Editing South Sea Company (section)

=== Slave trade under the Asiento ===
{{main|Asiento de Negros}}
[[File:1713 Asiento contract.png|thumb|Cover of the English translation of the Asiento contract signed by Britain and Spain in 1713 as part of the Utrecht treaty that ended the War of Spanish Succession. The contract granted exclusive rights to Britain to sell slaves in the Spanish Indies.]]
Under the [[Treaty of Tordesillas]], Spain was the only European power that could not establish factories in Africa to purchase slaves. The slaves for Spanish America were provided by companies that were granted exclusive rights to their trade. This monopoly contract was called the slave Asiento. Between 1701 and 1713 the Asiento contract was granted to France. In 1711 Britain had created the South Sea Company to reduce debt and to trade with Spanish America, but that commerce was illegal without a permit from Spain, and the only existing permit was the Asiento for the slave trade, so at the [[Treaty of Utrecht]] in 1713 Britain obtained the transfer of the Asiento contract from French to British hands for the next 30 years.

The board of directors was reluctant to take on the slave trade, which was not an object of the company and had shown little profitability when carried out by chartered companies, but they finally agreed on 26 March 1714. The Asiento set a sale quota of 4,800 units of slaves per year. An adult male slave counted as one unit; females and children counted as fractions of a unit. Initially the slaves were provided by the [[Royal African Company]].

The South Sea Company established slave reception factories at [[Cartagena, Colombia]], [[Veracruz, Veracruz|Veracruz]], Mexico, Panama, [[Portobelo, Colón|Portobello]], [[La Guaira]], [[Buenos Aires]], [[La Havana]] and [[Santiago de Cuba]], and slave deposits at [[Jamaica]] and [[Barbados]]. Despite problems with speculation, the South Sea Company was relatively successful at [[Atlantic slave trade|slave trading]] and meeting its quota (it was unusual for other, similarly chartered companies to fulfill their quotas). According to records compiled by David Eltis and others, during the course of 96 voyages in 25 years, the South Sea Company purchased 34,000 slaves, of whom 30,000 survived the voyage across the Atlantic.<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/58.1/eltis.html |title=History Cooperative – A Short History of Nearly Everything! |website=History Cooperative |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://archive.today/20091020132439/http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/wm/58.1/eltis.html |archive-date=2009-10-20}}</ref> (Thus about 11% of the slaves died on the voyage: a relatively low mortality rate for the [[Middle Passage]].<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.ehs.org.uk/ehs/conference2004/assets/paul.doc |title=The South Sea Company's slaving activities |first=Helen |last=Paul |url-status=dead |archive-url=https://archive.today/20121209151433/http://www.ehs.org.uk/ehs/conference2004/assets/paul.doc |archive-date=2012-12-09}}</ref>) The company persisted with the slave trade through two wars with Spain and the calamitous 1720 commercial [[Economic bubble|bubble]]. The company's slave trading peaked during 1725, five years after the bubble burst.<ref>Paul, H. J. (2010). ''The South Sea Bubble''.</ref>