Seville and Manila: Illegal trade,corruption,and the phenomenon of trust in the Spanish Empire

Abstract

At the beginning of the early modern period, the two port cities of Seville and Manila became bottlenecks in the rich inter-oceanic trade connecting Europe, America and Asia. To control this trade, the Spanish Crown tightly regulated all traffic between these continents and levied heavy taxes on all merchandise. The stricter the regulations became, the more the merchants tried to outwit them through contraband trading and bribery. Within this setting, it was often impossible for merchants to bring cases of non-compliance of agreements to the official courts. Hence, the question arises, how were merchants, lacking an institution in charge of penalizing dishonest commercial conduct, able to find the trust in partners to establish trans-oceanic trading networks? This note argues that the answer lies in the common ground that united certain groups of shared mental models, which enabled the merchants to trust in the social coercive power of these groups and consequently to trust their partners overseas.