Conceived in Liberty Volume 2 - Ludwig von Mises Institute

was able to become a favorite subcontractor of the Spanish assientists. Its
main trade was with the New Spanish ports: Cartagena on the mainland,
Havana, and Porto Bello on the Isthmus of Panama. In 1698, the complaints
of the English planters over a shortage of slaves led the British government
to cancel Royal African's monopoly and to throw open the English slave
trade to other groups.
The assiento was one of the main reasons for England's precipitation of
the War of the Spanish Succession (known in America as Queen Anne's
War) against France and Spain in 1701. For Philip V, the new king of
Spain in 1700, was a grandson of the French king Louis XIV, and he promptly
awarded the coveted assiento to the French Guinea Company—an act that led
powerful English merchants interested in the slave trade to support an English
war upon the two countries.
At the Peace of Utrecht the British financiers achieved what they
wanted: for Spain was forced to grant Britain a thirty-year assiento for the
slave trade to the Spanish colonies. The British government granted the
assiento monopoly to the newly formed South Sea Company, which promptly
used its privilege as a base for general trade with the Spanish West Indies—
indeed as a base for a vast amount of illegal trade as well. The South Sea
Company was an organization dominated by the leading West Indian merchants
and planters. They were led by Alderman William Beckford, the
wealthiest planter and an absentee landlord in London, and they supported
the imperialist opposition to the pacific Walpole.
Now the Spanish government no more welcomed evasion of its mercantilist
regulations than did any other government. It was the attempt of the
Spanish colonial coast guard to stop and search British ships in Spanish
territorial waters that precipitated England's going to war, despite England's
previous recognition of Spain's exclusive right of trade with its own colony.
The Jenkins' ear hoax was fostered by British merchants to gull the country
into going to war in order to swell their profits in the illegal trade with the
Spanish colonies. The interested merchants, allied to the jingoists, were led
in Commons by William Pitt (the main political protege of Beckford) and
his "Boy Patriots." These war hawks could not this time be denied, even
though Walpole was able to negotiate a compromise agreement with Spain
in the Convention of El Pardo in 1739.
Walpole's lone resistance to the war drive was eloquent. Noting the
Spanish treaty right of search in its own waters against illegal trade, he
warned that the warmongers "insist that our ships ought never to be searched
wherever they are to be found, and let them be ever so near to the Spanish
coasts. Pray sir, what is the plain English of this but that the trade to the
Spanish West Indies ought to be open to every interloper of ours. . . ." Yet
the facts of the case, the Convention of El Pardo, and Walpole's stubborn
eloquence could not this time prevail, and George II declared war against
217