Bold claims are made for this book in its introduction. Readers, however, need not be apprehensive: the author delivers as required. Pearce sets out to rewrite the history of British trade with Spanish America in the decades before independence. There has been, he observes, no comprehensive revision of this field in more than fifty years. Assessing the extent of British trade in the Americas has always been a complicated business. The records can be fragmentary, anecdotal, unreliable, and sometimes plain implausible. Indeed, much of what happened was probably never recorded at all. And this was for a good reason: between 1763 and 1808 most British trade with Spain's overseas possessions was illegal and conducted as a form of contraband. The West Indies was a risky place for business. A fortune might be made by shipping the right cargo to the right place at the right time, but markets could disappear just as quickly. Great powers captured and relinquished territories according to military advantage in the region and as bargains on the European stage. Pirates and men-of-war cruised the Caribbean and Central American waters either in search of prizes or to enforce the economic restrictions of their colonial systems.

But did this really matter for Britain? Admittedly Jamaica was economically valuable in the eighteenth century, but in other respects the great age of British trade and investment in the Americas lay a century ahead. Surely, too, the value of British goods going to Spanish America was insignificant in relation to Britain's global exports? A generation or two of historians have worked from data produced in the 1970s that indicated that by 1804–6 about £1.2 million worth of British produce found its way to Latin America (including Brazil)—merely 2.4 percent of Britain's £51 million export total. In the context of the Industrial Revolution and its transformation of Britain's economy these dealings were thus at best peripheral. Yet it is precisely this view that Pearce wishes to challenge. He claims that the value of British trade in the period of his study has been significantly understated. By 1807 perhaps £4 million worth of British goods went regularly to Spanish America alone—at least 6 percent of Britain's total exports. This puts its contribution to Britain's industrial advance in a different light. In short, Spain's possessions in the New World were of importance to Britain half a century earlier than previously reckoned.

But how could such an apparent historical underestimation have been possible? After all, the British government's policy after 1766 of opening free ports in the West Indies to encourage trade with Spaniards has always been known and widely credited with expanding commercial opportunities. The answer, Pearce proposes, is that trade out of Jamaica and other British territories was greater than previously supposed and, perhaps most significantly, because large volumes of British merchandise were transported and sold in the region by neutral shipping out of the United States or flying Danish or German flags. Carriage in neutral bottoms circumvented both embargoes on British vessels and the fact that legitimate British reexports via Spain itself necessarily ended with the outbreak of hostilities between the two nations in 1796 and the blockade of Cadiz in 1797. Britain and Spain remained at war for most of the period 1796 to 1808.

To assert, therefore, a fourfold expansion of trade with Spanish America between 1763 and 1808 requires some persuasive argument. Pearce concedes that some of his conclusions are provisional—an almost unnecessarily modest remark since many readers will be at a loss to suggest what more he might have done. It is not easy to bring trade statistics to life. Pearce works no miracle in that respect, but his discussion and analysis of sources is both engaging and expert. His argument is credible precisely because it is so well rooted in the records of the age. He opens with an account of the origins of British trade with Spain's dominions from the sixteenth century onward and then traces the distinctive features of the Asiento years between 1713 and 1739. The ground is thereby prepared for his scholarly discourse. The range of sources reveals the thorough approach that the author has adopted. It may be many years before this well-written and carefully organized work is superseded.

But the importance of Pearce's research transcends the history of the Caribbean. It goes beyond, too, the role that Spanish territories may have played in facilitating Britain's industrialization and global supremacy. If British trade was, as is usually assumed, one of the principal forces breaking down Spanish imperial control, then, if the extent of that trade was far greater much earlier than hitherto calculated, it follows that the Spanish empire was in the throes of terminal decline well before the era of political independence in the early nineteenth century. Spain's inability to operate its restrictive, excessively regulated, and over-taxed commercial system was being seriously exposed from the 1760s onward. By the late 1790s Spain's commercial hegemony among her own possessions had gone. Britain's century in Latin America had already begun.