Spain’s policy of neutral trade was designed to permit its colonial possessions to ride out the tumults of the Age of Revolutions and to preserve the empire’s integrity. Major studies of neutral trade in Spanish America have assigned blame on metropolitan factions for the failures of the imperial commercial reforms. Nevertheless, a growing body of scholarship on the American
consulados has demonstrated that neutral trade sowed deep divisions among competing colonial interests, undermining its efficacy. Of the regions most affected by neutral trade, Venezuela stands out. There,
comercio neutral, predominantly with the United States, proved a nimble means to provision a region whose commercial agriculture and royal government depended on a robust foreign trade. Made vulnerable by slave rebellion, revolutionary republican conspiracies, and the threat of foreign invasion, neutral trade with the United States preserved loyalty to the Spanish Crown and sustained colonial rule in Venezuela. As recent research has suggested, the policy’s greatest beneficiary was neither Spain nor its colonies. Rather, it was the fledgling United States, whose traders rushed to fill the demand for neutral merchant shipping.
Questions of loyalty remained at the heart of disagreements over the meaning of neutrality and neutral trade in late-colonial Venezuela. Nearly a decade of commerce with the United States led many Venezuelan Creoles to expect their struggles for independence would receive direct political aid and assistance from the North American republic. By examining how neutral trade with the United States helped sustain Spanish rule in a region wracked by economic crisis and political upheaval for over two and a half decades, this paper will reveal the underlying conflicts over neutrality that contributed to inter-American tension after 1815. The neutrality of the United States helped prolong the wars of independence in Venezuela and protract Spain’s tenuous hold over the region.
