Seville

city · earth

The improbable capital of the Atlantic trade: a river port some eighty kilometres up the Guadalquivir from the sea, chosen over the coastal harbours precisely because a river gives a crown control that an open roadstead does not. Every ship of the carrera de Indias had to clear through Seville, every cargo was registered there, and the monopoly gave the city the wealth that built its cathedral tower into a skyline and drew merchants, bankers and printers from across Europe. It also created the archive: the registers, licences, cargo manifests, lawsuits and correspondence generated by an administered monopoly are now the Archivo General de Indias, which is why the economic history of the Spanish Atlantic can be written in far more detail than that of most contemporary trades. Silting of the river and the growing size of ships eventually made the upriver passage impractical and the monopoly was transferred to Cádiz in the eighteenth century.