The Assiento was a treaty between England and Spain by which the latter
granted the former a monopoly of the Spanish colonial slave-trade for
thirty years, and England engaged to supply the colonies within that
time with at least 144,000 slaves, at the rate of 4,800 per year.
England was also to advance Spain 200,000 crowns, and to pay a duty of
331/2 crowns for each slave imported. The kings of Spain and England were
each to receive one-fourth of the profits of the trade, and the Royal
African Company were authorized to import as many slaves as they wished
above the specified number in the first twenty-five years, and to sell
them, except in three ports, at any price they could get.
It is stated that, in the twenty years from 1713 to 1733, fifteen
thousand slaves were annually imported into America by the English, of
whom from one-third to one-half went to the Spanish colonies.[9] To the
company itself the venture proved a financial failure; for during the
years 1729-1750 Parliament assisted the Royal Company by annual grants
which amounted to L90,000,[10] and by 1739 Spain was a creditor to the
extent of L68,000, and threatened to suspend the treaty. The war
interrupted the carrying out of the contract, but the Peace of
Aix-la-Chapelle extended the limit by four years. Finally, October 5,
1750, this privilege was waived for a money consideration paid to
England; the Assiento was ended, and the Royal Company was bankrupt.
By the Statute 23 George II., chapter 31, the old company was dissolved
and a new "Company of Merchants trading to Africa" erected in its
stead.[11] Any merchant so desiring was allowed to engage in the trade
on payment of certain small duties, and such merchants formed a company
headed by nine directors. This marked the total abolition of monopoly in
the slave-trade, and was the form under which the trade was carried on
until after the American Revolution.
That the slave-trade was the very life of the colonies had, by 1700,
become an almost unquestioned axiom in British practical economics. The
colonists themselves declared slaves "the strength and sinews of this
western world,"[12] and the lack of them "the grand obstruction"[13]
here, as the settlements "cannot subsist without supplies of them."[14]
Thus, with merchants clamoring at home and planters abroad, it easily
became the settled policy of England to encourage the slave-trade. Then,
too, she readily argued that what was an economic n
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