Global trafficking and local bankruptcies: Anglo-Spanish slave trade in the Rio de la Plata, 1786–1790

ABSTRACT This research focuses on the operations of the Royal Company of the Philippines in the global market, in particular on the slave trade between Africa and Spanish America, as a way to examine the local dimensions of global trade. It identifies the causes and consequences of a failed venture that, despite its failure, opened a new cycle in the Río de la Plata slave trade and its place in the global economy of the late eighteenth century.