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WORK TITLE: The Temptations of Trade
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http://www.fau.edu/history/finucane.php * https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/reviews/180671/pearce-finucane-temptations-trade-britain-spain-and-struggle-empire
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Female.
EDUCATION:Yale University, B.A., 2005; Harvard University, Ph.D., 2011.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Florida Atlantic University, assistant professor; University of Kansas, assistant professor.
AWARDS:Recipient of fellowships from John Carter Brown Library, Charles Warren Center for Studies in Early American History, and USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
Adrian Finucane, a graduate of Yale and Harvard, is a historian of early America. Her fields of interest encompass colonial America and the Atlantic world as well as the history of race and gender and the history of witchcraft in the colonies. She teaches courses in U.S. history to 1877.
Her first book is The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire. The empires of England and Spain had long been rivals in religion, politics, and trade. In the early eighteenth century these two superpowers signed an agreement to allow the British South Sea Company to hold complete control of the Spanish Atlantic slave trade. This agreement placed British company agents in the Caribbean and West Indies, trading merchandise and slaves with the Spanish colonies. As the publisher of the book noted, in this way the British “were able to collect potentially damaging information about Spanish imperial trade, military defenses, and internal conflict” and facilitate a “network of illicit trade, contraband, and piracy.”
Writing in the Journal of Southern History, John Garrison Marks commented that through the “lives and experiences of pirates and printers, merchants and mariners, Finucane offers new insight into the complicated links between the British and Spanish empires.” In a review of The Temptations of Trade at H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online, Adrian Pearce delved into the background of the agreement made between Britain and Spain—the Asiento de Negros, the “exclusive contract to supply Spanish America with enslaved people from Africa” that was granted by the Treaty of Utrecht in 1713 and lasted until 1750. The “unique nature” of the agreement and its various conditions—among them, one that “permitted the British to send ships to the great trade fairs that supplied the major Spanish colonies with goods from Europe”—provided the basis for Finucane’s “highly readable study” that “makes significant original contributions” to a somewhat neglected topic. Marks concluded: “This carefully researched and well-written book is to be recommended for scholars and students of the Spanish Empire during the early Bourbon era, of Anglo-Spanish relations in the colonial Americas, of colonial merchants and agents, and of trade and warfare in the eighteenth-century Atlantic.”
Gert Oostindie, critiquing the book in European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, observed: “All of this history is about globalization, and the complex interplay between commercial and geopolitical interests—under what conditions do states prefer international cooperation to further their commercial objectives, or conversely, do they decide to go to war to the same ends?” Without delving into a true “social and cultural history,” Finucane still “offers many valuable insights on the webs of information and on tensions inherent in inter-imperial economic rivalry and cooperation.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
European Review of Latin American and Caribbean Studies, January-June, 2017, Gert Oostindie, review of The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire.
Journal of Southern History, May, 2017, John Garrison Marks, review of The Temptations of Trade, p. 493.
ONLINE
Florida Atlantic University Website, http://www.fau.edu (November 2, 2017), author faculty profile.
H-Net Humanities and Social Sciences Online, https://networks.h-net.org/ (November 2, 2017), Adrian Pearce, review of The Temptations of Trade.
University of Kansas Website, http://www2.ku.edu/ (November 2, 2017), author faculty profile.
University of Pennsylvania Press Website, http://www.upenn.edu/ (November 2, 2017), book description.
Adrian Finucane
Ph.D., Harvard University
Assistant Professor
Areas of Expertise
Colonial Americas
Caribbean
Shipping
Email: afinucane@fau.edu
Office Phone:561-297-3951
engle
I am an assistant professor of early American history. I am currently working on a book project, Founding Georgia: Labor, Debt, and Utopianism in an American Borderland, which investigates settlement and discord during the Trustee period in colonial Georgia.
My first book, The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire, explores the close, sometimes surprisingly cooperative relationships between agents of the British and Spanish empires through the slave trade in the early eighteenth-century Caribbean was published by the University of Pennsylvania Press in the Spring of 2016.
My research interests include contact among peoples in the early modern Atlantic world, the history of race and gender in early European colonies, and the history of beliefs about witchcraft in early America. I have held fellowships through the John Carter Brown Library, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in Early American History, and the USC-Huntington Early Modern Studies Institute.
Courses
Undergraduate Courses
U.S. History to 1877
Colonial America
Curriculum Vitae (Available upon request)
Adrian Finucane
Office: 3619 Wescoe Hall
Phone: 864-9467
Email: afinucane@ku.edu
Dr. Finucane is a historian of early America, with a focus on the early British and Spanish colonies in the Americas. Her interests cover a significant portion of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Americas, broadly defined, from the Puritans of New England to the pirates of the Caribbean.
Finucane is currently working on a project, tentatively titled “The South Sea Company and Anglo-Spanish Connections, 1713-1739,” which explores the close interactions between individual subjects of the British and Spanish empires through the slave trade of the early eighteenth century. Finucane teaches courses on the early modern Atlantic world and the colonial Americas.
The Temptations of Trade: Britain,
Spain, and the Struggle for Empire
John Garrison Marks
Journal of Southern History.
83.2 (May 2017): p493. From Book Review Index Plus. COPYRIGHT 2017 Southern Historical Association http://www.uga.edu/~sha
Full Text:
The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire. By Adrian Finucane. Early Modern Americas. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. [vi], 212. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-8122-4812-8.) In The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire, Adrian Finucane provides an exhaustively researched account of the personal dynamics of empire in the early-eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Examining the impact of trade between Britain and Spain--centered on Britain's acquisition of the asiento from Spain, providing Britain the exclusive right to trade enslaved Africans to Spanish America--Finucane reveals how individuals shaped the contours of empire in ways unanticipated by London and Madrid, By examining the individual lives and experiences of pirates and printers, merchants and mariners, Finucane offers new insight into the complicated links between the British and Spanish empires, Finucane convincingly argues that exploring trade links between Britain and Spain reveals not only the mutual interest of these two competing empires, but also the way their fortunes were frequently intertwined during the eighteenth century, often because of the actions of individuals only weakly constrained by the prerogatives of European metropoles. Though much of Finucane's story takes place in Spanish America, the still-growing interest among southern historians of links between the South and the broader Atlantic world will make this study of trade and empire both interesting and useful for readers of the Journal of Southern History. Ultimately, Finucane reveals how an exploration of the actions of individuals on the edges of empires is essential for understanding the development of empire in the Americas. [John Garrison Marks, Rowan University]
Marks, John Garrison
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Marks, John Garrison. "The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire."
1 of 3 10/17/17, 9:09 PM
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Journal of Southern History, vol. 83, no. 2, 2017, p. 493. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1& id=GALE%7CA495476281&it=r&asid=07f433c08493b3bde18723e0009d615f. Accessed 17 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495476281
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http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MA...
The Temptations of Trade: Britain,
Spain, and the Struggle for Empire
Jorge Canizares-Esguerra
American Historical Review.
122.2 (Apr. 2017): p575-576. From Book Review Index Plus.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Canizares-Esguerra, Jorge. "The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for
Empire." American Historical Review, vol. 122, no. 2, 2017, pp. 575-576. PowerSearch, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=GPS&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1& id=GALE%7CA491479659&it=r&asid=1cfdc7eb88d3b6279831793265e53160. Accessed 17 Oct. 2017.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A491479659
3 of 3 10/17/17, 9:09 PM
Pearce on Finucane, 'The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire'
Author:
Adrian Finucane
Reviewer:
Adrian Pearce
Adrian Finucane. The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. 224 pp. $45.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8122-4812-8.
Reviewed by Adrian Pearce (University College London)
Published on H-Diplo (May, 2017)
Commissioned by Seth Offenbach
In all the history of British commercial relations with the Spanish colonies, the era of the British Asiento de Negros--the exclusive contract to supply Spanish America with enslaved people from Africa--is the best known. The Asiento was awarded to Britain as one of the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, and after a somewhat checkered existence was finally terminated in 1750. It was exploited by the South Sea Company, which had already been awarded a formal monopoly of British trade with Spanish America. Despite its generic title, Adrian Finucane’s highly readable study is devoted to the British Asiento and to the South Sea Company’s operations in the Americas. She notes that the impact of the Company’s activities in Britain--and above all the speculative “South Sea Bubble” and its spectacular collapse in 1720--have been studied in far greater detail than has the operation of the Asiento in the Americas, which is doubtless true. But it is also true that the quite unique nature of the British Asiento and the conditions that surrounded it have made it the focus of more abundant research, over many years, than any other aspect of British relations with colonial Spanish America. These conditions included the fact that, in addition to the trade in slaves itself, the Asiento permitted the British to send ships to the great trade fairs that supplied the major Spanish colonies with goods from Europe (held at Portobelo for the Viceroyalty of Peru and at Veracruz on the Gulf of Mexico for that of New Spain)--a feature with no precedent in previous Asientos.
From the very period of its operation, and on into the modern historiography, then, the British Asiento has generated a large and often polemical literature. Still, Finucane adds to this historiography with her broad-based study of trade, diplomatic relations, and warfare between Britain and Spain in the Americas across the first half of the eighteenth century. In that sense, this book reads as a modern version of Richard Pares’s classic War and Trade in the West Indies, first published in 1936 and covering the period 1739-63. The full range of relevant economic and diplomatic issues is discussed lucidly and accessibly, from the role of piracy, the wars that punctuated this period, and the rising tensions that eventually gave rise to the War of Jenkins’s Ear in 1739, leading into the War of the Austrian Succession and providing the context in which the British Asiento was finally cancelled. (We meet the notorious Spanish coast guard commander, Juan de León Fandiño, who cut off the ear that the British seaman Robert Jenkins later took to Parliament to help make the case for war against Spain.) Finucane’s book even discusses the fugitive slave communities of Jamaica, the maroons, and the impact their wars against the British had on Anglo-Spanish relations in the Caribbean. The book is to be recommended to scholars of trade and war in the Americas in the early eighteenth century more generally, then, and not only to those of the Asiento.
So far as the British Asiento is concerned, the book provides a fresh and wide-ranging English-language account that makes significant original contributions. Perhaps the most noteworthy of these lies in the biographical (or prosopographical) dimension, based on a detailed and carefully researched study of the activities and operations of the South Sea Company’s representatives in the Spanish colonies. Focusing above all on the cases of Thomas Dover, John Burnet, Jonathan Dennis, and James Houston, Finucane argues that “the real importance of the South Sea Company’s presence in the Americas lay in its bringing together of the Spanish and British imperial projects at the level of individual actors”; or again, that her study makes possible “the reconstruction of the history of the British and Spanish empires at the level of the people building it” (pp. 17-18). These men lived as foreigners (and generally Protestants) in the previously inaccessible Spanish colonies, often for years and with unusual scope for travel and to make observations of all kinds. The most striking case was perhaps that of John Burnet, who dabbled in natural philosophy, and from his base in Cartagena de Indias sent specimens (including a stuffed sloth) to such London luminaries as Hans Sloane and Sir Edmond Halley. Burnet, and the highly literate James Houston, may have been exceptional, however, since most South Sea Company agents were described far less flatteringly, as “uncouth and embarrassing” (p. 117). In any case, the passages of the book devoted to these men are highly revealing of their activities and of the dilemmas that moving between empires could pose on a personal level (Burnet eventually sold out the secrets of his employers and “defected” permanently to Spain).
Further original contributions on the history of the Asiento include much fine detail on the contraband activities that accompanied its legitimate trade, discussion of the debates held in Spain as well as in Britain on its usefulness or otherwise, and the strong opposition the contract provoked in Jamaica, whose merchants now faced powerful rivals in the smuggling trade to Spanish America, and also feared the impact of the Asiento on the supply of slaves to the British sugar colonies in the West Indies. The traditional historiography of the Asiento, both in Britain and in Spain, has taken very much a metropolitan stance towards it, in which the contract and its development have been seen strongly from the perspective of London or Madrid. A novel turn in recent writing on this topic, evident notably in the work of the Mexican scholar Matilde Souto Mantecón, is to study the Asiento from the perspective of the colonial territories in which it operated and where its impact was felt. At heart, the originality in Finucane’s study arguably lies chiefly in the fact that it stands somewhere between the imperial and colonial perspectives, to the degree that by focusing on the activities of the Asiento agents, it foregrounds the very zone of interaction itself between the British and Spanish Empires in the Americas.
The book does not present a fully rounded account of the British Asiento, nor does it aspire to. For example, it does not attempt to give a detailed analysis of the context and motivations behind Spanish policy towards the Asiento, a feature symbolized by the fact that Julio Alberoni and José Patiño, the powerful Spanish political figures most closely concerned with the contract, amass a total of three textual references between them. Arguably more seriously, Finucane sidesteps almost entirely the vexed and often thorny question of the specific value of the Asiento to the British: of what its sales were worth, and how high were its profits. This might be regarded as more serious because at times, it seems to lead her into the same trap that the more traditional historiography of the Asiento often fell into, of following the boosting pamphleteers of the Asiento era in portraying this as a uniquely prosperous or intense period for Anglo-Spanish relations in the Americas—not only in relation to the value of mutual trade, but also the personal interactions between British and Spanish subjects in the Americas that Finucane makes such a distinctive element of her story. The modern historiography of Anglo-Spanish trade and relations in the Americas in the second half of the eighteenth century suggests that the value of British trade with Spanish America came to far surpass that of trade under the Asiento, and this trade must surely have implied intense interaction between the British and Spanish (particularly in the free ports in Jamaica, the Bahamas, Trinidad and elsewhere), of the kind of interest to Finucane--even when it was not based on a fully legal and overt trade.
A further gripe that has nothing to do with the author, but rather with her publisher, and reflects a much broader problem and trend, is that the book has no separate bibliography: all the references are included only in the endnotes. What seems to be a growing move among publishers to dispense with separate bibliographies, presumably simply on the grounds of cost (or perhaps because the scholarly apparatus itself is seen as either tiresome or in some way inelegant, an approach that might also lie behind the increasing preference for endnotes over the far more practical footnotes) is to be lamented and opposed. It makes it much harder to track down specific references if they are missed at first citation (something that is itself more likely to occur when endnotes are used), and it deprives readers of the ability to review the historiographical underpinning of the study at a glance.
This carefully researched and well-written book is to be recommended for scholars and students of the Spanish Empire during the early Bourbon era, of Anglo-Spanish relations in the colonial Americas, of colonial merchants and agents, and of trade and warfare in the eighteenth-century Atlantic.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=49583
Citation: Adrian Pearce. Review of Finucane, Adrian, The Temptations of Trade: Britain, Spain, and the Struggle for Empire. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. May, 2017.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=49583
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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