Monroe Mock Lecture: No Such Thing as Neutral Trade

Monroe Mock Lecture: No Such Thing as Neutral Trade: U.S. Shippers in the Rio de la Plata at the turn of the 19th Century
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, the Peninsula, other European neutral ports and Brazil. Furthermore, North American traders provided a new avenue for Rio de la Plata merchants to acquire European manufactures from London, Amsterdam, and other Northern European ports. During this period, North American traders transported thousands of captives direct from Africa to Rio de la Plata, becoming the principal suppliers of enslaved Africans to the region in 1805 and 1806. The United States’ commercial presence in Rio de la Plata sheds light on the emergence of new trade patterns and commercial routes in the Atlantic that transcended national and imperial limits. As a result, even before the crisis of legitimacy provoked by Napoleon’s invasion of Iberia (1808) and the outbreak of independence wars (1810), merchants had already blurred imperial and national limits in the South Atlantic. The participation of U.S. merchants in Rio de la Plata reveals entanglements of Anglo and Iberian Atlantic histories and the interconnections between slavery and capitalism in the nineteenth-century South Atlantic.