The Iberian Transpacific Circuit between Calcutta and California, 1825–1845

Convention imagines imperialism on the West Coast of the Americas as emanating from Europe. Yet in 1825, a route existed between Calcutta and Mexico, financed by Anglo Basque commercial agents from Calcutta. The trade between India and Mexico brings to the fore that California (and West Mexico generally) was a transpacific commercial borderland. Silver from New Spain had served as a key currency of the global economy since the sixteenth century, and when the Spanish Empire unraveled between 1810 and 1821, shortages of silver in Asia emerged. As Ander Permanyer has shown, the Royal Philippine Company persisted until 1834 with its main office in Calcutta by affiliating with the Scot James Matheson in Canton. This article describes how two men in the Royal Philippine Company network (Juan Nepomuceno Machado de Souza and Francisco Xavier Espeleta de Yrisarri) migrated across the Pacific to build up Mazatlán as a port to restore the flow of Mexican silver for textiles of British India and China. With Mexico’s expulsion of Spaniards in 1827, the Basque Espeleta continued to Bordeaux, from where he managed Spain’s Almaden mercury mine with his brother-in-law from Sonora’s silver fields. The Portuguese Machado de Souza remained in Mazatlán, from where he arranged to supply California with Philippine goods. As another impact of this trade network, with secularization of missions in 1834, Machado and other Iberian silver traders on the Gulf of California vied to gain control of ex-mission lands in California. Archives in Britain and California reveal that Iberian merchants had a hand in the economic development of the North American Pacific and suggest that California and Arizona were linked with Sonora and Sinaloa into one commercial region which looked to the British in Asia for stability.