Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution

Abstract

In the early republic, a potent mix of commercial aspirations and ideological naivete characterized US diplomatic relations with South America. Tyson Reeder's book explores how North American visions of inevitable republicanism and free trade across the Western Hemisphere came to naught in Brazil. Surveying the give-and-take of state and merchant power emanating from North America, Brazil, Portugal, and Britain between 1760 and 1830, Reeder argues that experiences with international trade in the early republic disproved US revolutionary assumptions about the incompatibility of monarchy and commercial freedom.The monograph is divided into four parts. Part 1 establishes the context of trading and state relationships between the British and Portuguese empires in the eighteenth century's latter half. Portugal, Madeira, and Brazil bought North American grain, North Americans consumed Madeira wine, and Brazilian gold powered credit relationships with the British Atlantic and the slave trade from Angola. Unlike the British, who enforced illicit trading prohibitions in the North American colonies (a flash point for eventual revolutionary turmoil), the Portuguese never took a hard line on smuggling and mercantilism within their empire. Portuguese subjects in Brazil rarely perceived unlicensed trade as incompatible with fealty to the monarchy.Part 2 examines how the shifting political terrain of British imperial crisis and the American War of Independence altered trading priorities and commercial relationships. Independence from Britain meant that North Americans no longer enjoyed the trading privileges resulting from long-term British naval protection of the Portuguese. Portuguese bans on direct trade with the nascent United States deepened North American convictions that empires and monarchies could not be trusted trading partners.In part 3, Reeder explores how the hopes of US free traders for open trade with an independent Brazil aligned with neither that colony's late eighteenth-century fate nor US lawmakers' early nineteenth-century commercial policies. Early republic luminaries like Thomas Jefferson thought revolution, independence, and free trade inevitable for Brazil. Meanwhile, the Portuguese feared the US republican example in Brazilian uprisings like the 1789–90 Minas conspiracy. Nevertheless, the Portuguese court's movement to Brazil further liberalized Brazilian trade. As Reeder argues, the United States, not trade liberalization, was the problem for Portugal. Compounding the challenges for US merchants, the 1807 Embargo Act forbade the export of US products until foreign powers ceased interfering with US neutral trade. To North American merchants, this disastrous act “seemed to betray liberal ideologies to garner respect from European powers—a betrayal magnified as the Portuguese monarchy liberalized imperial commerce” (p. 134).Reeder examines the deeper dimensions of this disenchantment in part 4's discussion of the nineteenth century's first decades. Initially, North American observers prefigured rebels against Portuguese control in 1817 Pernambuco as latter-day versions of the 1776 patriots in Boston. North American seafarers accepted privateering commissions from José Gervasio Artigas, caudillo of the disputed Banda Oriental of present-day Uruguay and Brazil, to raid Portuguese and Spanish shipping in the pursuit of the region's independence. To maintain future trading opportunities and good standing in the community of nations, US politicians passed the 1817 Neutrality Act, which denied privateers safe harbor in US ports. Ultimately, Brazil's 1822 transition to an imperial monarchy engendered US prejudices about how Brazil's suspect racial composition made republicanism impossible and new conceptualizations of Brazil as a slaveholding paradise.Reeder offers a compelling investigation of trade mentalities and ideological projection. As Brazil delayed independence and then formed into an independent monarchy that liberalized trade, this unique course of decolonization “exposed the fragility of North Americans' commitment to hemispheric republicanism and its tepid attachment to free trade” (p. 237). Reeder's comparative commercial psychoanalysis illuminates deep connections between Brazil and the early United States that scholars have often overlooked. His research is deeply grounded in archival material from Brazil, Portugal, the United States, and Britain. At times, the book can be a bit repetitive and reductionist in its restatement of the paradoxical relationship between imperialism and free trade. Its single-minded focus on the Luso-Atlantic world also left me wondering about where else US beliefs in republican commercial liberalism were being put to the test. This lack of wider context notwithstanding, the book adds a wonderful case study to works such as Caitlin Fitz's Our Sister Republics: The United States in an Age of American Revolutions (2016), on the ideological aspirations of US political thought toward Spanish American independence movements, and Eliga Gould's Among the Powers of the Earth: The American Revolution and the Making of a New World Empire (2012), on the US struggle for legitimacy in the nineteenth-century community of nations. It will be an important book for historians of Atlantic commerce and early US–Latin American relations.