Adam Smith, in the classic An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, asserted that human beings have a propensity to "truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another."¹ He went on to argue that "man has almost constant occasion for the help of his brethren, and it is in vain for him to expect it from their benevolence only."² In this view of the world, then, trading developed because individual people knewãalmost innatelyãwhat they wanted, as well as where and how to acquire it. By definition, any exchange transaction required at least two different parties. Each and every human must therefore have understood, even subconsciously, that he or she in some measure relied upon others.³ If a man needed the "help of his brethren," as Smith maintained, he clearly recognized that as an individual he actually had brethren. Identifying those brethren is an altogether separate project; their qualities surely varied from one locale and time period to another. It is, nevertheless, clear that policies and events during the years prior to theWealth of Nations' 1776 publication date demonstrably shaped Smith's understanding of any community's composition and organization.

          For those of us several centuries removed from Smith, the simplest way to grasp his logic is to explore the various vineyards in which he toiled. A "North Briton" by birth, Adam Smith professed Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow; he also served as the University's Rector. Like many of his fellow intellectuals, he traveled widely on the European Continent; Smith also lived in London for several years. It was here that he began to examine at close distance the influence of national politics and policies upon economic affairs.⁴ What matters most of all for present purposes, however, is that much of Adam Smith's economic and political criticisms derived from extensive and detailed observations of the various states and empires that border the Atlantic Ocean.⁵ The Wealth of Nations reveals that its author found much with which to quibble as he considered the region's pre-1776 economic policies.

          Smith noticed that various governments effectively restrained the human propensity "to truck, barter, and exchange one thing for another." Using regulations, prohibitions, and tools such as tariffs, governments impeded those who lived under their protection from getting what they wanted when they wanted it; consumers thus encountered artificially engineered choices. In this way, the mercantile economic system effectively blocked the human propensity to exchange through engaging one's "brethren." Smith maintained that "the interest of the consumer is almost constantly sacrificed to that of the producer; and it [mercantilism] seems to consider production, and not consumption, as the ultimate end of all industry and commerce."⁶ His implication, of course, was that humans exchange in order to consume; if they could not reasonably utilize a product, or if they disliked it, then transactions involving that item would decline. Similarly, an eighteenth-century population would not excessively consume a product because to do so would lead to luxury and moral decay, which would have been anathema to any follower of the Scottish Enlightenment.⁷ The consumption process, as a result, naturally regulated itself.

          Eighteenth-century European governments nonetheless passed any number of laws that restricted individuals from being easily able to access their innate propensity to consume through exchange. The British government, for example, required that all colonial produce first be carried to a British port in a British-owned ship, even if such produce was finally destined to a market in France or Germany. Spanish law forbade all foreign ships from entering any of its colonial ports, even if Spain could not satisfy all of its colonists' consumer demands. France, Spain, and Britain all licensed only selected ports in their home markets to trade with the colonies. Import duties for colonial produce were high, effectively raising prices for European consumers.⁸  Policies such as these effectively denied individual consumers, on both sides of the Atlantic, not just choice but also the ability to seek and engage those "brethren" who could most help them. As Smith pointed out, "our merchants and manufacturers have been by far the principal architects" of these restrictions and regulations.⁹ Government preferred one group of residents within its control to another; it had therefore interfered in the natural process of consumer-driven barter and exchange.

          If individual humans have a propensity to trade with each other, and if each consumer also has "brethren," then the degree to which an individual's "brethren" could legitimately interfere through regulating consumer transactions must be raised. Answering this question proves complicated within an Atlantic world seascape. After all, many communities or groups of "brethren" existed simultaneously. Adam Smith moreover provides only limited guidance in sorting out a response. Observing European countries, he concluded "the great commerce of every civilized society, is that carried on between the inhabitants of the town and those of the country. It consists in the exchange of rude for manufactured produce, either immediately, or by the intervention of money, or of some sort of paper that represents money."¹⁰ Trade then ought to benefit both residents of the town and the country; each could obtain what they otherwise lacked. By extending this principle into the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, it becomes possible to assert that the "great commerce" took place between (European) towns and (American or African) countries. Manufactured "produce" came from the former while the "rude" produce originated across an ocean. The town's traders and manufacturers, in this analogy, effectively controlled not just the ways in which the country's residents could obtain desired consumables but also the ways in which they could dispose of their own produce. Those in the country clearly toiled under disadvantageous terms; their human propensities had been effectively circumscribed.

          Nor was the situation of all of the town's residents completely rosy. Most of them also had their human propensity to "truck, barter, and exchange" regulated. Certain consumer products were either unavailable or prohibitively expensive. "Rude Produce" tended only to come from one placeãeven if local tastes preferred that from another. As a result, metropolitan consumers paid higher prices than they needed to do; this effectively inhibited their ability to consume all that which they desired. And because they were spending more money on consuming things than they would naturally have done had they lived without the kinds of regulations that were in place, European consumers had less money available to them for investment in improvement and innovation. Mercantilist regulation thus had a deleterious effect on customers everywhere. In Smith's mind, "[t]he monopoly of the colony tradeÄlike all the other mean and malignant expedients of the mercantile system, depresses the industry of all other countries, but chiefly that of the colonies, without in the least increasing, but on the contrary diminishing, that of the country in whose favour it is established."¹¹ The economic system in operation across the Atlantic world, thus, undermined the ability of consumers to create their own trading communities, as they were naturally inclined to do.

          It is, nevertheless, outside this paper's scope to provide a complete analysis of the ways in which capital might have been better served absent the eighteenth-century mercantilist world's myriad of regulations. Instead, this essay will examine the ways in which consumersãindividually and collectivelyãcircumvented those policies that they believed deleterious to their needs. To return to the Smithian argument, the human propensity towards consumer-driven exchange took precedence over efforts to restrict it. Moreover, individual consumers clearly identified their "brethren" in ways that were at odds with definitions promulgated in statutes and policies. As a result, the white residents of the Atlantic world effectively rewrote the rules under which they supposedly labored. Perhaps most importantly, they got away with transgressing the system far more frequently than either contemporary officials cared to acknowledge or than those who now study only statutes could possibly conceive.

          No place within eighteenth-century Atlantic America reveals the human propensity to "truck, barter, and exchange" as it faced off against restrictions more clearly than does the Caribbean. Because the major European colonial powers each controlled multiple territories within this seascape, nationally diverse regional residents regularly encountered each other. French, Dutch, British, and Spanish subjects all lived under different laws, usually created and imposed from across a vast sea. Every island colony had a consumer population that had been created through migrationãforced or otherwise. After discounting the requisite number of calories, enslaved Africans had needs that diverged from, for example, those of British Caribbean planters. In turn, it is possible to identify discreet desires from any recognizable groupãfrom French merchants in Basse Terre to small farmers in Cuba to Scottish doctors in Kingston.  Individuals from each group could meet their needs through trade and exchange.¹² Of course, their home governments legally prevented them from doing so. In the Caribbean's case, however, geography provided residents with an advantage that they would not have had if they had been located closer to the European continent. Aided by their physical distance, white islanders readily and easily transgressed those policies and statutes that impeded their ability to transact exchanges with one another. And in no place can these regional interactions be seen more clearly than in colonial ports.

          The Atlantic World's ports stood at the locus of the exchange process. In Europe, those in the country exchanged their produce and manufactured goods through their ports for that which came from the Americas.¹³ In the Caribbean, ports symbolically represented the place where local country produce could be exchanged for town (meaning European) manufactures. Consumers on both sides of the Atlantic therefore directly engaged each other in their port towns. Nevertheless, Adam Smith asserted that those mercantile restrictions that governed the ports' operations inevitably failed to benefit consumers. As Smith himself said, "it cannot be very difficult to determine who have been the contrivers of this whole mercantile system; not the consumersÄwhose interest has been entirely neglected, but rather the producers, whose interest has been so carefully attended to."¹⁴ Had those participating in the mercantile economy adhered diligently to the laws under which they lived, Smith would certainly have been right. But the fact of the matter is that colonists, across the social and economic spectrum, and from one empire to the next systematically found ways to evade restrictions so that they might "truck, barter, and exchange" with "brethren" of their own choosing. Just as mercantilist policy limited interactions between residents of different imperial systems, so did it create a climate for individuals and groups to ignore any policies that poorly suited their goals. Caribbean ports, as a result, became places in which the local populations effectively "trucked" in legal interpretations as well as in consumer goods and produce. In this way, consumer needs could be more easily satisfied.

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          The eighteenth-century Caribbean effectively had three distinct kinds of ports. The first group, about which most is known, consisted of officially recognized towns. Each one had a Customs House or, at least, had officials stationed there whose responsibilities had them inspecting ships that entered and cleared the harbor and collecting the appropriate amount of import and export duties. The names of such places will be well known, even to those who have never been to the West Indies: Bridgetown, Cap FranÐais, Havana. It is easy to imagine how the law could be circumvented here when it got in the way of an exchange; indeed, widespread fraud and corruption can easily be documented. The second kind of Caribbean port was the officially licensed "free port". Designed specifically to draw in residents from neighboring islands under the control of a different imperial power, these ports were, at least in a certain sense, legally sanctioned centers of illegal commerce In almost all cases for which records still exist, one or both of the trading parties violated commercial policies of either the home or the host island. Some examples of such places at various times in the eighteenth century include Kingston, St. John's Grenada, Martinique, St. Eustatius.¹⁵ Of course, the Customs Establishment remained a presence in these places, but normally high rates of duties were dramatically reduced or eliminated altogether in an effort to promote commerce. The region's third kind of port, and the one which interests us here, was perhaps the most common. These ports were neither officially monitored nor legally recognized. Yet they grew up organically, meaning that residents of these towns (and their surrounding regions) naturally engaged with residents of other towns (and regions) in order to get what they needed. They fulfilled, in other words, their Smithian propensities to "truck, barter, and exchange," almost completely outside of the gaze of imperial officials. The principal example of this port to be considered here is Monte Christi.

          Most Atlantic historians have probably never heard of Monte Christi. Even so, its significance as a port where human propensities demonstrably led to mercantilist policy "revision" should not be underestimated. Located on Hispaniola's north coast, astride the line separating the Island's French and Spanish colonies, Spanish-controlled Monte Christi illustrated the ways in which colonial residents from all of the American empires rewrote those imperial statutes that served the European town at the expense of the colonial country. These Caribbean acts of non-compliance were, in many respects, more effective in furthering the interests of colonial consumers than those asserted in North America in the decades just before the American Revolution. Just as British North Americans confrontationally and aggressively challenged those policies with which they disagreed, those residing in Monte Christi, along with their trading partners, remained superficially supportive of problematic regulations as they actively and quietly undermined them. Residents of this kind of port city assumed control of their own consumption, as Smith believed natural. They did not rely upon European governments to sanction or prohibit their behavior. As a result, they rewrote law through transgressing it.

          Most scholars would consider Monte Christi little more than a minor settlement, given that its usual population consisted of only about one hundred poor Spanish subjects.¹⁶ During its heyday as a center for contraband commerce in the mid- to late eighteenth century, several hundred ships annually called into its harbor. Many of these vessels came from British North America, where European-imposed laws forbid trade with either the French or the Spanish.¹⁷ Still others came from islands elsewhere in the Caribbean. Because almost all sailings to Monte Christi by ships other than Spanish-licensed vessels violated Spanish lawãif not also those of another stateãthere is scarce documentation for voyages to the port. Having said that, however, enough ships faced interdiction efforts to leave historians an ample supply of data on the mechanisms by which the port operated. While we still know nothing about most trips there, we do have enough data to surmise how the residents of Hispaniola and other places in the Atlantic world used Monte Christi to satisfy their needs as consumers, despite the imperial restrictions placed upon them by those in the metropolitan towns.

          Monte Christi's "Lieutenant Governor" wrote to William Shirley, Governor of the British Bahamas, in March of 1760.¹⁸ The Spanish official claimed that an English Privateer, based in New Providence (now Nassau), illegally captured five Spanish vessels.¹⁹ The Lieutenant Governor claimed that he had licensed the five ships to sail from the port of Monte Christi only to the neighboring French colony of St. Domingue. They were to return loaded with goods that were required "for the Encouragement of the new Settlement under [Monte Christi's] Government."²⁰ British privateers would thus have had no reason to stop, let alone capture, these ships.²¹ Though Britain and France were at war, these were, at least ostensibly, neutral Spanish ships. French shipping, of course, would have been subject to British arrest and seizure. So long as Spain remained non-belligerent, however, its vessels should have been left alone. Governor Shirley thus needed to learn why the Spanish ships had been seized. He ordered an investigation.

          The five ships that had been arrested (and the return of which the Spanish now sought) had already been brought into a British Court of Admiralty, in Nassau, for condemnation, sale of the cargo, and division of the proceeds. Before any division of the prize could take place, a question needed to be answered. What were the ships' nationalities? If they were French ships, they were lawful wartime prizes; the ships and their contents could be divided between the privateer who captured them and the British government. On the other hand, if the ships belonged to Spanish subjects, restitution would obviously be requiredãas Spain and Britain remained at peace. Governor Shirley asked the Admiralty Court for copies of all pertinent documents and depositions.

          The Court complied with the Governor's request. Shirley, who had recently arrived in Nassau after having been Governor of Massachusetts, then glimpsed that which was well known to most regional populations.²² Shirley learned of Monte Christi's important role in facilitating extralegal exchange by evading territorial, and therefore legal, boundaries. The Bahamian Governor remained uncharacteristically diplomatic while standing his ground.²³ He asserted that Monte Christi had manufactured its own problem. Shirley maintained that the English privateers acted appropriately. Thus, Governor Shirley "reminded" his Spanish counterpart what the captured licenses (or passports), which the Spanish official had in fact signed, actually mandated. The first ship [Nuestra Se¿ora de Alta Gracia] had permission to "carry the Effects permitted [by Spanish law], and to bring some eatables and provisions for the use of Monte Christi, and for no other port." [emphasis mine] If the Ship's master violated his instructions then any cargo aboard was to be "answerable."²⁴ The second ship had been instructed to bring "the fruits and eatables of the Earth from the French colonies to Monte Christi for the Encouragement of the New Settlement There."²⁵ A third ship [Nuestra Se¿ora de Socorro] was licensed "to carry such Goods as are permitted to the French Colonies, and to bring from thence some provisions for the City of Monte Christi, and no other place."²⁶ The remaining two ships had similar charges.

          This meant that altogether a total of five ocean-going vessels received simultaneous permission to bring back produce from the French colony to be consumed in the Spanish port; no mention was ever made of shipping the imported French produce to other Spanish settlements on Hispaniola. ²⁷   But the Port's consumers could not possibly have consumed all of the imported "eatables and provisions," given their small number. William Shirley therefore concluded that his Spanish counterpart must have known that the Spanish ships clearly took part in illegal transactions.²⁸ Shirley diplomatically chose to assign the blame to the ships' captainsãwho had not strictly followed their Governor's instructions. The holds of these captured ships contained no food at all. The cargo instead consisted of "Sugars, Molasses, Rum, Indigo, and Coffee, the produce and manufacture of the French settlements." They were "without any of the usual and necessary papers for proving them to be the property of Spaniards."²⁹ The British Admiralty Judge therefore could condemn the cargoes as French, making them legal prizes of war.

          But what of the ships themselves? Governor Shirley admonished his Spanish counterpart that though enough evidence existed to order the ships condemned and sold, he would see that they were released. What evidence did Shirley have against the ships? He again used the passports that the Spanish Governor had approved. The ships did not adhere to instructions; they both had on board products that were not "eatables," such as sugar and they had far more of it than Monte Christi's small population could consume. Shirley claimed that "a most unwarrantable and prejudicial Commerce to the Interests of Great Britain is carry'd out with the French of Hispaniola thro' the Channel of Monte Christi, whereby the French are frequently furnished with great Quantities of Money, Contraband, and other Goods, in exchange for their Sugars and the other produce and manufactures of their Settlements."³⁰  The Spanish ships had thus given aid and comfort to Britain's French enemies, thereby violating principles of neutrality. But because the ships were Spanish-owned, he allowed them to be returned to Monte Christi with a warning that such behavior was unacceptable. The ships were once again placed in the service of Monte Christi's few consumers and, through them, their regional "brethren".

          English ships (from Britain, from the North American colonies, or from neighboring Caribbean islands), along with those from other European nations, regularly docked in Monte Christi's harbor, paid the Spanish governor cash, and were then given a Spanish license to enter the port. (Non-Spanish ships were not allowed in Spanish colonies; Monte Christi's Governor broke the law when he issued these passes.) Next, the visiting ships unloaded their foreign cargoes directly onto Spanish-licensed ships, like those captured by the privateers. The goods being transferred would be counted and then the foreign traders would pay the Spanish Governor another fee, usually a piece-of-eight, for every hogshead of molasses or other product that was destined to the French on the frontier's other side. In exchange for this consideration, the Governor overlooked the Spanish residents who loaded and unloaded foreign cargoes in the harbor at Monte Christi, and who shipped them aboard Spanish boats to foreign portsãand then did the same on the return voyages. They also paid their Governor a fee for this service.³¹

          The British and other foreign traders received Spanish money and French luxury goods in return, as well as French sugars, molasses, and other tropical produceãsuch as coffee. These crops could then enter the European marketplace as British produce; they usually remained on board the ships and then were clandestinely added to the final tallies at a pre-export inspection in the last American port that they visited before heading to Europe. Tropical products generally fetched higher prices in protected British markets than they did in protected French ones. ³² And because the foreigners paid the French in Saint Domingue in advance, consumers there benefited doubly. Not only did they get cash before they shipped their produce, they also received a higher price than they would have done by following legal channels. In fact, the Port of Monte Christiãand many others like itãallowed consumers across the Atlantic world to escape from policies that injured their consumer propensities.

          In diplomatic language, Governor Shirley let his Monte Christian counterpart know that the British had noted Monte Christi's procedures. Rather than accuse the Lieutenant Governor, Shirley asserted that the Spanish crews found means "to protect their [illicit] French Cargoes with Spanish papers" by using "some misrepresentation or Imposition (as I doubt not it must be) to obtain Certificates from you, Sir, that the same were puchas'd by Subjects of Spain, residing at Monte Christi."³³ Governor Shirley claimed to have seen documentation that a British ship had a cargo of Spanish sugar, purchased at Monte Christi, aboard it. Shirley knew for a fact, he said, that the sugar was French and had been loaded at St. Christopher's. "[T]here is a very large Quantity of the pernicious Trade," Shirley maintained, "carry'd on at Monte Christi." ³⁴ In this way, the Bahamian Governor revealed the ways in which an individual's propensity to "truck, barter, and exchange" led him to violate European-created rules that stood in his way. Mercantilist policy, without directly saying so, attempted to control consumer demand by using tariffs and prohibitions, and yet those very policies and requirements themselves became subjugated to consumer demand in the Americas, as evidenced by the elaborate systems of illicit trade through ports like Monte Christi.

          If tiny Monte Christi had a sizable amount of organized illicit commercial activity, it should come as no surprise that much bigger and more populous ports, such as Kingston in Jamaica, regularly participated in illegal activities. The larger ports, which had more officials stationed in them, as a result faced more consistent scrutiny. Nevertheless, as in the smaller places, consumers and their merchant suppliers found ways to challenge both the laws that impeded their abilities to "truck, barter, and exchange," and any consistently-made effort to enforce the problematic statutes. Just as Monte Christi was an active port that used passive tactics to circumvent the law, the larger ports introduced more confrontational and assertive tactics to beat back any official challenges to their illegal behavior. European merchants induced the various governments to promulgate policies that favored commercial people. The benefits to commercial people, however, were not uniform. In many cases, eighteenth-century Caribbean merchants found restrictions placed upon them to have deleterious consequences. As a result, they broke ranks with their European counterparts. Choosing to follow their own propensities to "truck, barter, and exchange," they forged alliances with new groups of "brethren," who were technically forbidden to them.

          With Britain and France still at war in July 1761, British Rear Admiral Holmes wrote to the Secretary of the Admiralty in London from his Jamaica post. Holmes reported that he had recently and clearly offended several Jamaica merchants.³⁵ He had done so by acting to suppress the illegal trade that Jamaica's residents carried on with the Spanish and French on Hispaniola. This trade almost certainly took place through Monte Christi. A number of the island's residents attempted to get Admiral Holmes to relax his opposition to the trade. In his report, Holmes claimed that he was "soothed, caressed, and flattered, but all to no purpose."³⁶ Because they could not eliminate his opposition in this manner, several prominent Jamaican merchants decided to work behind his back. Holmes believed that these merchants made clandestine deals with French ships to capture or destroy British naval ships. Though creating a naval nuisance, this policy too failed to meet with great success. The British Navy hadãquite physicallyãgotten in the way of "exchanging one thing for another."

          Desperate to end their own government's harassment of their contraband commerce, several Kingston merchants clamored for a meeting of merchant "brethren."³⁷ In this meeting, they discussed constructing the "proper Measures for the 'better Protection of the Trade of this colony'." When Admiral Holmes learned of this plan of events, he became extremely agitated. The implication for Holmes, of course, was that the British Navy could not adequately defend and protect the Island's trade from foreign aggression. He resented the public participation in the meeting, and vowed to continue his efforts to stop illegal trade with places like Monte Christi. Holmes asserted that the Jamaican merchants were, as he called them, a "Motley Group of Defamators."³⁸

          After they held their meeting, a number of the most powerful attendees went to Admiral Holmes's house and presented him with "their insolent, false, and abusive letter." Holmes did not reply to their letter. Holmes instead inferred that these wealthy men had become so vocal because they were engaged in a clandestine venture. Indeed, he tries to explain a recent court case in just this way. The ship Guadeloup had recently been condemned in Jamaica's Admiralty Court. Like the five Monte Christi ships that ended up in the Bahamian Admiralty Court a year before, this ship "had a false Spanish Pass, was navigated by Spaniards, and [was] taken, coming from the [French] Ports in Hispaniola, with French Produce."³⁹ Holmes believed that the ship and its cargo did not belong either to the Spanish, as claimed, or to the French, as the evidence indicated. He believed instead that the ship's cargo, if not the vessel itself, belonged to several Jamaica merchantsãwho happened to be participants in the Kingston meeting. These merchants, Holmes maintained, illegally imported French sugar into Jamaica by claiming that the ship used to carry it from St. Domingue to Jamaica had actually originated in a distant Jamaican portãand therefore was not subject to import duties. In this way, the island's merchants increased their rate of return from that which they could have expected by trading only their own produce.  Admiral Holmes, an honest official, was outraged at such a scheme.

          But we know better than to be outraged. The scheme developed because economic conditions, as indicated by commercial rules and regulations, did not allow individuals to utilize their propensity for exchange. As a result, they could not consume at anything like an optimum level (which would have varied widely from one place to the next). To remedy this situation, they resorted to getting help from their "brethren." They created trading communities that both allowed them the ability to acquire goods in order to consume them while simultaneously challenging the restrictions that served to hold them back.

          The Law was the largest casualty in all of this. The Port towns, with their easy access to individuals from different economies and societies, made such challenges relatively simple. American ports challenged European ones, at least metaphorically, for control of the ways in which consumption took place in Atlantic America. When all is said and done, the colonial ports allowed legal transgressions. From the European perspective, this could be seen as a "country" rebellion against the city. And from the American perspective, these conflicts demonstrate that the "country" itselfãas represented in this paper by the Caribbeanãno longer saw the interests of its consumers as secondary to those in the town, or European metropole. Rather, Caribbean residents understood that their ports provided them as much, or more, opportunity than did those in Europe. Increasingly, as the eighteenth century wore on, the Caribbean white population circumvented the laws by which they did not benefit; rarely did they even consider an active resistance of the kind that happened in North America in 1776. The mercantilism of the Atlantic world would come to an end because behaviors of the kind described in this paper ate away at its very foundation and proved it to be unsustainable in the long run. The propensity to consume trumped any laws put in place to regulate it.