This book examines the enormous riskiness of transatlantic trade in 18th century Spain and argues that many of the long-condemned commercial practices were vital accommodations to pervasive risk and uncertainty.

Jeremy Baskes is Professor of History and Director of Latin American Studies at Ohio Wesleyan University. He is the author of Indians, Merchants, and Markets: A Reinterpretation of the Repartimiento and Spanish-Indian Economic Relations in Late Colonial Oaxaca, 1750-1821 (Stanford, 2000).