James Cummins Bookseller

London: Printed for John Baskett, 1713.

Price: $15,000.00

About the item

[2], 48pp., printed in English and Spanish in parallel columns. Without the Privilege leaf preceding the title. Quarto. Trimmed and inlaid into folio sheets and bound within a folio volume of treaties between Great Britain and Spain assembled by the British Foreign Office Library, approx. 850pp in total. 19th century half roan and marbled paper boards, worn, some restoration at joints. Provenance: British Foreign Office Library (bookplate on the front pastedown). Sabin 2227; European Americana 713/85; Hanson 1896; Sperling 34; JCB (1)III:175; ESTC T4476.

Item #370449

First edition in English of one of the most important documents in the history of slavery in the Americas, and in the political and financial history of Europe and the Americas in the early 18th century.

Though the term "assiento" could refer to any number of Spanish contracts, "the Assiento" almost always refers to the "Assiento de Negros": a monopoly contract granted by the Spanish crown between 1528 and 1779 for the sole right to import slaves from Africa into the Spanish colonies. Normally granted to individual companies, the 1713 Assiento was granted directly to the British crown as part of negotiations for the Treaty of Utrecht which ended the War of Spanish Succession. In the decades following this 1713 Assiento an estimated 200,000 enslaved Africans were transported across the Atlantic.

The document grants sole privilege for the trade to the British crown for a period of thirty years, expiring in 1743. The agreement, consisting of forty-two articles, allows for a maximum of 4800 slaves to be introduced to the colonies each year, with a provision for increasing that annual amount each year by paying an added duty, places limits on sale prices, sets the cost of the duty to be paid for each enslaved person, allows for the use of British or Spanish ships and mariners in the slave trade, provides for the French Guinea Company's extraction from the colonies, and establishes the details of precisely where British ships would be allowed to travel and trade. The British were also granted the unique privilege to send one vessel with a cargo of up to 500 tons of other trade goods to the Spanish colonies each year.

While the Assiento seemed a lucrative deal, most Assientists over the years saw considerable losses due to the difficulty of cross-Atlantic trade and the duties paid to the Spanish king. The real benefit to its grantees was not profits from the slave trade, but rather the illegal ability to send other contraband on board their vessels to the otherwise closed-off Spanish markets in the New World. Britain was eager to get their own products overseas and to deny this revenue stream to the French (who had held the Assiento since 1701), thereby preventing them from refilling their coffers too quickly and upsetting the balance of power in Europe after the costly War of the Spanish Succession.

Queen Anne delegated the Assiento privilege to the South Sea Company, which had recently been established to pay off Britain's considerable national debt. The privilege was largely granted to them as an encouragement to investors, in order to allow the Company to achieve its original purpose more readily. Ultimately, however, it proved to be a costly and unprofitable endeavor for the South Sea Company, who were able to import only about one-third of their allowed quota of slaves each year, were frequently interrupted by war, and were required to render twenty-five percent of their profits to King Philip V of Spain.

The present example comes from the British Foreign Office Library, inlaid and bound into a folio volume of other treaties between Great Britain and Spain, arranged chronologically by treaty date. Over the course of many years, the library of the Great Britain Foreign Office inlaid copies of nearly every treaty involving Great Britain to folio size and bound them together by region. The library was dispersed in the late 20th century, with most of the volumes, and particularly the American volumes, broken up and sold by the William Reese Company.

Most of the other treaties with Spain within this volume are clippings or extracts from larger works, or true copies in manuscript, of treaties dated between the years 1176 and 1739. Included in the volume, however, is a separately-printed English edition of the Treaty between Great Britain and Spain as part of the Treaty of Utrecht (1713): Tractatus pacis & amicitiæ ... Treaty of peace and friendship between The most Serene and most Potent Princess Anne, by the Grace of God, Queen of Great Britain, France, and Ireland, Defender of the Faith, &c. and the most Serene and most Potent Prince Philip the Vth, the catholick King of Spain, concluded at Utrecht the 2/13 day of July, 1713. London: Printed by John Baskett, 1714. 115, [1]pp. ESTC T51509.

There are two issues of the Assiento treaty; this is the issue with a semicolon after "Assiento" and no punctuation after "or" on the titlepage. A crucially important document in the history of colonial trade, Spanish-British relations, English finances, and slavery in the Americas.