The Temptations of Trade

"Finucane presents a pathbreaking study that highlights the convoluted entanglements that tied the fates of the Spanish and British Empires together. By examining the ways that company agents pursued personal gain in places where metropolitan authority was weakest, Finucane concludes that European empires were shaped by the liminal individuals who traversed boundaries at the imperial margins."—Journal of American Studies

"The Temptations of Trade is the kind of engaging work that will interest historians of the British Empire, the Atlantic World, and the eighteenth-century Caribbean. It could also be fruitfully used in undergraduate and graduate seminars, particularly because of the remarkable stories it offers of individuals involved in the South Sea Company’s commercial operations in Spanish territory."—The Historian

"Finucane brings to bear significant research on company agents who brokered a difficult commerce while enriching themselves. Her work dramatizes the on-the-ground experiences of imperial loyalty and rivalry through their stories. It also greatly adds to previous scholarship on the South Sea Company, which has mainly focused on its presence in Britain . . . The Temptations of Trade provides a fascinating and granular work on transimperial contact and the formation of Atlantic communities."—Latin American Research Review

"In The Temptations of Trade, Adrian Finucane puts a human face on the Caribbean's imperial and commercial struggles by bringing to life the stories of the South Sea Company's agents in Spanish America. In the process, she answers a number of important questions about the nature of eighteenth-century trade and illustrates how British and Spanish empires, despite their unrelenting rivalry, depended on one another."—April Hatfield, Texas A&M University