Britain wins the Asiento at the Treaty of Utrecht
- Date
- 1713
- Category
- Economy & trade
- Region
- Europe and the Spanish Atlantic
- Era
- Early Modern
- Significance
The Treaty of Utrecht of 1713, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, transferred to Great Britain the Asiento de Negros, the monopoly contract to supply enslaved Africans to Spain's American colonies.
Under the thirty-year agreement Britain undertook to deliver 144,000 captives, at 4,800 per year, and gained the right to open trading offices at Buenos Aires, Caracas, Cartagena, Havana, Panama, Portobello and Veracruz, plus an annual permission ship for general goods. The contract passed to the South Sea Company, whose financial schemes around the Asiento helped fuel the speculative South Sea Bubble of 1720. Possession of the Asiento confirmed Britain's emergence as the leading slaving power of the eighteenth century and provided a legal channel, and cover for extensive contraband, into the closed markets of Spanish America. Combined with the lapse of the Royal African Company's monopoly, the Asiento accelerated the expansion of the British Atlantic slave trade that would carry millions of Africans across the Middle Passage over the following decades. The treaty illustrates how the traffic in human beings had become a central prize of European great-power diplomacy, bargained over in the same documents that redrew the map of Europe and the Americas.
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Empires active in 1713
- Portuguese Empire1415 CE – 1999 CE
- Spanish Empire1492 CE – 1976 CE
- Mughal Empire1526 CE – 1857 CE
- Qing Dynasty1636 CE – 1912 CE
- British Empire1583 CE – 1997 CE
- Solomonic dynasty1270 CE – 1974 CE
Related economy & trade events
- Founding of the Bank of England27 July 1694
- Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations9 March 1776
- Founding of the English and Dutch East India Companies1600–1602
- Royal African Company chartered, expanding England's slave trade1672
- Deindustrialisation of India under British rulec. 1800-1870
- Founding of the Bank of Amsterdam (Wisselbank)31 January 1609
Further reading
The wider story
The Silk Roads: A New History of the World
Best-selling world history told through the trade routes that moved goods, faiths and ideas.
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