-Revolutionary legislatures was minimal.

The Musical Topic of the Mass in B Minor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Melamed
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Church Music ◽  
Sacred Music ◽  
The Other ◽  
Entire Spectrum ◽  
Giovanni Pierluigi Da Palestrina ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

If there is a fundamental musical subject of Johann Sebastian Bach’s Mass in B Minor, a compositional problem the work explores, it is the tension between two styles cultivated in church music of Bach’s time. One style was modern and drew on up-to-date music such as the instrumental concerto and the opera aria. The other was old-fashioned and fundamentally vocal, borrowing and adapting the style of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, his sixteenth-century contemporaries, and his seventeenth-century imitators. The movements that make up Bach’s Mass can be read as exploring the entire spectrum of possibilities offered by these two styles (the modern and the antique), ranging from movements purely in one or the other to a dazzling variety of ways of combining the two. The work illustrates a fundamental opposition in early-eighteenth-century sacred music that Bach confronts and explores in the Mass.

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