SLAVE TRADE.

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The Assiento; or Contract For Allowing to the Subjects of Great Britain the Liberty of Importing Negroes into the Spanish America. First edition of a major development of the transatlantic slave trade, which helped establish Britain as the predominant slave-trading power. The Assiento was the monopoly granted by the Spanish to supply African slaves to their American colonies, which then stretched from California to Chile. After the War of the Spanish Succession, Spain granted the final Assiento to the British South Sea Company, which held it from 1713 to 1750. The terms of the slave trade granted by the Assiento were prohibitively restrictive, and the company never made a substantial profit from its American slave-trading: their real motive in pursuing it was to secure access to the wider American market.This copy is bound within a folio volume of Anglo-Spanish treaties from the Foreign Office Library, complete with the library's large engraved bookplate to the front pastedown. The volume covers over 550 years of Anglo-Spanish relations, from 1176 to 1739. The earliest treaties have been carefully extracted from later compendia, while the later treatises include a separate printing of the Treaty of Utrecht (also 1713).

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