Unlikely Alliances: British Factors in Spanish America, 1713–39

How was it that in 1724 Dr. James Houstoun, a subject of Great Britain, found himself living in Cartagena de Indias and socializing with Spanish ladies and colonial officials? Historians have long understood the Caribbean as an area of long-standing colonial competition and conflict. The experiences of men like Houstoun tell a different story.

This paper, “Unlikely Alliances: British Factors in Spanish America, 1713-1739,” focuses on an understudied aspect of the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, the nearly thirty years of economic and sometimes political and social cooperation between the Spanish and British empires in the period between the War of the Spanish Succession and the War of Jenkins’s Ear. During this time the British held a monopoly on the slave trade to the Spanish empire and stationed dozens of factors of the British South Sea Company in port cities throughout the Caribbean and the Spanish Americas, despite the long-standing political and confessional animosities between these empires. These port cities, as well as the surrounding areas of the Caribbean and Atlantic where ships belonging to these empires came into contact through both legal and illegal trade, were influenced by contact from multiple European sites as well as African and indigenous peoples. Despite the changes of the early eighteenth century, these empires continued to offer both major potential threats and significant opportunities to one another. Through a focus on Houstoun and other South Sea Company employees, this paper argues for the importance of this contact between empires to each of these empires and to the early modern Atlantic world.