Biography:

Claire Jones is a PhD candidate in the Department of History. Her research sits at the intersection of early modern British, Portuguese, and Spanish history, and is interested in Atlantic trade, merchant networks and business practices, migration and imperial borders, political economy, and international law. 

Project Title: Inter-Imperial Trade and the Formation of an Anglo-Iberian Atlantic, 1660-1720

Abstract:

My dissertation examines early modern British commercial encroachment on Spain and Portugal’s Atlantic empires. Between 1660 and 1720, a variety of actors—merchants, artisans, consuls, diplomats, and officials—became increasingly preoccupied with the negotiation, implementation, and maintenance (or subversion) of legal privileges that allowed British merchants to practice a kind of informal empire in the Atlantic world and limited the ability of the Spanish and Portuguese Crowns to manage their imperial economies. As successive generations of British traders abroad called upon their home government for protection in their interactions with foreign authorities, securing more and better formal rights to trade in the Portuguese and particularly in the Spanish empire became—in addition to a major political objective—a key issue in Britain’s public politics in the early eighteenth century. In contrast to studies that center illicit or intra-imperial trade regimes, I argue that legal inter-imperial trade is crucial to understanding the political and commercial dynamics of the early modern Atlantic world. In particular, it allowed for the formation of an entangled Anglo-Iberian Atlantic in which British merchants and policymakers depended on their ability to formally extract trans-imperial access from their Spanish and Portuguese counterparts.