Asiento -- Britain's Slave Trade Monopoly
Britain acquired the asiento at Utrecht in 1713 — the contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spanish America — and treated it as the prize of the war. The War of the Spanish Succession had been fought to prevent France and Spain uniting under a single Bourbon. It ended with a Bourbon on the Spanish throne and a set of commercial compensations, of which this was the largest. The contract had existed since the sixteenth century. Spain had almost no African trading posts of its own and had always licensed the supply to foreigners — Portuguese, then Genoese, then French — and the asiento was the licence. Britain's terms ran thirty years and required 4,800 people a year, with a duty payable to the Spanish crown and a share of the profit to both monarchs. The South Sea Company was created to exploit it, and Queen Anne took a quarter of the stock. An additional clause permitted one trading ship a year to the Porto Bello fair, which the company used as cover for smuggling on a much larger scale by resupplying it at sea. The trade never made the money expected. What the company made money on was the debt-conversion scheme that produced the Bubble of 1720. The friction over smuggling and the Spanish coastguards' searches produced the War of Jenkins' Ear in 1739. Britain gave the asiento up in 1750 for £100,000, and by then had become the largest slave-trading nation in the world without needing it. The contract was the most sought-after commercial prize in European diplomacy for two centuries, and what it traded in was people.
- Year: 1713 CE
- Category: Political
