Abstract
Recent scholarship on the rights of neutrals in the long eighteenth century is very well represented by this welcome bilingual volume of sixteen essays. Editor Schnakenbourg contributes a thoughtful specialised essay on the role of neutral flags in French West Indian survival during the Seven Years’ War, and he shapes the book with his general organisation, plus his introduction, conclusion and abstracts offered in French and English.
The essays are assembled in four topical categories: the networks of neutral commerce; the actors; the centres; and the place of neutrality in interstate relations. The introduction suggests the insights to be derived from this organisation, and supports his intention ‘to challenge the epistemological relevance of national frameworks and imperial structures when studying the Atlantic world’. (p. 19). However, only very well-prepared readers will be able to remember who was belligerent and who was neutral in any given year in this non-chronological arrangement of essays. An Atlantic world that was transformed after mid-century by the French loss of Canada, the British loss of most North American colonies, the French and Haitian revolutions, the Napoleonic Wars, and the collapse of the Spanish empire in America is hardly a unified topic. This review considers these essays in roughly chronological order.
Three essays attempt to span the entire period, and do so from rather peripheral perspectives. Holger Weiss examines statistics for the small Danish slave trade, usually confined to delivering African slaves to the Danish West Indies, but providing a neutral flag for a wide variety of traders between 1791 and 1815. Barry L. Stiefel surveys the ongoing place of Jewish traders in building neutral ports and transnational networks, particularly in Danish and Dutch West Indian islands. Victor Enthoven’s case study of Dutch St. Eustatius during the Anglo-Dutch alliance (1674–1781) reveals the place of this significant free port in smuggling and neutral trading with British and French colonies. Tensions between the British and Dutch about neutral rights were endemic and they persisted until the British Navy finally destroyed the settlement in 1781.
Neutrality in the first half of the eighteenth century is examined in three informative essays. Ana Crespo Solana studies strategies of Dutch traders at the bustling Spanish entrepôt of Cadiz through war and peace. Their ‘hidden neutrality’ continued the illicit trade that brought major mutual benefits, and was aided by Swedish and Danish flags and brokers when necessary. That other well-known trans-imperial trade of this period, between the French West Indies and the British North American colonies, readily went from smuggling to the use of ‘neutral entrepôts’ during the Seven Years’ War. Franc̨ois Ternat discusses a very different notion of colonial neutrality, examining French conceptions and misconceptions of a neutral colonial buffer zone, involving Acadians and the Six Nations Iroquois.
The American Revolutionary War brought marked changes. The nascent United States government immediately sought neutrality in foreign affairs and commercial shipping. Marc Belissa’s essay examines the limits of a neutrality that faced Federalist opposition at home as well as British, and sometimes even French, belligerence at sea. The brief spectacular success of Ostend, a free port in the Austrian Netherlands, grew as France (1778), Spain (1779) and Holland (1780) entered the American War. François Antoine examines the effective opportunism of this uniquely-placed port, but the promising networks did not survive when peace was restored.
The central focus of the volume is Atlantic neutrality in the era of the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars. Ten essays delve into aspects of this war-torn era when American and a changing group of European neutrals were important to beleaguered French and French-colonial traders. Boris Deschanel examines the correspondence of Jean-Jacques Chauvet, a middling merchant in Marseilles, who used American, Dutch, and German neutrals to preserve a little of his coffee trade with St. Domingue. Lisbon provided another perspective, which Miģuel Dantas da Crux argues was sustained by Portuguese neutrality, neutral flags and papers, and by American neutrals. Cuba’s new Real Consulado successfully expanded the colony’s trade with neutrals in the decade after 1797, often subverting Spanish intentions, as Dominiques Concalvès explains. A fourth demonstration of the growth of neutral trade was the brief prosperity of the new Swedish West Indian port of St. Barthélemy in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. Foreign traders flocked there to become Swedish citizens, ignoring shifting European alliances, and profiting from a neutrality that was, as Ale Pȧllson argues, contested but largely effective.
Much of the expansion of neutral shipping in the 1790s was the rise of U.S. shipping and foreign trade. While several of the essays mention this, two examine it explicitly. Silvia Maragalli reminds readers that U.S. merchant tonnage tripled between 1790 and 1807. The U.S. became a major re-exporter of French tropical commodities to Europe, with Bordeaux as the favoured destination. Manuel Covo examines the complexities for Americans and others attempting to trade in St. Domingue amid revolution and rapidly-changing local, American, British and French laws.
In the pursuit of Latin American independence, local interests continued their illicit trades, undermining Spanish authority without explicit neutrality. Clément Thibaud details this ‘neutralising’ of imperial authority on the Caribbean coast south of Panama. Great Britain, France, Sweden, and the U.S.A. were officially neutral in these struggles, and Nicholas Terrien demonstrates how all parties smuggled, traded in Spanish goods taken by ‘insurgent privateers’, or helped arm the revolutionaries. Manoeuvring for diplomatic and commercial advantage was rampant, but respect of neutral rights was better when all the major sea powers were neutral.
Generally, neutral flags and papers were less useful than neutral brokers, neutral shipping, or neutral ports in providing cover from the threat of the British Navy or privateers. British traders are understandably absent from this book; their Atlantic trade grew in wartime, supported by British convoys rather than neutral intermediaries, except in the uninterrupted tobacco trade to France itself. French and Spanish imperial and colonial trading networks adapted quickly and creatively to wartime disruptions and shortages. Suggestions by several authors that new trading networks may have survived after peace was restored are usually optimistic. The use of third parties, whether neutral brokers or neutral ports, involved additional costs and delays sustainable only by inflated wartime prices. Insurance and wage rates for neutral shipping are entirely absent here, and might help in evaluating changing risks.
Neutral Atlantic shipping increased markedly by the end of the eighteenth century, and always-leaky imperial trading frameworks could be fatally compromised. Growing United States merchant shipping was a significant part of this transformation; an American Atlantic that survived this period was being born.
This excellent volume should be required reading for all those interested in early modern Atlantic, American, imperial or maritime history.