This article describes and analyses an extraordinary series of financial and commercial transactions made by the Anglo-Dutch consortium of Hope-Barings during the French Revolutionary Wars. Linking Spain, Britain, France, the Netherlands, the United States, and Mexico, these transactions originated in Spain’s urgent need to secure royal funds stockpiled in Mexico and rendered inaccessible by Britain’s wartime blockade of the Atlantic. In return for British acquiescence in the importation of these funds, the Spanish granted free access to the rich Mexican market for British goods and manufactures. And, extraordinarily, the prospect of such an outlet for its exports in Mexico was so attractive to the British that they in turn consented not only to the transfer of Spanish royal funds across the Atlantic, but even to their delivery to their greatest enemy, Revolutionary France; all of this, at the very height of the Napoleonic ‘Continental System’ of anti-British economic warfare.
The article concludes that the Hope-Barings contract is of interest in at least three major areas. First, it helps to explain how British trade with the Spanish colonies experienced strong growth, even during a period of outright war with Spain. Secondly, it underscores the utter marginalisation of Spain from its American colonies even prior to the independence of the region, when it appears already to have been displaced as the economic metropolis. Thirdly, this case contributes to British economic history by demonstrating one major means by which Britain circumvented the Continental System, with strong growth in exports to the Americas in 1805-6 more than compensating for the fall in exports to Europe during the same years.
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