The Debate over the Establishment of a Trading Company for Buenos Aires: Protectionism, Contraband, and Free Trade through the Case of Domingo Marcoleta, c. 1745–50

In 1745 a Basque representative in Madrid proposed to establish a Trading Company for Buenos Aires. The Company would be given a monopoly over the sale of European goods in the southernmost part of Spanish America as a means to curb contraband in the region. Times were propitious for commercial reform after the disruption of the fleet system during the War of Jenkins’ Ear, and the establishment of Companies in Caracas and Havana. The city of Buenos Aires, however, vigorously opposed the project via its representative at the Court, Domingo Marcoleta (1717-1796). His Representaciones—short treatises—rejected the Company and advocated alternatives for commercial reform. As the translator of George Grenville into Spanish, Marcoleta was familiar with the languages of political economy of mid-eighteenth century Europe. He argued that the projected Company hindered Buenos Aires dwellers’ “natural right” to “active commerce.” Marcoleta thought that the Company would not tackle the roots of contraband. Instead, a greater frequency of register ships and “competition” among suppliers was how “other Nations” managed “to exclude and displace” foreigners from commerce. With Marcoleta’s case-study I want to portrait the multi-faceted nature of reform in the Hispanic Atlantic. Competing projects—the Company versus register ships in this case—were discussed in order to “resurrect” the Spanish legal trade throughout the eighteenth century. I will also demonstrate how ideas of reform, articulated in vocabularies available in a Euro-Atlantic context, intersected with local realities. Marcoleta was at such crossroads of the imperial and the local. His place as a royal officer contributed to the fading away of the Company project after 1750, in accordance with Buenos Aires’ interests. His simultaneous imperial and local role is further illustrated by his own ideas for reform, which promised “utilities” to the Crown while not constraining Buenos Aires’ “natural liberty” to commerce.