Staying Afloat: Risk and Uncertainty in Spanish Atlantic World Trade, 1760–1820, by Jeremy Baskes

Abstract

Staying Afloat: Risk and Uncertainty in Spanish Atlantic World Trade, 1760-1820, by Jeremy Baskes. Social Science History. Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2013. xiv, 393 pp. $70.00 US (cloth). Whereas Harold Cook has been analyzing the Dutch experience to study the connections between the rise of global commerce and the development of a global science, German media historians Wolfgang Schaffner and Bernhard Siegert have proposed to look at the Casa de Contratacion (established in Seville in 1503) and the Council of the Indies (1520) as two of the institutions connected with the emergence of modern knowledge and the reliable gathering of experience and data. Far from the protestant values and Puritan ethos, beyond the social origins or exploits of the members of the London Royal Society, Schaffner and Siegert analyzed how bureaucrats and bureaucratic devices that emerged in the Spanish Monarchy shaped a new way of both assessing what reality was and governing what the king would never see with his own eyes. This kind of telemathic representation, based on bureaucratic media of transmitting data from the New World to Spain, created new kinds of evidence. Inspired by media philosopher Friedrich Kittler and by the seminal work of the Spanish historian of science, Jose Maria Lopez Pinero, Schaffner und Siegert turn functionaries and devices of the Casa and the Council--maps, reports, instructions, memoranda--into key actors in the making of modern Europe. Furthermore, Arndt Brendecke has focused on the Spanish Empire in order to understand the crucial relationship between Empirie-Gebrauch und kolonialer Herrschaft. Thus, in current historiography the rise of modern knowledge is primarily a result of the development of modern commerce as well as the Spanish colonial administration with their procedures and protocols (see Wolfgang Schaffner Telemathische Representation im 17. Jahrhundert in Erika Fischer-Lichte (ed.), Theatralitdt und die Krisen der Reprasentation: DFG-Symposion 1999, Stuttgart /Weimar, 2001, pp. 411428; and Bernhard Siegert, Passagiere und Papiere: Schreibakte aufder Schwelle zwischen Spanien und Amerika (1530-1600). Munich, W. Fink, 2006). In Staying Afloat, Jeremy Baskes, specialist in the colonial economic history of Mexico, examines Spanish imperial trade and the ways in which merchants addressed endemic risk and uncertainty in transatlantic commerce. Risk and uncertainty were pervasive in early modern, long-distance, trans oceanic commerce. The central argument of Baskes's book is that much of the commercial behaviour of Spanish merchants should be understood as their responses to ever-present riskiness of trade (p. 2). One of the main focuses of this monograph is the impact of Reglamento of Comercio Libre (Free Trade) on long distance trade in the second half of the eighteenth century, and at the end, on the political organization of the Empire (treated in particular in chapter four, in which Baskes suggests that the promulgation of comercio libre altered the institutional arrangements that had helped regularize supply and mitigate uncertainty in the pre-reform era). …