Contraband and Trade Rivalry in the Eighty Years’ War

As described in the first two chapters, Dutch–Spanish and Dutch–Portuguese trade relations in the early seventeenth century were determined to a large extent by the ebb and flow of battles, embargoes, and trade protection measures in effect during the Eighty Years’ War when the Dutch were at war with Habsburg Spain from 1568 to 1648 the time at the end of which the Dutch established hegemony in the Atlantic economy. Only during the Twelve Years’ Truce between the warring parties from 1609 to 1621 did some order of normalcy return to Iberian-Dutch commercial exchange but trade with Tierra Firme and the Spanish Caribbean islands remained off limits to Dutch merchants as Spanish trade and navigation rules and prohibitions remained in effect. For much of the time, trade rivalry between Habsburg Spain and the Dutch Republic continued unabated and sea battles occurred at regular intervals. At entry points to major rivers where the Spanish held sway over self-declared territorial rule, embargoes and blockades were imposed by both parties and thus trade and navigation was regularly obstructed. Along the coasts of Tierra Firme and the Caribbean islands Dutch merchants tried to undermine Spanish control and intrude upon Spanish territory with some resolve but often only temporarily. Brazil was a Portuguese possession but as Portugal was united with Spain from 1580 until 1640, Spanish territorial control and trade restrictions affected Brazil as well even though Portugal continued to trade on a semi-autonomous basis. In any event, all Dutch trade as well as trade conducted by Sephardic merchants resident in the Dutch Republic was illegal trade as far as the Spanish were concerned and therefore, typically, not recorded contractually. So, in effect, we have only incidental evidence of the Dutch–Spanish and Dutch–Portuguese tobacco trade from official freight records in the Notary Public records in the City Archive of Amsterdam for the early seventeenth century as discussed in the previous chapters.

Dutch mariners were trespassers and illegal merchants in the Iberian colonial world and in the traditional carrying trade with the Iberian Peninsula, including Portuguese ports, which were officially blocked from 1580 until the start of the Twelve Years’ Truce (1609–1621).

The words spoken by the Duke of St. Bungay, an elder Liberal Party patriarch, an endorsement of the candidacy of Plantagenet Palliser as a future chancellor of the exchequer, suggests that efficient economic management, like the maintenance of land or reputation, is a respected, if vaguely defined, skill. The discipline required by material management has potentially wider applications to policy. But his endorsement is no different from that of Scruby, the electoral agent (later, upwardly mobile as a clerk for Attorney Chaffanbrass in Phineas Redux), who urges tight management upon his client, George Vavasor, even while conceding that his candidate's advertising has been consigned to an agent with largely absentee supervision. Proper management involves delegation of authority, apparently, though the deputized are often invisible.

Although thought of as a thinly-veiled portrait of a younger Trollope's experience while at the General Post Office, The Three Clerks (1857) is much richer insofar as it portrays a politics (as the distribution of power) within government agencies charged with the regulation and maintenance of public services. The plot is driven initially by two young clerks, Harry Norman and Alaric Tudor, his close friend, apprenticed to Weights and Measures, and a third, cousin to Alaric, Charley Tudor, consigned to a less dignified branch, Internal Navigation (or “Navvies”). The class system is pervasive, even in institutions dedicating to servicing the public at large. There, Tudor enjoys a somewhat louche after-hours sociality with an assortment of barmaids and dance hall companions. In another of Trollope's interregnums, there are at least three possible (albeit conflicting) avenues to membership in the civil service. Political access to the governing class, enabling future bureaucrats to “hang on round the outer corners of the State's temple” (TTC 81), would appear to have a number of competing avenues. Friendship with or descent from nobility; a newly instituted system of rigorous examination by committee to determine entry and staged promotion; and finally—and most idealistically—knowledge acquired by direct experience would all qualify. Yet, a retired seaman on pension at half-pay, the crusty Captain Cuttwater represents the hopelessness of experience ever qualifying one for a position at, say, Admiralty, that might usefully make room for his vast knowledge of seafaring.

Introduction

According to Simon Schama in The Embarrassment of Riches (1987): “… The smell of the Dutch Republic was the smell of tobacco.” Describing the Dutch Golden Age, he referred to accounts by visitors to the Netherlands who were struck by the omnipresence of tobacco smoke in inns and towing barges and the common sight of men and women smoking in public. I am not sure if this was a general situation at the time, but it was certainly true that in depictions of hearth and home in Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, tobacco pipes and smoking were prominent features. Tobacco consumption in Europe in the seventeenth century experienced a remarkable growth and provided substantial profits for merchants engaged in the tobacco trade. Yet, we know very little about its very beginnings and, in fact, you could say that compared to the sugar trade, the tobacco trade is terra incognita. In part, this is because the tobacco trade was contraband trade in the early seventeenth century when Portuguese and Sephardic merchants became engaged in exchange with the coastal regions of South America and the Caribbean islands under Spanish and Portuguese rule where Dutch merchants including Amsterdam’s Sephardic merchants were considered “interlopers”; foreign merchants with no license to trade. Furthermore, they were considered enemy merchants as the Dutch Republic was at war with Habsburg Spain during the Eighty Years’ War (1568–1648). Whereas we know the broad outline of various aspects of the tobacco contraband trade in the later part of the seventeenth century, we know very little about why and when Amsterdam became the European—or you might say—the global marketplace for tobacco or where tobacco was first traded for profit. Here, we need to delve into the history of Amsterdam as a staple market and the role Portuguese and Sephardic merchants played in the Spanish and Portuguese colonial trade. In the sixteenth century, Antwerp in Flanders (the Southern Netherlands) had been the main market place for colonial goods exchanged in Northwestern Europe, but toward the end of the century, Amsterdam replaced Antwerp in that role.

To address a specific kind of play in Trollope's Barsetshire Chronicles and the Palliser Novels is to encounter serious risks, not unlike those characters who commit to “gaming the system” in such radically different ways. If public opinion functions like traditional characters in a novel (as an imaginary, assembled body constructed by author, other characters, critics and readers), then we might logically expect development through time in the model of the Bildungsroman. A shared ideological body would mature into self-awareness, finding a secure place in the culture from which it initially seemed exiled. If public opinion, however, functions only as negation of the conventional body or part of some imaginary public sphere purged of individual interest, then its operations upon a system—its role in generating the consequential—would be of primary importance. It is, in a number of ramifications, “everybody” and “nobody” as we have seen. As part of an imaginary body, it would be defined in part by an account of inward investments of faith that enact it: Who came to believe in it and under what conditions? Who would hope to realize a return, be it professional, financial, comfort or public esteem, that might pay dividends in the future? To what extent are those who invest in public opinion really speculating on it, as opposed to pursuing or purchasing it, so as to be sufficiently nimble to vacate a position? The literary critic enjoys no exemption.

As a concept, play carries a considerable surplus of cultural baggage and literary history. We might, for example, commence with Huizinga's work and move through that of Roger Caillois to the various accounts of the performative “knights of misrule” in the Renaissance theater. Although all of these may “come into play,” Trollope rather uses the concept differently. It becomes synonymous with insincerity or the shirking of hard work and responsibility, hence duplicating the idleness of the privileged as they play social and conversational games that seem opposite to work. It is neither chance nor simulation, as Caillois suggested, nor is it invariably competitive.

Political, Economic, and Geographical Context

In A Nation Upon the Ocean Sea, Studnicki-Gizbert (2007) shows us repeated evidence of the role Portuguese New Christian merchants and their foreign partners played in smuggling activities and in bribing officials. As members of the Portuguese Nation they promoted and conducted “free trade” and brought the wrought upon them by cultivating an elaborate system of working within the system and accumulating and circulating wealth outside the realm. Operating within and outside the Spanish system they extended partnerships with merchants in Northern Europe and the Mediterranean region and with the various merchant communities in the Spanish American colonies. In the 1620s, prominent members of the Portuguese Nation formed a key group in the efforts to install Count-Duke of Olivares as Prime Minister under King Philip IV of Spain who promoted the imperial commonwealth of Spain and Portugal. Within the realm the Canary islands and Hispaniola were integral parts of the inter-locking system of trade which merchants of the Portuguese Nation promoted and served. The islands were points of contact where cargo was transferred and where foreign merchants engaged in contraband trade thrived.

In a World on the Move, Russell-Wood (1992) reminds us of the connections, interactions, and movement of goods and people in the early modern Atlantic world. Perhaps more than any place Hispaniola exemplified that characterization and Portuguese merchants were the most prominent examples. Commercial success depended on regular and sustained personal contact and circulation of goods via the transatlantic networks of merchants and mariners which provided a steady stream of information about supply of products, market prices, routes to sail, and people to stay in contact with. The breadth of such merchant networks expanded significantly in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries as Spain’s imperial reach widened and engaged Portuguese merchants and bankers after the unification of 1580. However, the role of Portuguese merchants in the Atlantic trade had been evident for some time before the unification as evidence from the slave trade and sugar trade demonstrates. Furthermore, slaving and smuggling often went hand in hand and Portuguese merchants were omnipresent where slaves were in demand, plantations emerged, and export of staple goods became the life blood of the colonial administration.

The ease with which both men and women develop an appetite for politics—as did Trollope himself—transforms how we think of public opinion and its component suppliers. A porously defined public comes to sit at previously exclusive or at least potentially monopolized metaphoric tables (with indifferent guardians), be it catering to ambition, enhanced social intercourse or reciprocal affection. This taste initially appears as “neo-Liberal,” perhaps akin to Trollope's self-identification insofar as it is potentially more socially inclusive. The attraction of favorable public opinion is a relatively universal taste across all classes and political parties.

Adam Kotsko has argued that neoliberalism is a form of political theology, albeit often exemplifying predatory inclusion. In both the theological and political novels of Trollope there is an emphasis on freedom and open markets, though not necessarily as an expression of choice or human creativity and dignity. Such open access by the public is rather an apparatus for reducing responsibility in favor of shared blameworthiness. Systemic failures are so dissolved as to be granular and individually unidentifiable, as the duke's eldest son, Lord Silverbridge, does under the duress of a public sympathetic with the foibles of the less advantaged, like Major Tifto in The Duke's Children. The dream of an inclusive discursive “commons” might be a preamble to Lawyer Chaffanbrass's judges in Phineas Redux, habitually handing down compromised verdicts by splitting the middle and dissolving differences, the better to avoid offending sensibilities.

This waiver of sovereignty (as firm judgment) yields to a general sugarcoating—a strategic neutralization of blame—which universally attracts while disguising what lies beneath. One might think of it as an adulteration of the sovereignty of private judgment by pressures of an imaginary collective voice. The negotiation of the loss of these sovereignties which had previously defined ideological, social and even narrative identity recalls Adorno's “constellation” with its pressures to “think about nonthinking.” Surely, this is one definition of public opinion, rhetorically touched upon by Trollope: “it should be a matter bound by our opinion rather than your own” (DC 171, ital. added) or perhaps more succinctly as a part of a negative dialectic “a thing not to be thought of which must be thought of” (DC 172).