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There were many variations - not
mutually exclusive - on how the trade was undertaken:
a) The merchant purchased one or two
crops of oranges and lemons produced by the small farmer. This
latter person was usually a tenant farmer who received an
advance payment for his crop as a way of guaranteeing the
sale. The buyer undertook to pick and box the fruit, the price
per box varying according to the variety and the conditions of
trade. It is interesting that from the middle of the century,
specifically from the time of the Seven Years War, a clause
was introduced that the contract was void if a ban on trade
with Spain were to be imposed. Families such as Butler, White
(Álvarez Pantoja 2000: 31), Macores, Keating, Cahill, Beck,
and the English families Rice, Carpinter, Summerhayes and
Darwin are good examples. Doña Ana Marsellaque, wife of Don
Guillermo Darwin, had at her death in 1735 some 74,577 reales
‘given to various farmers on account for the oranges and
lemons of the coming harvest as costed in the agreement...’
(AHPSe, leg. 8.742 f. 218). Darwin himself bought the produce
of ten small farms in Alcalá de Guadaíra in the 1770s. But
the best example is the company which Don Miguel Coleman
formed with Don Diego de Guardo in 1752. The Irishman invested
500 pesos escudos (75,000 reales),
the equivalent of the capital he had advanced for oranges and
sour lemons to several farmers and owners of 18 groves on the
outskirts of the city and elsewhere. For his part, De Guardo
contributed 3,500 pesos, in which was included the value of 70
kegs of Flanders butter (AHPSe, leg. 3790, f. 610).
b)
The merchant offered himself as guarantor for the farmer, both
in the rental and in any possible sale, the latter having to
undertake to sell to him alone the produce of oranges and
lemons; this happened in the case of Don Guillermo Darwin in
1752 in a farm in Sombrerero, in Puebla del Río.
c)
Sometimes the merchant himself leased the farm. As well as
bestowing on him the role of producer, the farm offered him a
place of recreation as well as refuge from harsh weather or
frequent epidemics. There was often an agreement with the
farmer that he could have the vegetable produce grown on the
farm, while the leaseholder would keep the fruit yielded by
the trees. Thus Don Guillermo Carpinter declared in his will
of 1738 that he held the lease on a farm in Tablada where the
farmer had to give him, without Carpinter incurring any costs
whatsoever, all fruit produced until he paid off a debt of
16,000 reales.
d)
The purchase of orchards. In general it has been considered
that investment in real estate by the Andalusian bourgeoisie
– a class which as we have seen was of differing origins
and, it might be supposed, diverse mentalities - was
symptomatic of the deflection of capital from more lucrative
‘bourgeois’ activities. In other words it could be taken
as a clear case of ‘the betrayal of the bourgeoisie’, even
though these very Andalusians were of quite recent origins, be
they natives, Irish, English, French, Flemish, Italians,
Germans and so on. It is advisable to take other factors into
account, such as the need to own real estate, precisely
because of their origins as foreigners, in order to gain
access to trade with America (we will not get further into
this aspect here). This was especially relevant since trade
with England became financially risky because of the continual
wars of the time. In addition to all of these, of course,
there was the simple drive to expand businesses.
These
investments focused on highly valued products, at a time and
in a century when citrus fruits were beginning to be used by
the British Navy to combat scurvy. The first attempt was
carried out by Lind in 1747, and Cook applied the lesson in
his expeditions, but it was not till 1795 that the British
navy adopted citrus for general use. The Flemish and the
French, who were above all exporters of oil, invested in olive
plantations, while the Irish for the same reason turned their
attention to the fruit groves, although they did make some
minor investments in other crops. They invested much capital
in their fruit groves. They planted trees, dug wells, and
built houses. In other words the effect of their activities
was not only economically beneficial to themselves, but it
left a rich legacy to the society where the Irishmen had
chosen to live.
A
difficult alliance: Patricio O’Conry and Juana Keating
A
case in point permits us to illustrate what has been said
hitherto. Patricio O’Conry, a well-known member of the
British colony in Seville, came from the town of Dungarvan, County
Waterford. His businesses included the import of butter and
textiles, including silk. He also bought citrus fruit for
export, as well as corn to be supplied to the army. Apart from
this, we know that he sent large numbers of books to the
region around what is now Northern Colombia and Panamá, as
well as to Buenos Aires (five and fifteen crates of books
respectively, to the value of 8,024 and 52,154 silver reales).
He invested in the publishing business, ordering the printing
of 1,500 copies of Antonio de Nebrija’s Vocabulario
(AHPSe, leg. 5197, f.467).
His
strong social position had led him to marry Doña Juana
Keating, a native of Waterford and member of an Irish family
that was prominent in France (Jahan 2003: 149-163). He was a
friend of the Irish merchant Miguel Coleman, also a native of
Dungarvan, and was Coleman’s executor as well as owing him a
significant amount. His daughter Doña Elena O’Conry had
married perhaps the most prominent member of the British
community in the 1740s and 1750s, a man who was one of the
most sought after widowers in Seville society, Don Guillermo
Darwin, a native of London. This was in keeping with a
strategy practised by merchant families, who employed marriage
to their advantage for the development of their businesses and
to ensure family stability. These marriages suited both sides
- an enterprising son-in-law who had some commercial
experience benefited from relationships within his wife’s
family, while he made his own contribution to expanding and/or
consolidating the business. This is the so-called rule by son-in-law of which we find examples throughout the
century.
This
practice offered a certain ‘preference for unions between
families that were settled in the same territory (...)
because as a strategy it permitted the survival of the
merchant house as well as social reproduction...’ (Fernández
Pérez 1997: 166). Darwin was never actually made a business
partner, undoubtedly on account of the hard times experienced
by O'Conry after the marriage of his daughter Elena. Thanks to
these relationships, Elena’s brother, Juan, took charge of
the finances of the Englishman Guillermo Carpinter, whose
executor was the same Guillermo Darwin. A relative of his
wife, Diego Keating, was at the same time Darwin’s factor or
business manager in Lisbon, from whence Darwin exported the
larger part of the merchandise he sent to England.
However,
in 1743, illness prevented Patricio from continuing with his
enterprises and obliged his wife to take charge of them. Until
his death in 1745 it appears that things went reasonably well,
although he began to experience ever greater shortfalls.
O’Conry’s main debts consisted of 1,000 pesos escudos for
the value of different types of silk that a number of people
in the locality of Yecla (Murcia) had failed to pay him,
together with various accounts, to the value of 70,334 reales,
for corn he had sold to the army in the years 1739 and 1740.
The payment of this was to be so slow that his son-in-law Don
Guillermo Darwin inherited the balance of the debt, 12,374 reales.
As late as 1772, this had not been fully discharged (AHPSe,
leg. 8.807). In 1742, his son Juan O’Conry married Doňa
Micaela de Tapia, neither of whom brought anything of material
value to the marriage. The very fact that Juan was his
compatriot’s accountant while at the same time being his
competitor gives us an idea of the difficult times that the
family experienced in the 1740s.
Juana
Keating’s great success occurred in 1744 when she won a law
suit against a man who had acted as guarantor for the people
in Yecla. She reached an agreement with him in which she would
recover half the 1,000 pesos owed to her, to be paid in yearly
instalments of 100 pesos. The debt-ridden couple O’Conry and
Keating obtained a mortgage on two farms of pomegranate,
orange and lemon trees. He would pay in boxes of oranges which
Juana undertook to export. The rest of the money was to be
collected directly from a guarantor in Yecla, for which
purpose the couple in 1744 issued power of attorney to Don
Juan Patricio O’Ronan, a resident of Alzira (Valencia)
(AHPSe, leg. 3784 f. 268).
But
Juana did not seek to persevere with her husband’s
businesses, and instead began to liquidate the real estate
attached to the household. That same year, 1744, she sold to a
neighbour in Triana five aranzadas
(about two hectares) of Mollar vines for 4,000 reales.
She also sought to get an extension on the rental of a farm of
oranges and lemons that the couple had rented out to the
monastery of the Holy Spirit Order (AHPSe, leg. 3784 f. 404 y
411).
One year later, in 1745, Patricio O’Conry died. He left an inheritance
of 1,000 pesos escudos, several pieces of jewellery and silver
plate, domestic utensils and sundry items of furniture. He
also left a vegetable farm in Triana (La Viñuela) and
miscellaneous livestock, together with the products of four
other vegetable gardens he had rented, two in Puebla del Río,
one in Triana and one other very near to the monastery of La
Cartuja. The remainder consisted of approximately 206,895 reales
owed to him but whose payment was less than certain (AHPSe,
leg. 5203, f.74). |
