Asiento de Negros


The [List of colonial governors of Angola|]asiento was a short-term loan or debt contract, of about one to four years, signed between the Spanish crown and a banker or a small group of bankers against future crown revenues. Between the early 16th and the mid-18th century, asientos were used by the Spanish treasurer to adjust short-term imbalances between revenues and expenditures. The sovereign promised to repay the principal of the loan plus interest. The participant bankers in Seville, Lisbon, Genoa and Amsterdam, in turn, drew on the profits and direct investments obtained from a large number of Atlantic merchants. In exchange for a set of scheduled payments, merchants and financiers were given the right to collect relevant taxes or oversee the trade in those commodities that fell under the monarch's prerogative and included after peace treaties were signed. In this way a set of merchants received the monopoly on tobacco, salt, sugar and cacao on a trade route from the West Indies, accompanied by licenses to export silver from Spain to Northern Europe. A new asiento was the safest means to get their money back and cash their arrears.
A specific example, the Asiento de Negros, was the right to import and sell a fixed number of enslaved Africans in the Spanish colonies. They were usually obtained by foreign merchant banks, in the beginning by Portuguese and Genovese, and later by Dutch and English, who cooperated with local or foreign traders, specialized in shipping. The asiento specified the places of importation and the points of delivery, as well as navigation routes.
The original impetus to import enslaved Africans was to relieve the indigenous inhabitants of the colonies from the labor demands of the Spanish colonists. Spain gave individual asientos to Portuguese merchants to bring slaves to South America. In 1575 the decree of bankruptcy ruined almost all the Spanish "asentistas". From 1577 until the bankruptcy of 1627, Genovese bankers played a mayor role in financing Spanish imperialism. Most Portuguese contractors who obtained the asiento between 1580 and 1640 were conversos. The first major Asiento involving Portuguese financiers was concluded in 1625 and before 1647 they provided roughly half of the Asientos made in Spain for the Netherlands.
After the Treaty of Münster, Dutch merchants became involved in the Asiento de Negros. In 1713, the British were awarded the right to the asiento in the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession. The British government passed its rights to the South Sea Company. The British asiento ended with the 1750 Treaty of Madrid between Great Britain and Spain.

History of the ''Asiento''

Background in the Spanish Americas

The general meaning of asiento in Spanish is "consent" or "settlement, establishment". In a commercial context it means "contract, trading agreement". In the words of Georges Scelle, it was "a term in Spanish public law which designates every contract made for the purpose of public utility...between the Spanish government and private individuals."
The asiento system was established following Spanish settlement in the Caribbean, when the indigenous population was undergoing demographic collapse and the Spanish needed another source of labor. Initially a few Christian Africans born in Iberia were transported to the Caribbean. But as the indigenous demographic collapse was ongoing and opponents of Spanish exploitation of indigenous labor grew, including that of Bartolomé de Las Casas, the young Habsburg king Charles I of Spain allowed for the direct importation of slaves from Africa to the Caribbean. The first asiento for selling slaves was drawn up in August 1518, granting a Flemish favorite of Charles, :es:Laurent de Gouvenot, a monopoly on importing enslaved Africans for eight years with a maximum of 4,000. Gouvenot promptly sold his license to the treasurer of the Casa de la Contratación de Indias and three subcontractors, Genoese merchants in Andalusia, for 25,000 ducats. The Casa de Contratación in Seville controlled both trade and immigration to the New World, excluding Jews, conversos, Muslims, and foreigners. African slaves were considered merchandise, and their import regulated by the crown. The Spanish crown collected a duty on each "pieza", and not on each individual slave delivered. Spain had neither direct access to the African sources of slaves nor the ability to transport them, so the asiento system was a way to ensure a legal supply of Africans to the New World, which brought revenue to the Spanish crown.

Portuguese and Sephardic monopoly

For the Spanish crown, the asiento was a source of profit. Haring says, "The asiento remained the settled policy of the Spanish government for controlling and profiting from the slave trade." In Habsburg Spain, asientos were a basic method of financing state expenditures: "Borrowing took two forms – long-term debt in the form of perpetual bonds, and short-term loan contracts provided by bankers. Many asientos were eventually converted or refinanced through juros."
Initially, since Portugal had unimpeded rights in West Africa via its 1494 treaty it dominated the European slave trade of Africans. Before the onset of the official asiento in 1595, when the Spanish monarch also ruled Portugal in the Iberian Union, the Spanish fiscal authorities gave individual asientos to merchants, primarily from Portugal, to bring slaves to the Americas. For the 1560s most of these slaves were obtained in the Upper Guinea area, especially in the Sierra Leone region where there were many wars associated with the Mandé invasions.
Following the establishment of the Portuguese colony of Angola in 1575, and the gradual replacement of São Tomé by Brazil as the primary producer of sugar, Angolan interests came to dominate the trade, and it was Portuguese financiers and merchants who obtained the larger-scale, comprehensive asiento that was established in 1595 during the period of the Iberian Union. The asiento was extended to importation of African slaves to Brazil, with those holding asientos for the Brazilian slave trade often also trading slaves in Spanish America. Spanish America was a major market for African slaves, including many of whom exceeded the quota of the asiento license and illegally sold. Till 1622 half of the slaves were destined for Mexico. Most smuggled slaves were not brought by freelance traders.
Angolan dominance of the trade was pronounced after 1615 when the governors of Angola, starting with Bento Banha Cardoso, made alliance with Imbangala mercenaries to wreak havoc on the local African powers. Many of these governors also held the contract of Angola as well as the asiento, thus insuring their interests. Shipping registers from Vera Cruz and Cartagena show that as many as 85% of the slaves arriving in Spanish ports were from Angola, brought by Portuguese ships. In 1637 the Dutch West India Company employed Portuguese merchants in the trade. The earlier asiento period came to an end in 1640 when Portugal revolted against Spain, though even then the Portuguese continued to supply Spanish colonies.

Dutch, French and British competition

In the 1650s after Portugal achieved its independence from Spain, Spain denied the asiento to the Portuguese, whom it considered rebels. Spain sought to enter the slave trade directly, sending ships to Angola to purchase slaves. It also toyed with the idea of a military alliance with Kongo, the powerful African kingdom north of Angola. But these ideas were abandoned and the Spanish returned to Portuguese and then Dutch interests to supply slaves. The Spanish awarded large contracts for the asiento to the Dutch West India Company in 1675 rather than Portuguese merchants in the 1670s and 1680s. In 1700, with the death of the last Habsburg monarch, Charles II of Spain, his will named the House of Bourbon in the form of Philip V of Spain as the successor to the Spanish throne. The Bourbon family were also Kings of France and so the asiento was granted in 1702 to the :fr:Compagnie de Guinée|French Guinea Company, for the importation of 48,000 African slaves over a decade. The Africans were transported to French Caribbean colonies of Martinique and Saint Domingue.
As part of their strategy of maintaining a balance of power in Europe, Great Britain and her allies, including the Dutch and the Portuguese, disputed the Bourbon inheritance of the Spanish throne and fought in the War of the Spanish Succession against Bourbon hegemony. Although Britain did not prevail, it did receive the asiento as part of the Peace of Utrecht. This granted Britain a thirty-year asiento to send one merchant ship to the Spanish port of Portobelo, furnishing 4800 slaves to the Spanish colonies. The asiento became a conduit for British contraband and smugglers of all kinds, which undermined Spain's attempts to keep a protectionist trading system with its American colonies. Disputes connected with it led to the War of Jenkins' Ear. Britain gave up its rights to the asiento after the war, in the Treaty of Madrid of 1750, as Spain was implementing a number of administrative and economic reforms. The Spanish Crown bought out the South Sea Company's right to the asiento that year. The Spanish Crown sought another way to supply African slaves, attempting to liberalize its traffic, trying to shift to a system of the free trade in slaves by Spaniards and foreigners in particular colonial locations. These were Cuba, Santo Domingo, Puerto Rico, and Caracas, all of which used African slaves in large numbers.

Holders of the ''Asiento''

Early: 1518–1595

Six Asientos were granted to:
governor of Angola and holder of the royal tax-farming contract there. The terms of the agreement were much stricter, and Coutinho ran almost immediately into legal and financial difficulties.
Between 1640–1651 there was no asiento. De facto free trade existed in the Spanish Americas. The Dutch were expelled from Loango-Angola in 1648. In 1649 the Swedish Africa Company was founded by Louis De Geer; the company was sold to Dutch WIC in 1663. In March 1659 the Danish Africa Company was started by the Finnish Hendrik Carloff and two Dutchmen. Their mandate included trade with the Danish Gold Coast. Their goal was to compete with the Dutch, the Swedish and the Portuguese. The Dutch competed with the Company of Royal Adventurers Trading to Africa founded in 1660. Both of these slaving powers had a strong presence on the Gold Coast and the Bight of Benin; many slaves came from Cross River. :pt: Matthias Beck|Matthias Beck, who had left Dutch Brazil in 1654 after twenty years, was appointed by the WIC as governor of Curaçao, that, from 1662 to 1728 and intermittently thereafter, functioned as an entrepôt through which captives on Dutch transatlantic ships reached Spanish colonies. A second branch of the intra-American slave traffic originated in Barbados and Jamaica.

Genoese: 1662–1674

The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713 granted Britain an Asiento lasting 30 years to supply the Spanish colonies with 4,800 slaves per year. Britain was permitted to open offices in Buenos Aires, Caracas, Cartagena, Havana, Panama, Portobello and Vera Cruz to arrange the Atlantic slave trade. One ship of no more than 500 tons could be sent to one of these places each year with general trade goods. One quarter of the profits were to be reserved for the King of Spain. There was provision for two extra sailings at the start of the contract. The Asiento was granted in the name of Queen Anne and then contracted to the company.
By July the South Sea Company had arranged contracts with the Royal African Company to supply the necessary African slaves to Jamaica. Ten pounds was paid for a slave aged over 16, £8 for one under 16 but over 10. Two-thirds were to be male, and 90% adult. The company trans-shipped 1,230 slaves from Jamaica to America in the first year, plus any that might have been added by the ship's captains on their own behalf. On arrival of the first cargoes, the local authorities refused to accept the Asiento, which had still not been officially confirmed there by the Spanish authorities. The slaves were eventually sold at a loss in the West Indies.
In 1714 the government announced that a quarter of profits would be reserved for Queen Anne and a further 7.5% for a financial advisor, Manasseh Gilligan. Some Company board members refused to accept the contract on these terms, and the government was obliged to reverse its decision. Despite these setbacks, the company continued, having raised £200,000 to finance the operations. Anne had secretly negotiated with France to get its approval regarding the asiento. She boasted to Parliament of her success in taking the asiento away from France and London celebrated her economic coup.
In 1714 2,680 slaves were carried, and for 1716–17, 13,000 more, but the trade continued to be unprofitable. An import duty of 33 pieces of eight was charged on each slave. One of the extra trade ships was sent to Cartagena in 1714 carrying woollen goods, despite warnings that there was no market for them there, and they remained unsold for two years.
It has been estimated that the company transported over 34,000 slaves with deaths comparable to its competitors, which was taken as competence in this area of work at the time.
The asiento was given to a group of Basques from 1765 to 1779.
In 1784, the Spanish crown contracted with the large Liverpool firm to bring slaves to Venezuela and Cuba between 1786-1789.
Spain's connection to the trade with Africa was minor, with only 185 voyages and 61,000 slaves from the continent from 1500 to 1800. This compares to almost 25,000 voyages and over 7 million slaves embarked in total by all nations from 1500 to 1800.
Of the total number slaves, nearly half went to the Caribbean islands and the Guianas, almost 40 percent to Brazil, and some 6 percent to mainland Spanish America. Surprisingly enough, under 5 percent went to North America. These figures may differ as authors of "Atlantic History and the Slave Trade to Spanish America" suggest half of them went to Brazil and a quarter to the Caribbean.

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