The virtuous circle: slavery, cowhides, and commercial privileges of the Royal Company of the Philippines in the Rio de la Plata, 1788-1790

Abstract

The work intends to explain, from the commissioner of the Royal Company of the Philippines in the Río de la Plata, the trial of the trafficking of African convicts and the return of leather exports for the benefit of British partners and River Plate merchants. The local dispute over the collection of rights, the management of the benefits in the local distribution of slaves and the bankruptcy of the RCF, are contexts of a tax complaint that reveals the local intersection of three vertices of the problem: the tax dispute of privilege trade, the global business of slavery and the local cycle of direct traffic, as well as the export of cowhides as an expansion of the local livestock economy.