Sustaining Empire

Reviewed by: Sustaining Empire: Venezuela’s Trade with the United States during the Age of Revolutions, 1797–1828 by Edward P. Pompeian Tyson Reeder Sustaining Empire: Venezuela’s Trade with the United States during the Age of Revolutions, 1797–1828. By Edward P. Pompeian. Studies in Early American Economy and Society from the Library Company of Philadelphia. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2022. 343 pages. Cloth, ebook. Generations of scholars have studied the connections between North and South America during the Age of Revolutions, long before Atlantic history became a major research field. In a historiography that spans more than a century, historians have left few themes untouched. They have analyzed diplomacy, politics, trade, and race. They have studied the intersections of those topics and have atomized them further into republicanism, imperialism, smuggling, neutrality, and the slave trade, for example.1 However the questions are sliced and diced, most works in this vast historiography fundamentally grapple with the relationship between revolutionary political economies and fracturing empires. In Sustaining Empire, Edward P. Pompeian suggests that despite the abundance of scholarship, historians can still find new ways to imagine that relationship. In an analysis of U.S. trade with Venezuela from 1797 to 1828, he argues that rather than undermining transatlantic European imperialism, as other historians have suggested, trade with neutral nations buttressed imperialism in its waning decades, giving it an extended final breath. When the Spanish Empire opened limited commerce with neutrals in 1797, it prompted U.S. merchants to shift to South American markets, which reinforced rather than eroded monarchy and imperialism in the Americas. Neutral trade acted, as he puts it, “as a preservative of the Spanish Empire” (13). [End Page 187] Pompeian rejects constructivist explanations of U.S. exchanges with Latin America. In international relations, constructivism assumes that leaders shape foreign policy objectives based on national ideologies rather than zero-sum calculations to acquire national power. Scholars skeptical of constructivism assume that fiscal and political might matter more than domestic values when rulers formulate their international ambitions.2 Pompeian extends that reasoning beyond the state, arguing that ideology has enjoyed an outsized role in the historiography of inter-American commercial relations. He recognizes that North Americans sympathized with South American revolutionaries but argues that those sympathies did not translate into ideologically tinged commercial networks that supported revolution and targeted empire. More often, U.S. commerce provided imperialism a lifeline. Sustaining Empire reveals that after Spanish authorities liberalized the empire’s commerce in 1797, U.S. merchants dove into Venezuelan markets, accepting government contracts and shoring up imperial finances. Some received crown-granted monopolies to trade in Spanish America and coveted Mexican specie—John Craig, Robert Oliver, and John Oliver most noteworthy among them. In 1806, when South American revolutionary Francisco de Miranda outfitted a small force in the United States in defiance of U.S. neutrality laws and led his followers on a doomed expedition to liberate Venezuela from Spanish rule, his mission threatened those contracts. In response, Craig and the Olivers cooperated with Spanish authorities to thwart Miranda’s plans and protect their trade. Those merchants were among the few who became wealthy from South American trade, but, as Pompeian notes, they did so by trading with the empire, not the revolutionaries. When it came to Miranda’s venture, Pompeian argues, U.S. merchants preferred the stability of Spanish imperialism over the prospect of independence in the Americas. He recognizes that Miranda did enjoy ideological sympathy in some U.S. newspapers and that some expected the revolutionary to open new republican markets to North Americans. Those voices belie the skepticism of the broader trading community, Pompeian demonstrates. He notes that in the thick of controversy, some U.S. traders even expressed hostility to South American independence. Pompeian shows that historians cannot separate Miranda’s failures to garner North American support from lucrative trade networks that tied eminent U.S. merchants to the Spanish Empire. Despite Pompeian’s lucid analysis, historians need not conclude that Miranda’s failures meant that U.S. merchants had no financial or ideological interest in Venezuelan independence. An unwillingness to invest in a cause does not mean that one has no economic interest

Ancient history · Diplomacy · Economic history · Empire · Historiography · Neutrality · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Historical Studies in Latin America · History · History and Politics in Latin America · Law · Politics and Society in Latin America