American Trade with European Colonies in the Caribbean and South America, 1790-1812

Abstract

I n the first decade of American independence, the principal European powers restricted or excluded American trade with their possessions to suit the needs and interests of their own commercial classes. The twenty years of war among these powers which began in 1793 caused the abandonment of commercial monopolies as the belligerents were forced to resort to neutral shipping and to authorize the importation of neutral goods on a wide scale. While the war thus produced an enormous expansion of trade with the West Indies and opened up promising new markets, especially in Spain's continental colonies, American commerce became extremely sensitive to every shift in the course of events. The exhilarating wartime dreams of American commercial supremacy in the region which lingered on long after the war masked the reality of this dependence on external events just as the relative increase in American exports obscured the real poverty of the region's markets. Precarious as it was, this branch of American foreign trade took nearly one third of all the exports of the United States between I790 and i8I4.1 The fortunes of a number of important producer groups and regions, of several major seaboard towns, and of a large part of the American merchant class depended on trade with the West Indies and