Innovation and Entrepreneurship as Strategies for Success among Havana-Based Slave Trading Firms after 1820

At the time of the Congress of Vienna in 1814 the involvement of Cuban-based Spanish merchants in the slave trade seemed to be coming to an end. Although British diplomatic pressures in Vienna fail to achieve any long-lasting agreement on the part of the European slave trading nations, soon after, many of them were forced to sign bilateral treaties obligating them to bring to an end their involvement on the transatlantic slave trade. Spain’s turn was in 1817, and although Spain did commit to end its involvement in this trade by 1820, in reality the involvement of their subjects increased exponentially.

This paper explores the strategies devised and put in place by Havana-based traders in the post-1820 period to defy and circumvent all measures aimed at bringing the trade to an end, taken by the Spanish and the British government. In particular, we look at how business firms were pioneers in implementing a series of new stratagems that included, but were not limited, to the establishment of networks with agents on both sides of the Atlantic, to the diversification of the items they traded, and to the implementation of technological innovations of different kind. We argue, that ultimately, the perpetuation of the slave trade to Cuba until the 1860s was first and foremost a result of the success of the strategies used by the firms that are at the center of this paper.