Reviewed by: Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution by Tyson Reeder Kirsten Schultz Tyson Reeder, Smugglers, Pirates, and Patriots: Free Trade in the Age of Revolution (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 2019). Pp. 368; 15 illus. $45.00 cloth. As the first decade of the nineteenth century came to a close, United States' and Portuguese imperial commercial policies collided for reasons that defied the longer history of mercantilist regulation. In 1807, the United States government issued the Embargo Act, forbidding U.S. ships from sailing to international ports. [End Page 728] Infamous and ultimately short-lived, the embargo was intended as a response to French and British acts of economic warfare during the Napoleonic Wars that included seizures of U.S. ships. Less than a year later, with Napoleon's troops crossing Spain to occupy Lisbon, the Portuguese royal family set sail for Brazil. The move thwarted a Napoleonic usurpation of the throne and allowed the Portuguese Prince Regent to ride out the war in Portugal between French occupiers and Anglo-Portuguese forces at a presumably safer distance. Among the relocated sovereign's first acts was the opening of Brazil's ports to all friendly nations. As the barriers to Brazilian markets fell away, embargoed North Americans, including many who previously had practiced and preached free trade, were left to observe from afar as British traders rushed in to set up shop in Salvador and Rio de Janeiro. As Tyson Reeder argues in this ambitious and extensively-researched book, this moment of political-economic divergence—when an old mercantilist power opened ports and a new free-trading power shut them—was one of several turning points in the commercial relations between British America and the Luso-Atlantic in the Age of Revolution. Tracing the contingencies and entanglements of British, U.S., Portuguese, and Brazilian trade policies and political projects across more than a century, and across multiple local, national and imperial archives, Reeder is particularly interested in the ways in which U.S. diplomatic and commercial practices took inspiration from, and later set aside, republican and free trade ideologies. "Rather than advance tidy national narratives," he concludes, "the revolutionary age exposed the difficulty of reconciling liberal ideologies with national expediencies" (134). Reeder begins with a survey of the long history of Anglo-Portuguese relations within an Atlantic commerce that "developed as a composite of legal strictures and illicit trade practices" (2). At the turn of the eighteenth century, an older Anglo-Portuguese alliance was affirmed in a series of treaties that both provided for the Kingdom of Portugal's defense during the War of Spanish Succession (1701–1714) and enhanced commercial exchange. The Methuen Treaty of 1703 stipulated that English woolens entered Portugal free of duty, while Portuguese wines entered England with tariffs lower than their French competition. In the decades that followed, Anglo-Portuguese trade continued to turn on privileges as British and Portuguese traders navigated the influx of massive amounts of gold from newly-discovered mines in Brazil, the transatlantic slave trade that supplied labor to the mining region, and London-based finance. Those who governed from London and Lisbon, in turn, implemented mercantilist principles to maximize metropolitan accumulations of wealth but also allowed inter-imperial commerce when it served similar ends. While the seventeenth-century Navigation Acts had fortified English entrepôts, they permitted commerce between British North America and Portuguese territories, including the direct importation of Madeira wine and Portuguese salt and the export of breadstuffs from the middle colonies via England. As Reeder explains, Portuguese traders paid for provisions with Brazilian gold and Spanish-American silver. In some cases, payments of smuggled, or untaxed, gold went directly to British Americans' English creditors (13). In this way, British American trade to Portugal and the Portuguese Atlantic islands sustained the colonial consumption of English manufactures. In the first half of the eighteenth century the asiento (Spanish American slave trade contract) also gave British traders a foothold in Rio de la Plata from which they smuggled goods into Brazil. Portuguese royal officials continuously expressed alarm about these arrangements. In the middle of the eighteenth century the Portuguese crown, guided [End Page 729] by...
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