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311 Pages
Genoese Entrepreneurship and the Asiento Slave Trade, 1650-1700
This book explains how Genoese entrepreneurs transformed the structures of global trade during the second half of the 17th century. The author reconstructs the business network built by the Genoese merchant Domenico Grillo between the 1650s and the 1680s. Grillo’s business interests stretched from the Mediterranean to Pacific South America, traversing and joining the Spanish, Dutch, and English Atlantics. He and his associates created a new business model that was to be emulated by Dutch, French, and English traders in subsequent decades: the monopolistic asientos for the exploitation of the trans-imperial and intraAmerican slave trade to Spanish America.
Offering a connected history of capitalism across trans-continental geographies and different empires, this book challenges established views of a period which has traditionally been interrogated from a northern European mercantile perspective. Cutting across the histories of the slave trade in the Atlantic world, early modern capitalism, and early modern empire, this study has much to offer to students and scholars interested in the agents, economic practices, and geographies of trade that do not easily fit into and therefore disrupt the traditional narratives of the Rise of the West.
Alejandro Garcia-Mont6n is a Juan de la Cierva-Incorporacién fellow at the Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Spain.
Acknowledgements
I began this project over 12 years ago, and it is now drawing to an end. Since then, I have become obliged to many people and institutions. These pages could not have been written without their help. No number of acknowledgement pages can suffice to express my gratitude to all of them.
First, I should like to thank Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, who between 2009 and 2014 was my PhD supervisor at the European University Institute (Florence). Recently, also thanks to his mentorship I was able to obtain a postdoctoral contract “Juan de la Cierva-Incorporaci6n 2018,” which has allowed me to continue my research. Since then, and until now, his patient advice, wide historiographical gaze, and unflinching support have been a fundamental contribution to my work. This book is largely based on my doctoral dissertation, but also includes the fruits of many more years of research. Between 2016 and 2020 I had the opportunity to work with Bethany Aram at Universidad Pablo de Olavide within the framework of her research projects 3C and, more decisively, ArtEmpire. Her guidance has made my research perspective richer and more complex, directing my attention to the vibrant worlds of the Isthmus of Panama and Pacific South America. Similarly, this book would not have been possible without Carmen Sanz Ayan, whose lectures at Universidad Complutense de Madrid in the late 2000s awoke my interest in 17th-century Genoese bankers and merchants. Thanks to her, I was able to take my first professional steps, which later led me to Florence and Seville.
Over the years, many scholars have attentively read different versions and drafts of this work. Their advice and constructive criticism have invariably contributed to improve it, making it more interesting and a good deal more readable. They always had a word of encouragement for me. I am particularly indebted to Catia Antunes, Jorge Diaz-Ceballos, José Miguel Escribano-Pdez, Maria Fusaro, Regina Grafe, Luca Mola, Mariana Labarca, Xabier Lamikiz, and Antonella Romano. Special thanks are due to Harald Braun, Pedro Cardim, and Max Novick for trusting my work and for their patience throughout the publication process. The advice of the anonymous reviewers has also been very helpful to me, assisting me to understand my own work better.
I have had the chance to talk about history and the craft of the historian in many ways, in many places, and with many people. I want to thank them for all I have learned from them, especially Gustavo Alares, Francisco Apellaniz, Yasmina Ben Yessef, Paolo Calcagno, Andrea Caracaussi, Cloe Cavero, Jorge Flores, Alejandra Franganillo, Evan Haefeli, Manuel Herrero, Benoit Maréchaux, Danilo Pedemonte, Margarita Suarez, and Roberto Zaugg. You have often helped me in unexpected ways. Many of you are no longer only colleagues, but also friends.
I have also greatly benefited from my participation in dozens of seminars, workshops, and conferences; Coimbra, College Station, Bergamo, Budapest, Florence, Leiden, London, Madrid, Milan, Padova, Seville, Valencia, Vienna, Washington D.C., and a long etcetera. To those who gave me the opportunity to present my findings, and to those who commented on my work in those occasions, I want to extend my gratitude too.
The raw materials of the historian are the documents. I want to say thanks to all the archivists and librarians who made my research so much easier in Genoa, Lima, Madrid, Rome, Seville, Simancas, and Turin. I am especially indebted to several researchers who have provided me with references for this book. Felipe Vidales del Castillo gave me numerous references from Spanish, Italian, and British archives and libraries. My debt of gratitude with Luca Lo Basso and Claudio Marsilio is especially heavy. In addition to unveiling the complexities of the history of Genoa to me, they put me on track of precious documents in the Archivio Durazzo Giustiniani di Genova. I want to thank the generosity of Marcello Cattaneo Adorno, owner of this archive, for letting me peruse it, and the help provided there by Magdalena Giordano. Andrea Lercari and Davide Gambino were also of great help in the Archivio di Stato di Genova. Filipa Ribeiro da Silva shared with me interesting references in the archives in Amsterdam. David Fernandez Villanova made my visit to the Lima archives as fruitful and easy as possible.
In recent years, I have worked at Universidad Pablo de Olavide, Seville. There I found a pleasant intellectual environment, and I have received help, in many different forms, from my colleagues, especially Amelia Almorza Hidalgo, Brice Cossart, Jonatan Orozco Cruz, Natalia Maillard, Eva Manzano, Rocio Moreno Cabanillas, Igor Pérez Tostado, and Omar Svriz. I also want to salute my colleagues in the research group PAIDI HUM 100: “Historia de la Globalizacién: violencia, negociaci6n e interculturalidad,” from whom I always keep learning.
I want to thank the journals Jerénimo Zurita (Zaragoza), Hispanic American Historical Review (Durham) and the publisher CITCEM/ Afrontamento (Porto) for allowing me to include here passages originally published elsewhere. David Govantes-Edwards has translated most of this text, and he has also been of great help in this process.
This research had been funded by various institutions. My predoctoral research was supported by the scholarship programme “Salvador Madariaga IUE 2009-2013,” from the Spanish Government. I also had financial support from a number of projects, including CIRPADEL [HAR2009-12963-C03-01] and NOBINCIS [HAR201239016-C04-01], funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation. The core of my postdoctoral research was supported by projects ArtEmpire [ERC CoG 648535], funded by the European Research Council, and 3C [HAR2014—52260-P] funded by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness, in which I had the privilege to participate. The support lent by the fellowship “Juan de la CiervaIncorporacién, 2018,” [IJC2018-037929-I] Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, as well as my participation in the project Atlantocracies [UPO-FEDER 1264973], have been key for the final steps in the process.
In order not to break old historians’ traditions, I want to close these lines by thanking the support and the good times with my friends in and from Florence, Genoa, Madrid, and Seville, who have certainly made many years of complex research so much easier. My father, my mother, and my sister have been a constant tower of strength. Other relatives, especially my grandparents, have also encouraged me to overcome difficulties. Most importantly, this project made my path cross with that of my wife. That, in and by itself, makes it all worth it.
Introduction
Now it is well known to all, who are not quite ignorant of the course of Trade and Merchandise, that the Traffick of Europe hath been engrossed into the hands, and carried on all along by the Venetians, Genoese, Portugalls, Easterlings, Hollanders, and English; all which I shall briefly run through, and show how the failure and decay of One, was the original rise to Another, till the whole at present is divided between the Hollanders and us.
John Smith, England’s improvement reviv’d, 1673!
From the perspective of a 21st-century historian, the staying power of John Smith’s arguments is striking. Ordinary English commentators like Smith saw the European business arena of the second half of the 17th century as a chess tournament. The final match, no doubt, was a game played by two empires and their merchants, that “at present is divided between the Hollanders and us,” the English. The contenders had secured a place in the final after overcoming several old champions. As Smith reminded his audience, until that moment “the traffick of Europe hath been engrossed into the hands, and carried on all along by the Venetians, Genoese, Portugalls, Easterling.” But now, things were different, and it was not so difficult to explain why: “the failure and decay of One, was the original rise to Another.” Until now, historians have predominantly followed this teleological, diachronic, north-European-centred perspective to explain the pace of mercantile transformations and genealogies of empire during the early modern period.* This book invites the reader to look at the decades in which Smith was writing through different lenses, the ones of Genoese entrepreneurs. Equipped with these other lenses, we shall notice that the game was different from the one portrayed by Smith; there were other players who had something to say too, and even the rules of the game were not the ones Smith thought.
This book reconstructs the mercantile worlds that the Genoese knitted during the second half of the 17th century. The following chapters trace the business interests of the Genoese Domenico Grillo, from the 1650s to the 1680s, spanning from the Mediterranean to Pacific South America, traversing and joining the Spanish, Dutch and English Atlantics.
In examining the strategies used by these Genoese to build up their resilience, I pay particular attention to the novel business model created by Domenico Grillo and other Mediterranean entrepreneurs, which was emulated and imitated by Dutch, French, or English traders for decades to follow: the new monopolistic asientos for the exploitation of the trans-imperial and intra-American slave trade to Spanish America. In offering a connected history of capitalism across trans-continental geographies and different empires, this book restores the Genoese experience to show their transformative role in shaping the structures of global trade in the Atlantic world. Thus, this book affords an alternative perspective on a period and a context in which scholars have so far insisted on the unparalleled and almost uncontested success of northern European merchants at the expense of other European players, including the Genoese.
Certainly, to focus on Genoese traders as agents of global change might seem an odd choice at first, and even a daring endeavour if the chronology under consideration is the second half of the 17th century. An established historiographical tradition deters historians from venturing into the road that this book undertakes. But it is my contention that by putting aside the traditional ideas about the rise and fall of Italian merchants, dissociating the Genoese from the roles into which they have traditionally been typecast, and relying on fresh archival research, it is possible to present a more complex understanding of a period that witnessed profound changes in the histories of trade and empire.
I
As illustrated by John Smith’s account, the Genoese play particular roles in the master narratives about the making of capitalism and early modern empire. While for the 16th century they embody the golden age of Italian and Mediterranean business practices, closely related to the development of the Iberian empires, for the 17th century they are envisioned as an example of the decadence of these models of global expansion.?
Since the 12th century, along with the Venetians, the Genoese were the leading protagonists of Christian trade in the eastern Mediterranean and the Black Sea, but things started to change by the mid-15th century.* The Genoese shifted their interests to the West and grew in the shadow of the Iberian monarchies.? While advancing and consolidating the global expansion of the Spanish Empire, the Genoese created their own invisible empire and connected the city of Genoa with the wider developments taking place throughout the period. Genoese capital and businessmen colonised the economy and the finances of the different territories ruled by the Spanish Empire. Genoese shipping, banking techniques, and wide-ranging relational networks played a central role in structuring the first global empire.®
The literature encapsulates this process under the label the “Age of the Genoese.”’ Between 1557 and 1627, an elite of Genoese businessman at the service of the Spanish kings built impressive fortunes on a business portfolio that combined three major avenues of investment, private warfare, naval services, and most crucially financial services, while simultaneously ruling the Republic of Genoa. The war effort of the Spanish Empire was sustained by Genoese lenders, which, in turn, came to dominate the European system of payments. These Genoese were paid for their services in American silver, commercial privileges, and nobility titles and fiefs channelled through the royal patronage system. As such, the literature links the expansion of the European network of credit during the 16th and early 17th centuries to the archetype of the Genoese banker, deeply involved in the finances of the Spanish Empire.®
By the 1620s, this hegemonic position of the Genoese bankers came under threat from their competitors, which, the dominant narrative tells us, they could not always parry efficiently. First, the Genoese could not compete with the networks organised by Portuguese New Christian merchant-bankers that began entering the political circuits in Madrid and serving the Crown as bankers and contractors. These networks were more flexible than those of the Genoese, more suited to operate in cross-confessional environments, and were capable of operating in several empires at once.” More importantly, they were better represented in and connected to Amsterdam, the rising business centre of the moment. By the 1620s, New Christians linked leading commercial hubs in Spanish America, such as Cartagena de Indias, Mexico City and Lima, with Upper Guinea and Angola, in Africa. In Europe, they were present in important Atlantic ports such as Seville, Lisbon, and Hamburg, and had close connections with other important coastal cities like Bordeaux and La Rochelle. The end in 1640 of the dynastic union that had brought the Spanish and Portuguese empires together in 1580 upset the plans of the New Christian networks in the Spanish Empire.!° For the Genoese, this was a good opportunity to fill the vacuum left by their departure, but then more complications arose.
The 1640s and 1650s witnessed the rise of northern European traders and capital. Amsterdam and London merchants gained direct access to American silver in two ways: first, via contraband in the Caribbean, from their bases at Curacao, Jamaica and Barbados, and in the South Atlantic, from the Rio de la Plata; and second, through the growth of Dutch and English merchant communities in Seville and Cadiz, the two Iberian gateways to Spanish American trade.!! In addition, from the late 16th century onwards, the northerners and their ships played an increasingly important role in the Mediterranean and controlled the long-distance trade passing through the Strait of Gibraltar. !?
Finally, the Tuscan port of Livorno was a growing pole of attraction for international merchants and goods, bypassing Genoa.'° To complicate matters even more, the acute political and financial crisis undergone by the Spanish Empire in the 17th century did nothing but undermine the Genoese position even further; the Spanish Crown demanded fewer financial services in exchange for dwindling returns.'* As Genoese bankers lost international leverage and Genoa ceased operating as the beating heart of European finances, the Genoese and their city retreated to an obscure corner in the annals of economic history. From this perspective, the rise and fall of Genoese capitalism during the 16th and 17th centuries embody the shift of the centre of the European economy from the Italian republics to northern Europe, first Amsterdam, and later London.
As Genoese capitalism, and Italians in general, lost ground during the 17th century, northern Europe flourished at the expense of the actors and trades that had mattered before. This classic interpretative framework still dominates the literature, but narratives about the rather straightforward, smooth rise of north-western Europe have become more nuanced in recent years. A current focus on the global limitations suffered by the Dutch and the English trade is transforming our understanding about how those merchants and their empires operated in practice. Thus, there is a certain degree of acknowledgement in the literature that John Smith’s claims were inflated. Currently, it may be argued that merchants from northern Europe never quite expanded as far as other Europeans had managed to do in the past, and that their expansion during the 17th century was more like catching up with them than anything else. In the Indian Ocean, the Dutch East India Company could not penetrate effectively the exchange circuits that linked the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and India, where the Portuguese had also failed before.
The English East India Company’s presence in subcontinental India was subordinated to the interests of local rulers and straight-jacketed by the game of regional politics.!° The Iberian empires, on the other hand, proved impossible to shift in the Americas, which led to the emergence of fragile Dutch and English, economic systems that could operate in parallel with and as a complement to the existing ones. From the Great Lakes to the Missouri Valley, Native nations like the Lakotas conditioned European imperial projects for centuries.'” Further north, in the Hudson Bay area, English fur traders did not have other option than to adjust to the commercial etiquette and of their Native American partners.!° In sub-Saharan Africa things were not so different. The consolidation of northern European outposts and trading stations took place only after a long learning process from the experienced Portuguese, who had been there from as early as the 15th century.!? If it was to happen at all, the European presence was ultimately viable only if an invitation from local hosts was forthcoming.?° In the Mediterranean, nobody, be they a state, mercantile network, or corporation, seemed capable of staying on top for very long, and cooperation with local networks was inescapable.*!
The traditional narrative about successful merchants and empires from northern Europe is currently questioned from other perspectives too. The efficiency of the organisational models, economic institutions, and mercantile practices once thought to be the key levers of the rise of modern, northern European global capitalism, has been reconsidered from a less celebratory, more nuanced angle.?* This is especially obvious regarding the nature, the role, and the operation of the corporation, which has been revised in the light shed by the most celebrated chartered joint-stock companies, those operating in Asia, namely, the English and the Dutch East India Company. In most occasions, the advancement of the companies’ interests relied upon the private agency of their employees and their ability to merge with the social, cultural, economic, and political local environments.** These corporations were not a mere instrument of empire-makers or simply propelled the interests of neatly defined business groups in the metropolis.?* Nor were they the nation-driven enterprises, as it was once thought. Instead, they were crisscrossed by transnational networks and the point of convergence of multiple clashing interests, which frequently overwhelmed the corporation’s spheres of economic action.?> The corporation has regained a central role as a global economic actor, but it is no longer envisioned as the only optimal solution to solve the problems of exchange, or as the best tool to advance the interests of empire.*° Rather than being wiped out, individual and family firms, as well as diasporic forms of business organisation, remain alive and well till today.’ Similarly, ascribing distinctive entrepreneurial attitudes to Protestantism has proven to be a reflection of ideological bias rather than historical accuracy.7°
Despite these revisionist approaches and more nuanced accounts, the traditional scheme about the Dutch and English merchants’ success and uncontested dominance had — and continues to have — effects on our understanding of 17th-century trade. The tall and strong historiographical tree represented by the classic visions on the rise of English and Dutch merchants — and, by extension, that of their empires — has shaped the historiographical perspective. Looking almost exclusively at that tall tree has come at a high price. It contributed to divert attention from other trees with different characteristics, and from the wider woods which they all make part of, pushing other seemingly smaller trees almost into oblivion.”? It is undeniable that, while historians have devoted considerable time and effort to analyse the rise of English and Dutch merchants and their empires during the 17th century, less effort has been devoted to the fate of Italian traders and their commercial and financial hubs in the Mediterranean. In other words, because these Italian actors’ decline and irrelevance has been taken for granted, historians have lost sight of both the bigger picture and the details that make that picture up: this has led to a widespread disregard for other spheres, in which those commercial networks not only retained an important role, but even flourished.
Against this historiographical backdrop, this book firmly reintroduces the experience of Genoese entrepreneurs within the wider developments of the second half of the 17th century. It shows that, contrary to conventional wisdom, the Genoese were not passive onlookers doomed to be pushed to the margins by increasing competition, nor did they retreat from international circuits of exchange and confine their business to their kinsfolk. Rather, they sought new markets and commercial partners, diversified their investment portfolios, and found creative solutions to deal with a new phase in the mercantile world that they had once dominated. In addition, needless to say, profits from their overseas ventures fuelled the Genoese merchants’ social aspirations at home. Challenging the traditional view of decay, this study reveals the astonishing dynamism of Genoese and Italian merchant-bankers in commercial circuits across and within the European states and their overseas empires, and suggests that these networks skillfully adapted to change rather than simply collapsing in the face of such far-reaching shifts.
But the importance of reviving the Genoese experience in this period does not simply derive from the fact that it has been ignored in the past. Any attentive reader will be aware that historians were always bemused by the paralysis of north-Italian traders during the 17th century.°° In the 1970s, Fernand Braudel himself openly insisted on the need of looking more closely into the fate of the Genoese in his master piece Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme.>! Furthermore, during the last decade or so, historians have shown that genovesi, comaschi, fiorentini, milanesi, and veneziani businessmen retained a more central role in the second half of the 17th century, which extended well into the 18th, than traditionally thought.*? For authors such as Luca Lo Basso the years between 1659 and 1684 were a “new golden period” for the Genoese capitalists.*? These are stories very much still in the making and no work has yet integrated these disparate contributions into an overarching narrative. Nor does this book attempt to do so, but it aspires to open a window into historiographical shifts that have gone unnoticed in the English-language literature.
This book seeks to go beyond underlining the continued importance of the Genoese and argues that they were agents of change. It does so by looking into the second half of the 17th century and in contexts beyond the Mediterranean, such as the Atlantic and Pacific South America, even if an impressive amount of historical work suggested that following the tracks of the Genoese then and there was not worth the effort. To put it simply, had I uncritically accepted David Landes’ influential words, these pages would not have been written. In his view, during the 17th century
Italy never really seized the opportunities offered by the Great Opening: one does not find Italian ships in the Indian ocean or crossing the Atlantic. Italy was centered in, caught in, the great Inland Sea. Caught also by old structures.>*
Luckily, archives are full of surprises that provide researchers the raw materials with which to unveil forgotten pieces of the past, and which afford them the opportunity to create new historiographical worlds.
No one should expect this to be a study of Genoese trade on a world scale, but a book that investigates how Genoese entrepreneurs established institutions, which proved crucial in gearing chains of global exchange and articulated trans-imperial as well as international entrepreneurship within the Atlantic world. By examining the links woven by Genoese traders between the Mediterranean, the Atlantic world and Pacific South America, this book adds an important piece to a global, vibrant jigsaw puzzle currently under construction: that of entrepreneurs, firms, economic practices, and geographies of trade that do not easily fit in — and therefore destabilise — the traditional narratives about the Rise of the West and the notions about the operation of early modern capitalism. To the stories about Sephardic merchants from Livorno, Armenians from New Julfa, and Vaniya traders from Diu and Daman, told in this vein by Francesca Trivellato, Sebouh Aslanian, or Pedro Machado, I add an account of the Genoese Grillo family, the entrepreneurial practices of one of its members —- Domenico — and the asiento de esclavos.*>
Il
Domenico was born in Genoa around 1617 and died in Madrid in 1686. It cannot be said that he came from a family that did not benefit from the business expansion of the “Age of the Genoese.” The Grillos were at the very core of that oligarchy that did so much to sustain the Spanish monarchy with financial assistance and naval resources in the Mediterranean. Yet, the Grillos never reached the levels of political influence and wealth amassed by other families, like the Dorias, the Centuriones, or the Spinolas, either in the Republic of Genoa or in the Spanish Empire. However, it would be grossly misleading not to recognise that it was in the late 17th century when the family benefitted the most. Domenico Grillo’s global businesses contributed to advance the fortune, prestige, and social standing of his family at an international level.*° Like the English gentry or the Dutch merchant families, Italian elites also captured the opportunities provided by an expanding, increasingly entangled world economy.
Domenico Grillo built his career as a businessman in Madrid. As one of the youngest of six siblings, he was probably meant to leave Genoa to advance the interests of the family abroad, a secular practice among the local patriciate. As such, during his youth he received intensive training in accounting, learnt the use of the complex bills of exchange, became familiar with the merchants letters’ etiquette and initiated himself in the secrets of business.*” However, political events precipitated Domenico leaving the city. He and his friend and associate Ambrosio Lomellino were expelled from Genoa in 1647 for their participation in a reactionary plot against venality in the promotion of new patricians. Madrid was their destination. Although the alliance between the Spanish Empire and the Republic of Genoa was deteriorating dramatically at the time, Madrid hosted a still buoyant Genoese constellation of high-class businessmen and a large community of humbler, although indispensable, Genoese assistants.°®
When Grillo arrived in Madrid, the Spanish Empire was undergoing a severe fiscal and financial crisis which made the Genoese reshuffle their investments in Castile and pursue new business opportunities. Rather than confining his activities to one sector, he carved out a career as a veritable portfolio capitalist who combined investments in multiple economic niches, including tax-farming, seaborne wool trade, or state and private finances.*’ This diversification was in line with the choices of other Genoese businessmen. Beginning in the 1610s, the Genoese began ditching the business portfolios that had characterised them during the “Age of the Genoese.” The Genoese lost interest in Spanish debt markets and looked for new venues of investment. They increasingly focused on the public debt of the Republic of Venice and the Papal States, and began exploring other European credit markets, in France, Austria, and Sweden.*? Other Genoese increased their investments in the overseas trade of the Iberian empires, areas in which they had already eagerly participated in the late 15th and early 16th centuries. Genoese communities in Lisbon and especially Cadiz grew.*! Following the path of these Genoese transatlantic traders, Grillo also directed his attention to the same business spheres.
The transformation of Genoese business portfolios underscores their ability to adapt to the changing market conditions of the 17th century, a reflection of their skill in managing information to identify market opportunities.” In view of these examples, 17th-century Genoese capitalists were resilient players who managed to stay afloat in a shifting world. But they were daring entrepreneurs too, and took decisions in risky contexts, exploited opportunities when they appeared, and explored new business models.*? The asiento de esclavos managed by Domenico Grillo and his partners is a prime example of this. This book concentrates mainly, but not only, in this business.
In 1662, after months of tough negotiations, Domenico Grillo and his partners secured an asiento — a charter — from the Spanish Crown for the introduction of African slaves in the Spanish Caribbean. The asiento was an old cooperative formula used by private actors and the Spanish Crown to establish joint ventures for the exploitation of the empire’s varied assets, including the mobilisation of war resources, loans, tax-farming, and mercury mining.*+ Commercial, fiscal, and jurisdictional privileges were exchanged for lump sums of money and services. Lacking support from the Republic of Genoa to penetrate the overseas markets, Grillo recycled the old institution of the asiento to carve out a place for his company in the increasingly competitive and changing commercial circuits of the mid-17th century.
There were many new elements in this asiento that are worth exploring. Neither the model of cooperation proposed by Grillo to the Spanish Crown, nor the privileges he asked for — and which he ultimately obtained — had precedents in the history of the collaboration between private capital and the rulers of the Spanish Empire. Contemporary observers were aware of the novel nature of this asiento. In 1672, Joseph de Veitia y Linaje published the primary manual of trade in the Spanish Atlantic, entitled Norte de la Contratacion. This book presented a systematic overview of the rules and institutions that governed trade and navigation in the Spanish Atlantic and it quickly became a key source of knowledge for any trader willing to invest in Spanish American trade. Regarding Domenico Grillo’s asiento, Veitia y Linaje had little doubts that “the substance of which is very different from old asientos.”*° The lasting effects of Grillo’s asiento have been acknowledged in the literature for decades, if not centuries, even if only a few times. George Scelle’s pioneering study of the organisation of the African slave trade in the Spanish Empire in the 1910s, and Marisa Vega Franco’s monograph on Grillo’s asiento in the 1980s, pointed out the importance of the new asiento model.*” Some scholars have integrated this case in histories about the development of international legal orders,** and it is not difficult to find references in the histories of the Dutch and the English slave trade in the Caribbean.”
However, the importance of this asiento has been insufficiently emphasised to date, and the role it played has not been integrated into more encompassing narratives about the history of the African slave trade to Spanish America, or those regarding the articulation of the overarching political economy of the Spanish Atlantic.°° In a wider scale, it has also been largely neglected in the histories of the Atlantic world, and remains little explored from the perspective of global histories of business and trade. This book tries to do justice to the transformative capacity of Grillo’s asiento.
First, it explains how a constellation of Genoese entrepreneurs changed the way the African slave trade was organised in the Spanish Empire. Prior to 1662, participation in the official slave trade was open to multiple actors, but this asiento came with monopolistic privileges over the traffic in African captives. This asiento charter also changed the way the slave trade was taxed, while building a new jurisdiction independent from the highest Spanish American courts and authorities, the audiencias and the viceroys, and the Casa de la Contratacion — the House of Trade — in Seville. As such, the transatlantic trade in goods on the one hand — the socalled Carrera de Indias - and the trade in African captives on the other hand — the sphere of the slave asientos — began to be organised in neatly different institutional spaces, following different business logics and mercantile paths, while, at the same time, interacting in many ways.>!
Second, it shows that the significance of this transformation concerning the African slave trade to Spanish America goes beyond the history of the Spanish Empire. It appeals to histories and historians of Atlantic trade and empires, because this abhorrent commerce “drew on all European branches of this traffic, and captives from all African regions engaged in this traffic landed in at least one of the many Spanish colonies.”’* As the Spanish Empire did not possess trading stations where to acquire captives in the coasts of Africa, the slave trade to Spanish America was operated by international merchants, often from other empires. Prior to the 1660s, the slave trade to Spanish America was firmly in the hands of Iberian merchants, mostly of Portuguese origin, who operated transatlantic slave voyages.°’ From then onwards a rapid internationalisation of the slave trade to Spanish America took place and direct voyages linking Africa with Spanish America became rarer.** With Grillo’s asiento, the slave trade started to run officially through previously forbidden trans-imperial trading routes in the Caribbean. As such, Genoese entrepreneurs provided the institutional layout — the rules and the norms, but also the practices and the trading routines — for the organisation and operation of the official slave trade until the late 1730s. Those who were to follow in Grillo’s wake, such as the Dutch Balthasar Coymans (1685-89), the French Guinea Company (1703-14) and the English South Sea Company (1714-38), just to mention a few, operated under the basic conditions inaugurated by this asiento forged by Mediterranean entrepreneurs.»
Not only were the effects of the new way of organising and operating the slave trade introduced by the Genoese long lasting, but they also had wider implications for the history of slavery in the Atlantic world. On the one hand, intra-American and trans-imperial routes became the prime channel through which slave traders moved African captives to Spanish America until the very late 18th century.°° On the other hand, as aptly noted by Tatiana Seijas, these changes “led to the A fricanization of slavery at the end of the seventeenth century.”°” The success of Domenico Grillo’s business model, quickly imitated by others, led to the decline of the trans-Pacific slave trade, which before then had regularly brought slaves from Southeast Asia and the Indian subcontinent to Spanish America.°® As such, Domenico Grillo contributed to reproduce and enhance power structures devised to enslave and profit from the lives of people who were forcefully dragged into the most heinous side of the early modern capitalist machinery.
In order to better understand all these embroiled stories across empires and their global significance, I contend that we should see Domenico Grillo’s 11-year asiento as an experiment designed to explore new models of commercial and institutional organisation in the Atlantic, at both the trans-imperial and the intra-imperial scales. Sheltered by an exclusive jurisdiction ingrained in the institutional ecosystem of the Spanish Empire, Grillo’s asiento pioneered the creation of a business and relational space that pivoted on the trade in enslaved African people. The asiento channelled international entrepreneurship into the Spanish Indies, while it also offered a commercial space for Spanish American traders willing to export their commodities to other imperial spaces. In engaging with the asiento, merchants moved African people forcefully, traded in American silver and colonial products such as cochineal, indigo, or cocoa, and exchanged European manufactures or Asian spices. As such, the Genoese-engineered slave asiento provided a crucial hinge for the articulation of larger, global commodity chains which transcended the Atlantic world. Even this brief look at the implications of Grillo’s involvement in the asiento demonstrates the historiographical value of rescuing from oblivion the experience of Genoese entrepreneurs in a period that witnessed far-reaching transformations, in which we were told for a long time that their role was marginal, if not entirely absent.
IV
In addition to showing how Genoese capitalists built up their resilience during the 17th century and unveiling their transformative role for the structures of global trade, this project pursues a third, more ambitious goal. It seeks to restore a sense of an entangled world that has been fragmented by historians.
In many ways, the historical processes addressed in this book and the connections it unveils have been overlooked due to the artificial separation inflicted by certain ways of writing history during the 20th century, and which remain alive and well. The histories of trade and empire to which this book contribute have been pretty much forged, implicitly, or explicitly, as histories of alterity dominated by a northwestern perspective.°” Additionally, thinking about historical change and its protagonists in rather crude diachronic terms contributed to further building stark, contrasting historical portraits. These historiographical practices, for which the nation-state is the quintessential unit of analysis, have led also to an artificial separation of the many spaces surveyed in the following chapters. The impact of this on how we understand the connections between Genoa and the extra-Mediterranean overseas is a case in point. As noted above, during the 15th and 16th centuries the Genoese expanded across the Atlantic on the back of the growing Iberian empires. Historians interested in these empires paid attention to the Genoese contribution to their overseas expansion, but to a large extent they envisioned the Genoese mostly as foreign, alien actors to these empires. A such, what was relevant was to explore the contribution of these actors to the construction of the empire, rather than seeing these actors operating across the empire. For example, in the Spanish case, the imperial/national framework has put the focus on the Genoese communities in Seville and Cadiz, the two gateways of the Spanish overseas trade, or on tracing them in the Americas.°” These choices led to magnificent pieces of historical writing, but at a cost. The connection that these communities had with Genoa became blurred, and with it our ability to understand the role that this city and its merchants played in the organisation of the overseas business of the Genoese based in Cadiz, Seville, or Lisbon. Conversely, by losing sight of these links, the importance of the Genoese and Genoa in the globalisation of the Mediterranean has been obscured too.®! This is in spite of the role ascribed to Genoa as a nodal point in the organisation of Genoese networks operating abroad.®* Likewise, we can reach similar conclusions about the impact of nation-state narratives in moulding our understanding of the Atlantic world as a world neatly compartmentalised into watertight empires.°?
To dissolve these artificial divisions, I decided to do a connected history heavily grounded on archival research. In these pages, spatial units of analysis are explored, instead of being taken for granted, and links between actors are source-verified, rather than assumed. In addition to removing the Genoese from the pre-defined historical roles in which they have been placed in the master narratives about the making of early modern capitalism, my methodological toolbox incorporates other strategies: thinking history from transnational, connected, and entangled perspectives.
These methodological choices have been moulded by the sources I found in the archives, and my archival research has been informed by my methodological choices. Following Grillo’s business interests in the trans-imperial African slave trade to Spanish America and Pacific South America, and analysing their relationship to the Mediterranean, I have visited a dozen archives and historical libraries in Genoa, Lima, Madrid, Rome, Turin, and Seville. In many ways, while researching for this book, I found myself enmeshed in an entangled history of archives, in which references found in one location urged me to dig in other places. For example, in Genoa I found letters written aboard a slave ship in the Chagres river, in the Isthmus of Panama, while in Lima I found notarial records that recorded patronage relations brokered by the Genoese in Madrid’s royal court. In turn, in Madrid I found who were the London-based Sephardic merchants working for Domenico Grillo interests in London, concerning the slave traffic in the Caribbean. These documents drove me to move beyond many pre-conceived historiographical categories and think about more tightly entangled scenarios and on a broader scale of analysis than historians are generally used to.°°
By mobilising these varied forms of information and by relating it to such disparate historiographical realms, I also attempt to contribute with a book that is useful beyond its specific arguments. Rather than focusing on specific types of records or on documents issued by a single source, I have always tried to juxtapose different types of documents and crossread them. This has to do with my interest in reconstructing historical processes and contexts from multiple standpoints. Rather than selecting a few, discrete, homogenous documents to examine them intensively, I have decided to weave together seemingly unconnected documents scattered in a multiplicity of archives but which were part of the same story. Additionally, by interpreting these materials against the backdrop of a truly international literature, I have sought to establish a fruitful dialogue not only beyond archival and historiographical fragmentation, but also connecting different scholarly traditions. By presenting this connected history through the example posed by Domenico Grillo, I aim bringing together developments taking place in several historiographical fields, expressed in various languages, and produced in different national academies. Ultimately, readers will decide how persuasive my ideas and analyses are, but I hope that someone finds some use in the events I reconstruct and the historical connections I rescued from the archives, creating the possibility of integrating them in different strands of the literature. I hope this book gives valuable hints to other researchers and helps to bring similar stories into the limelight.
As a direct result of these choices, a connected history emerges: one that pivots around the business of slavery and the links that Genoese entrepreneurs weaved across the emerging English Empire, the rising Dutch Atlantic commercial web, the key commercial circuits of the “old” Mediterranean and the robust Spanish Empire. The geographies encompassed by Domenico Grillo’s asiento are not new to anyone with an interest in merchant networks and the histories of Atlantic empires. However, the ways in which Grillo and his peers connected all these spaces and the ways in which they used them to push their business interests challenge the way in which historians have traditionally understood the links that connected these geographies and the agents that were behind these connections. For instance, in Domenico Grillo’s model the city of Genoa acted as a market for silver and colonial goods, a transit point for merchandise en route to the Ottoman Empire and a hub where credit could be raised in order to operate at a trans-continental level; Madrid and Cadiz, for their part, were centres where ship’s captains, commercial factors, and judges could be recruited to undertake trans-imperial and intra-imperial transactions in the Atlantic world. Meanwhile, Grillo’s company turned to Amsterdam and London for some of its transactions, and these cities were, first and foremost, his gateways into the Dutch and the English Empires. In turn, Grillo’s factors relied on Curacao, Jamaica, and Barbados largely as transit points and, to a lesser extent, as markets. Finally, by penetrating the Isthmus of Panama and cooperating with the locals, Grillo’s organisation was able to capture the silver and the rich trade of Pacific South America, which was ultimately channelled into the Mediterranean through the Dutch and the Spanish Atlantic. Definitively, the mercantile world described by John Smith at the beginning of these pages was far more kaleidoscopic and less hierarchically organised than he would have us believe.
As such, the value of focusing on the specific case of Domenico Grillo and his involvement in the asiento lies in its capacity to open a window to merchants, business dynamics, and geographies of trade which have remained obscure to historiography to date, or which have been discussed in isolation from each other. What made these worlds of the asiento trade possible was the convergence of the business interests of a plethora of seemingly unrelated merchants that were already present in those commercial spaces. More than the personal project of a given character like Domenico Grillo, the asiento businesses were a collective endeavour that involved hundreds, if not thousands of people, either directly or indirectly, who were ready to reap the profits generated by the slave trade in trans-imperial and intra-imperial environments. Following Flavio Miranda’s approach to Portuguese medieval merchants, we should understand Domenico Grillo as a network taker. He and his partners co-opted and wired merchants and pre-existing trading geographies. But by enhancing existing links or creating new ones under the aegis of the asiento businesses, Grillo was also a network maker.°” Genoese entrepreneurs worked as a catalyst to intensify these relationships. Therefore, in addition to changing the way the African slave trade to and in Spanish America was organised, the new asiento model created a business relational sphere that selfreproduced and expanded, becoming crucial for the entangled histories of empire, trade and slavery in the Atlantic world in the decades that followed.
Vv
However, as much as this book can be a history of mercantile connections, this is as well a history of commercial exclusion and power relationships among merchants and between merchants and empires. Trade certainly goes with connectivity, and it therefore plays a central role in narratives about the making of early modern globalisation.°* Yet, we should not forget that the making of trade during the early modern period was also the making of commercial exclusion. At the end of the day, Grillo’s asiento was a monopoly granted by a major political power like the Spanish Empire.
By exploring how the Genoese pursued their interests in global trade through the new monopolistic asiento model, this book adds a valuable piece to our understanding of the operation of private merchants and self-organised networks in and through early modern empires. Peter A. Coclanis, David Hancock, David Studnicki-Gizbert, Catia Antunes and Amelia Polonia, and Lou H. Roper, among others, have drawn a picture of European overseas trade and Atlantic empires that radically departs from the traditional view, which laid emphasis on the central role played by government apparatus in overseas European expansion. Private interests, especially of a commercial nature, were central in forwarding the interest of global empires, but, at the same time, also proved crucial in undermining the political and economic structures set up by these very imperial rulers and metropolis.
The relationship between private actors and the Spanish Empire was not different. In many ways, that was the secret but also the weakness of the Spanish Empire. As Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla has argued, the Spanish Empire assumed the protection costs and provided with the earliest infrastructure for global trade from which a genuinely cosmopolitan constellation of actors reaped benefits worldwide. However, these players not necessarily contributed to the development of the empire, but eroded it in many ways.”° The limited authority of the Crown vis-a-vis a myriad of constitutionally empowered corporate, local and individual actors across different territories led to a constant and asymmetrical process of negotiation that defined Spanish Empire-building efforts from a global perspective.’' Merchants played a crucial role in this too, as they provided the capitals and the expertise for running the empire, while benefiting from hitherto unknown economic opportunities at a global scale.’”* Grillo’s case shows that international private capitalists not only became stakeholders of empire but that the families and the ruling class of Genoa fuelled their social reproduction at home at the expense of other empires and beyond the “Age of the Genoese.” ”? As such, this book offers new insights for a larger comparative research agenda by showing how the Spanish Empire was built, shaped and exploited by Genoese entrepreneurs who ultimately forged formal institutions for trans-imperial trade, like the asiento, in the Atlantic world.”
As a book that reveals the ways Genoese entrepreneurs cooperated with the Spanish Empire and exploited monopolistic rights to pursue new avenues of global trade in trans-imperial and intra-imperial environments, the following chapters pay special attention to the role played by “liberties and freedoms” in the making of early modern capitalism. Over the last two decades, historians have increasingly focused on the way merchants dealt with the “basic problems of exchange” in different historical settings, from a global perspective.”> These works have examined the way traders governed their transactions and mitigated uncertainty, by relying on a wide and often mixed repertoire of formal and informal institutions, both private and public in nature.”° This, however, must not make us neglect the political economy within which these merchants had to operate and which they also contributed to shape. Solving the fundamental problems of exchange was a core activity for merchants worldwide but securing formal privileges and fostering the commercial exclusion of others by legal means was a no less daily concern.’” As legal historians have fruitfully showed also in the last decades, early modern societies were globally built upon a legal ecosystem based on jurisdictional fragmentation, in which many individuals, groups, and corporations enjoyed exclusive freedoms and privileges.’* Larry Epstein elegantly described this scenario, where “Pre-modern freedoms were not a constitutional birthright and an indivisible public good as in modern liberal theory. They were socially specific, temporally contingent and frequently legally transferable sources of privilege and exclusion.” ””
By adopting this analytical perspective, we see that entrepreneurs used legal devices like the asientos not only to ground cooperation with political powers like the Spanish Empire, but as a prime “source of privilege and exclusion” vis-a-vis other traders. By looking at Domenico Grillo’s business operations from the perspective of the exploitation of the liberties and freedoms that he was granted along with the asiento charter, a twofold idea stands out: early modern merchants weaved links with one hand while crafting forms of commercial exclusion with the other. This book emphasises that merchants endeavoured to access, manage, and/or maintain spaces of economic and legal exclusion by creating and enjoying a multi-layered framework of exclusive freedoms and privileges. The structure of Domenico Grillo’s asiento and the commercial privileges that he snatched from the Crown reveal how merchants perceived the operation of trans-imperial and intra-imperial markets during the second half of the 17th century, and the formulas that they devised to capture trade and exclude other merchants from the competition. At the same time, these actors never ceased to manipulate privileges like the asiento to expand their business activity, formally constrained by the limitations of their own privileges. Thus, expanding their businesses they inevitably meant challenging the exclusive freedoms and liberties of others. Domenico Grillo and his company manipulated the privileges attached to the charter to pursue their private interests both inside and outside the Spanish Empire, and vis-a-vis different government institutions — from the Crown to local authorities — and other private merchants and mercantile corporations operating in similar environments.
VI
This complex and multifocal story unfolds in the following way. Chapters 1 and 2 provide the necessary contexts to understand the emergence of the new monopolistic asientos for the slave trade in relation to the history of Genoese capitalism during the early modern period. Rather than waning, during the late 17th and early 18th centuries the fortunes of Genoese families like the Grillo flourished. Chapter 1 offers a panoramic view of the Grillos trajectory from the 16th century to the early 18th century. It describes their participation in the business of naval warfare in the Mediterranean and banking during the “Age of the Genoese,” under the leadership of other Genoese clans at the service of the Spanish Empire. However, the Grillos were certainly not among those that benefitted the most during this period. In fact, the meteoric rise of this family took place later, in the second half of the 17th century, and in relation to business enterprises and trading geographies, like transatlantic asiento trade, from which for a long time the literature has claimed the Genoese to have been absent.
The transformation of the Grillo family in the local context of Genoa should be understood in relation to the economic niches within which Genoese entrepreneurs operated during the central decades of the 17th century. Chapter 2 undertakes that goal. During this period, Genoese merchants faced a double challenge: while coping with Sephardic, English, and Dutch competitors, as has traditionally been argued, they also faced the deterioration of the secular alliance between the Spanish Empire and the Republic of Genoa, on which their impressive economic success since the mid-16th century had been based. Genoese entrepreneurs were forced to adapt to a new scenario. By examining the emergence of Genoese trade in the Iberian Atlantic and northern Europe, this chapter shows how Genoese merchants shifted from financial markets to overseas trade and how they made of Genoa a leading hub in the circulation of silver at a global scale. The analysis of Domenico Grillo’s business portfolio will guide us into the mercantile worlds of Genoese entrepreneurs while showing that the impact of politics, rather than the alleged incapacity of Genoese merchants to trade beyond their kinsfolk, was the decisive factor that forced them to realign their business strategies.
During the 1630s, the Englishman Lee Roberts’ The Merchants Map of Commerce claimed that Genoa was inhabited by “the greatest Money-changers and Usurers in the world, who if they would not distrust God with their wealth by Sea, would easily become famous Merchants.”®° Grillo and his partners did not distrust the sea, and did not hesitate to embark in the terrible business of bringing African slaves to Spanish America. In Chapter 3 I explore how Grillo and his partners presented to, and pursued the asiento de esclavos with, the Spanish Crown in order to be granted privileged access to the Atlantic economies. By examining Grillo’s approach to negotiation during the 11 years in which his asiento was in force, this chapter casts new light on the role played by private actors in the management, reproduction and configuration of the institutions that governed the trans-imperial and intra-imperial slave trade to and within the Spanish Empire.
Certainly, the asiento charter gave Grillo unprecedented freedom and privileges in the Spanish Atlantic. However, these concessions did not turn automatically into profit. By examining Grillo’s operations as network taker and as network maker, Chapter 4 shows Grillo’s mobilisation, recruitment, and organisation of people and resources that were scattered throughout the Spanish Empire and beyond to operate the asiento trade. Genoese, Milanese, Andalusian, Creole, Flemish, or Basque actors joined the asiento businesses as ship captains, commercial factors, or judges, providing with essential know-how and knowwho about the inner workings of the intra-imperial and trans-imperial spheres of trade.
Chapter 5 addresses how Grillo’s company operated the trans-imperial dimension of the asiento trade. Outside of the Spanish Empire, Domenico Grillo endeavoured to secure slave cargos that came originally from Senegambia and from as far as Loango, as well as a wide variety of other goods including Dutch cloth, Madeira wine, and Asian cinnamon, which were later sold in the Spanish American markets. This chapter identifies the mechanisms employed by Domenico Grillo’s company to infiltrate the English and Dutch Atlantic and to secure the services of suppliers such as the Dutch West India Company, the English Royal Adventurers Trading into Africa, and multiple private merchants. By examining the access points through which Domenico Grillo’s company infiltrated these empires, from the metropolises of Amsterdam and London to the islands of Curacao, Barbados, and Jamaica in the Caribbean, this chapter presents a multi-imperial and genuinely transatlantic perspective about the operation and formation of trans-imperial markets.
In Chapter 6 I adopt an intra-imperial, Spanish American perspective to understand how Domenico Grillo’s factors operated this new asiento trade on the ground. I particularly focus on the Isthmus of Panama and Pacific South America, the most coveted trading areas for the company and where most African captives were taken. The chapter presents the unprecedented privileges wielded by the company’s factors against the opposition posed by local players, including other slave traders, tax-farmers, and political leaders. Moreover, Grillo’s factors expanded the company’s reach by challenging the privileges of the Seville and Lima consulados, by smuggling, and by venturing into trading areas that exceeded the limits of the asiento charter, like Peru. Yet, Grillo’s factors only could enter these trading spheres with the cooperation of other Spanish American merchants, middlemen, and political authorities who rapidly started to benefit from the asiento trade. This collective construction of the asiento trade on the ground cemented a solid commercial and relational space linking the Spanish Indies to other empires of the Atlantic world.
By tracing how Grillo’s company connected the Caribbean with Genoa through the Spanish and the Dutch Atlantic, Chapter 7 reveals how Mediterranean entrepreneurship not only seeped into the Atlantic and beyond, but how Mediterranean players were prime actors in globalising the Mediterranean despite the growing influence of northern European interests there. In these pages, we shall see that Grillo and his associates relied on the city of Genoa to nurture overseas and multi-imperial trade operations such as the asiento. As a relational space, it allowed venues from which to mobilise capital and credit at the European level, which were critical to finance the asiento operations. Additionally, it also provided with an ideal market from which to sell and redistribute American silver, indigo, cocoa, or cochineal across the Inner Sea. Throughout these seven chapters and final epilogue, I invite the reader to explore the operation, the geographies, and the making of early modern global capitalism from a hitherto neglected angle, that of Genoese entrepreneurs. As once stated by Fernand Braudel, “Seeing Genoa’s history after 1627 in a more favourable light than usual, necessarily involves seeing the global evolution of Europe and the vast worldwide economy that formed around it through a different lens.”*®! This book embraces that challenge.
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