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No such thing as neutral trade: U.S. shippers in the Rio de la Plata at the turn of the nineteenth century

Scholars of Spanish South America have long emphasized the significance of British influence in the Rio de la Plata by the time of the region’s independence in 1810 and the subsequent revolutionary decade (Ferns 1960; Irazusra 1963; Scalabrini Ortiz 1940). Historians have demonstrated the crucial role of the British invasions of 1806– 1807 in the economic, social, and political processes of Buenos Aires as paving the way for political autonomy and free trade. Others have examined the British influence in Uruguay’s creation as an autonomous state and the subsequent integration of the Rio de la Plata region into the British informal empire during the nineteenth century (Ferns 1953; Street 1959; Manchester 1964; Winn 1975; Brown 2008). However, less studied and debated was the United States commercial presence in Rio de la Plata, which was also significant, equaling and at times surpassing British interests in the region. Between 1798 and 1807, no less than 167 United States vessels entered Rio de la Plata ports carrying manufactured goods, Atlantic produce, alcohol, and enslaved Africans. During this period, U.S. vessels comprised the second largest foreign merchant fleet in the estuary and transported more than 8,000 enslaved Africans to Rio de la Plata. As the Napoleonic wars ravaged Europe and the Atlantic, neutral United States vessels carried produce, silver, information, and people from Rio de la Plata to other Spanish American ports (e.g., Cuba), to the Peninsula, to other European neutral ports (e.g., Hamburg) and Brazil. U.S. neutral shippers and slavers provided a new avenue for Platense merchants to acquire European manufactures from London and other northern European port cities. Thus, the U.S. commercial presence was not only significant for its sheer scale but also for what it reveals about the patterns of Rio de la Plata commerce and its connections to the wider Atlantic world at the turn of the nineteenth century. The U.S. commercial presence in Rio de la Plata, the main commercial hub of the Spanish empire in the South Atlantic, unveils the multiple trans-imperial routes and commercial networks Spanish American merchants developed during the last decades of Spanish rule. By exploring loopholes in the regulations for intra-imperial trade, neutral trade, and the slave trade, while simultaneously leveraging previously existing networks to Portuguese America, Rio de la Plata merchants established new trans-imperial commercial networks to U.S. merchant firms. These new connections did not depend solely on familial or corporate networks within the Spanish empire, as historians have demonstrated to be the case in the previous decades, but they were built on commercial