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El Niño, Environmental Crisis, and the Emergence of Alternative Markets in the Hispanic Caribbean, 1760s–70s
Sherry Johnson
| IN September 1773 merchant William Pollard wrote to his colleague Peter Holme in Liverpool about business conditions in Philadelphia. Pollard wondered why the cost of provisions such as flour, bread, and wheat was so high when demand, especially demand from the British Caribbean, was down. As an afterthought he remarked that his fellow merchants, Thomas Willing and Robert Morris, partners in the Philadelphia commercial house Willing & Morris, were buying up all the flour they could find. They even chartered six or seven ships that belonged to other establishments and sent them to Quebec and to Maryland in search of more flour, since the local suppliers could not meet their demand. Unable to understand why Willing & Morris would want to purchase so much flour, especially since the price was "the highest ever known," Pollard dismissed their actions as speculation.1 |
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Pollard had no way of knowing that Willing & Morris were not speculating; instead, they were trying to fulfill the stipulations of a business venture that would prove as lucrative as it was unusual. They were gathering flour for a market that normally was forbidden to them, the Spanish colony Puerto Rico. The concession to import flour directly into Puerto Rico was unprecedented since 1740, when Spain had created its own monopoly company, the Real Compañía de Comercio de la Havana. The Spanish actions effectively cut out the British South Sea Company that held the privilege to enter Spanish ports with slaves (Asiento) and anything they could smuggle.2 Spanish policy toward foreign ships had grown even more restrictive since 1763. Why, then, would Spanish officials enter into an arrangement with Willing & Morris when doing so was thoroughly inconsistent with metropolitan policy? And why did such a reversal of policy occur in 1773? |
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Environmental crisis helped create commercial connections among cities in the Hispanic Caribbean and Philadelphia, and Spain's need for provisions further compelled it to support the Americans, overtly and covertly, in their fight for independence. Current historiography argues that after the outbreak of war in 1776, Spain promoted commercial connections between Cuba and the representative assembly of the thirteen colonies, the Continental Congress.3 These connections were created for espionage purposes that would allow Spain to evaluate British strength, to gauge the likelihood of a British attack, and to determine whether or when to come to the rebellious colonies' aid. Taking an inherently political position, such studies universally argue that the desire to purchase foodstuffs was merely an excuse to further imperial goals and to establish espionage networks. |
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The question of the opening of the flour trade to Puerto Rico, however, as well as late-eighteenth-century historical processes, need to be revisited from an environmental perspective. Incorporating discoveries in science—specifically the correlation between El Niño events in the southern hemisphere and increased hurricane activity (La Niña) in the Caribbean—within an interdisciplinary theoretical framework allows scholars to seek the causes and consequences of historical events.4 Such a perspective turns the logic of the political explanation around, establishing that food shortages were not merely a rationale to engage in espionage but real and continuous, beginning with drought in 1770 and continuing through the deadly hurricane season of 1772, which had effects lasting to 1778. By 1772 famine threatened, and from Madrid to the American colonies, Spanish royal officials responded with emergency measures that, for all practical purposes, rescinded restrictions on commerce with foreigners. Though some areas recovered, bad weather and poor harvests continued in Cuba until 1776. Combined with crisis in Havana's traditional provisioning ground, Mexico, and demands placed on it by other areas under Spain's jurisdiction, such as Puerto Rico, the island grew even more dependent on provisions from the north. The opening of new markets in the foreign West Indies would eventually help North American merchants realize that they no longer needed Great Britain for their economic survival. |
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