In Temptations of Trade, Adrian Finucane reexamines the history of the British South Sea Company's asiento, the monopoly it enjoyed to supply Spanish America's peripheral colonies with enslaved African laborers from 1713 until 1750. Finucane presents a pathbreaking study that highlights the convoluted entanglements that tied the fates of the Spanish and British Empires together. By examining the ways that company agents pursued personal gain in places where metropolitan authority was weakest, Finucane concludes that European empires were shaped by the liminal individuals who traversed boundaries at the imperial margins. Her argument is that the South Sea Company's slave-trading monopoly finally ended because the cross-cultural exchange and cooperation the asiento created could neither overcome intermittent intra-imperial conflicts nor sustain prolonged periods of peace. The asiento united the British and the Spanish in a mutual project of imperial development only to then drive them apart.

Temptations of Trade is an imperial history in new clothes. One of Finucane's most important contributions is to use the South Sea Company asiento to reveal how empire was not just a project of European states. It was also the creation of diverse individuals on the ground who sought to profit from colonial frontiers where economies were growing, settler populations enlarging, and institutions of authority still yet maturing. The formation of empires in the Caribbean periphery was messy and unruly. South Sea Company agents therefore gained a cultural fluidity and knowledge of Spanish America that they brandished to shape imperial identity and propaganda while enhancing the temptations of the region's trade.

Finucane cleverly uses eighteenth-century print culture to supplement the South Sea Company's scant records, highlighting the complexities of the company's trans-imperial business and its agents’ trans-imperial lives. In Spanish American port towns, the South Sea Company's factors occupied a middle ground. Despite special regulations and restrictions, they were not isolated from the local Spanish Catholic communities they lived and worked among. They learned Spanish, employed local servants, dined in the homes of colonial elites, collected and shared scientific information, and cavorted with women. At Portobello, Panama, Cartagena, and Buenos Aires, company agents also sought to enhance their wealth by engaging in contraband trade with smugglers from Jamaica and the Spanish Main. Pragmatism rather than imperial ideology guided the agents’ attitudes and activities as they worked simultaneously to enrich themselves and enhance the glory of the British Empire. During both peace and war, the agents attempted to maintain relationships that cut across culture and nationality. And for these reasons, their trans-imperial connections and pursuit of gain came into conflict with a horde of other interests: Spanish colonial authorities, pirates, Jamaican colonists, British naval officers, Liverpool merchants, and London imperial bureaucrats.

Finucane succeeds in focussing on company factors and employees rather than influential directors or other imperial officials, but her approach produces neither a sufficient nor a satisfactory examination of the trans-imperial entanglements she so notably describes. The historical agents on the ground in Temptations of Trade are Britons or Anglo-Americans rather than the Spanish subjects they worked with and against. Although it includes Spanish-language research, the book highlights markedly British perspectives. Company factors like John Houston may have embraced alternative imperial imaginaries and identities, but the merchants, seamen, travelers, colonists, and other non-state actors who appear in the book are nearly all decidedly Britons. Pirates, the Inquisition, enslaved Africans, or Native Americans are peppered into the narrative, but the non-Britons who cooperated as individuals in the legal trade and colluded in contraband are most often nameless, voiceless, and overlooked. Finucane does not include them in the same meaningful way as she examines the on-the-ground construction of empire by individual company agents. Nor does she survey their contributions to and effects on the kinetic dynamics of cross-cultural cooperation that were so important on imperial peripheries. This Anglo-centric approach is a shortcoming. Finucane elaborates a critically important theoretical framework for understanding trans-imperial connections across the Americas, but inadequately examines the composition and tensile qualities of those ties.

To describe the braids of entangled empires is one kind of historical endeavor. To disentangle the individual strands and reconnect them again is an entirely different enterprise. Temptations of Trade is not a book that does the latter, for Finucane examines only one thread of the braid. Nevertheless, the genius of Temptations of Trade lies in its promise of new and innovative research to come. It is an early wave of surf that is breaking against a historiographical shore. That is a very important reason to read it.