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Date: September 22, 2020 at 11:29:23 AM EDT
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Subject: H-Net Review [H-LatAm]:  Borucki on Freeman, 'A Silver River in a Silver World: Dutch Trade in the Rio de la Plata, 1648-1678'
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David Freeman.  A Silver River in a Silver World: Dutch Trade in the
Rio de la Plata, 1648-1678.  Cambridge Latin American Studies Series.
Cambridge  Cambridge University Press, 2020.  xiv + 226 pp.  $99.99
(cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-41749-5.

Reviewed by Alex Borucki (University of California, Irvine)
Published on H-LatAm (September, 2020)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz

The more we read about the Dutch, the more we realize that our
understanding of the Atlantic World will continue to have significant
gaps until we engage more deeply with their actions across the
Atlantic-Pacific axis of silver, slaves, and trade emerging in the
sixteenth century. Historians of Spanish America rarely read Dutch
primary sources, and historians of the Dutch Atlantic rarely read
Spanish records (though most commonly both of these groups read
English). David Freeman is one of the few historians who read these
three languages as well as Portuguese, all essential for examining
colonial Río de la Plata's Atlantic trade. In addition, Freeman is
one of the very few historians to have conducted archival research in
both the Netherlands and Buenos Aires, further supplemented in this
book with archival sources from France, Spain, and the United
Kingdom. Indeed, Freeman is the first to examine Spanish-language
notary registers inserted within Dutch-language files in the Dutch
notarial archives (only Zakarías Moutoukias has worked on the Dutch
records of the Río de la Plata). Freeman affirms the centrality of
archives in the historian's toolkit as that which sets this
profession apart from other scholars in the humanities and social
sciences. It takes a vocation and great patience to dig through these
repositories and master the knowledge to connect historical
characters and processes in seventeenth-century notarial records in
Spanish and Dutch. Freeman's work makes clear that historians who
fail to do this work may end up repeating commonplace impressions and
interpretations. This excellent book instead surprises the reader on
many fronts regarding Dutch-Spanish trading partnerships in Buenos
Aires, and it should be translated into Spanish for further
circulation in Latin America.

Freeman puts forward an important argument about how we envision
"contraband" as a form of local governance in the Spanish Americas.
As he puts it: "Dutch trade flowed through Buenos Aires both inward
and outward not because the governors were greedy and corrupt (which
ultimately increased risk and diminished opportunities), but because
they functioned within a system of governance that allowed them to
interpret royal will to best serve local and regional communities"
(p. 7). Indeed, seventeenth-century Spanish colonial authorities
rarely used the word _contrabando_ to refer to what we would call
contraband today. Instead, Freeman uses the terms "registered" and
"unregistered" to refer to the legal standing of the commodities
(including enslaved people) being exchanged in Buenos Aires and on
board of Dutch ships, in order to avoid modern conceptions of
contraband that could misinform our understanding of these
developments.

Dutch trade in the Río de la Plata depended on establishing reliable
connections with local governors and merchants and on a legal
architecture centered on notarized agreements between Spanish and
Dutch associates. The centrality of local authorities and
partnerships between Dutch traders living outside and inside Buenos
Aires and Spanish merchants and officials of Buenos Aires is
illustrated by the close relationship between the governor of Buenos
Aires, Pedro de Baygorri, and Dutch merchant Albert Jansen. Local
government and merchant communities mattered. In this Spanish-Dutch
partnership, the Buenos Aires-based Spanish merchants took on the
less risky role_, _while the Dutch took most of the risk. Spaniards
(some of mixed European and African ancestry) conducted commerce of
Dutch merchandise from Buenos Aires to Lima and Potosí, the source
of the silver lubricating this trade, and probably enjoyed
comparatively greater profits from this commerce than transatlantic
shippers, such as the Dutch, who were more exposed to losses and
uncertainty. A quantitative analysis of merchant accounts, if these
survive, could shed light on this issue. Most of these transactions
were notarized rather than being done secretly and informally in the
middle of the night . A structure of ink and paper, of legal
jurisdiction and rights on property, knit together Amsterdam and
Buenos Aires: "the notarial cultures in Amsterdam and Buenos Aires
bound these men even when their face-to-face contacts were rare" (p.
193). These contracts functioned to set in writing the legalization
of this unregistered merchandise and enslaved Africans, which allowed
a safe passage from Buenos Aires to the inland (and thus provided
safeguard against Spanish officers in such places as Córdoba,
Tucumán, and Mendoza, who could confiscate merchandise and slaves).
This world of ink and paper, combined with family links and
friendships, reduced the risk for the Dutch and their local Spanish
counterparts conducting cross-cultural trade in the Río de la Plata
and bridged different legal communities and cultures.

Events in Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World brought this trade to
an end about 1680. Freeman finds that specific prohibitions against
Dutch trade in Buenos Aires issued by Madrid, a greater number of
ships (_navíos de registro _and _navíos de aviso_) sent from Spain
to more frequently connect the Río de la Plata with the metropolis,
and the renewal of the Portuguese trade in the Río de la Plata after
1668 and prior to the Portuguese foundation of Colonia del Sacramento
in the shores opposite to Buenos Aires in 1680, all contributed to
this decline. The creation of the _audiencia_ (high court) of Buenos
Aires in 1663 with a new governor who intended to curtail
unregistered ships arriving in the context of the Spanish loss of
Jamaica (1655, with Spanish recognition in 1670) also influenced the
decline of Dutch trade in Buenos Aires. While the Third Anglo-Dutch
War (1672-74) that crippled Dutch shipping also had a role, Freeman
rightfully recognizes that Curaçao became the main Dutch center of
transshipping in the Americas in the 1660s, which led the Dutch
shipping presence in Buenos Aires to disappear by 1680.

Freeman addresses the Dutch presence in the Caribbean at the
beginning and at the end of his book. Yet we may wonder about the
commonalities and differences of Dutch trade in the Río de la Plata
in 1648-78, compared to Dutch involvement in New Granada and
Venezuela in those years. Detailed scrutiny of the Dutch in the
Caribbean could have helped qualify Freeman's assessment of Dutch
commerce in Buenos Aires. Freeman asserts that between 1654 and the
1660s "much of the [Dutch] direct trade with Spanish America went
through Buenos Aires" (p. 87). Evidence from the traffic of captives
shows that, in the decade of 1650, more captives arrived in Dutch
ships from Africa to the Spanish Caribbean and circum-Caribbean than
to the Río de la Plata (www.slavevoyages.org), before the decline of
Dutch trade in Buenos Aires in the 1660s. And this is without
counting the slave trade from Curaçao to the Spanish colonies.
Evidence from the Transatlantic Slave Trade Database suggests the
need for further clarification and qualification when comparing the
Dutch commerce of goods in the Spanish circum-Caribbean vis-à-vis
Buenos Aires. Notwithstanding, this is the best examination of the
Dutch trade in colonial Río de la Plata to date, and an example of
micro-analysis based of the itinerant life of Jansen in the
Netherlands, Spain, and the Río de la Plata, among other places.

Citation: Alex Borucki. Review of Freeman, David, _A Silver River in
a Silver World: Dutch Trade in the Rio de la Plata, 1648-1678_.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews. September, 2020.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=55407

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