 Great. Welcome back, everybody. I hope everyone had a good break. We're about to enter in now to the middle of the sessions. It's my great pleasure to introduce my friend and colleague, Dr. Anna Brinkman Schwartz, and Anna Stundey at Columbia University as an undergraduate, and then she made that terrible mistake of coming to King's College London, falling under the spell of maritime history there with Andrew Lambert. And after getting your doctorate, she did postdoctoral work at the University of Warwick. She's joined the Defense Studies Department in 2020, and her current research project is focusing on the development of strategic thinking in international law during the Seven Years War. I have an article just out on coffee houses and strategy, a heady mix for anybody who likes to hang around Starbucks or Costa. But today she's going to talk about some of the things that have to do with international law as imperial invasion, Anglo-Spanish anti-slave trade, court sovereignty, and the balance of power from 1817 to 1835. So, Anna, looking forward to it. Great. Thanks, Greg. I'm just going to share my screen so I can put my PowerPoint up. And hopefully you're seeing my PowerPoint at this time. So you may, someone may have noticed that my title on the PowerPoint is slightly different from my title in the program. I ended up shortening the years that I would address today, mostly because I'm still waiting for a cache of documents to be sent to me from the archives in Spain. But as anyone who may have worked in those archives, it's a bit like waiting for Godot. So I'm seven months running and still waiting. So I'm just going to talk about the research that I've done up to 1822 in this case. This project is really a new area for me. I mostly stay in the late 18th century, but I really got interested in slave trade courts as they relate really to prize law and the research I did in prize law in the late 18th century. And so I really just sort of ran with it. So this is kind of a test drive for me of my newest research. And so I'm just going to delve into it. So one of Britain's foreign policy objectives during the post Napoleonic period was the establishment of bilateral treaties with European maritime powers that would declare the slave trade to be unlawful. It would provide a legal framework for its suppression. Having declared the slave trade illegal for British subjects and within British territories in 1807, the endeavor undertaken by the British government to achieve an Atlantic wide cessation can be seen as an attempt to impose British maritime legal norms and ideas on to other countries and to provide a means for their adoption as international law. The means of imposition and enforcement were bilateral treaties and the creation of the courts of mixed commissions, otherwise known as anti slave trade courts. Just such a treaty was signed with Spain in September of 1817 and included an article that instituted a court of mixed commissions in Havana for the purpose of adjudicating slave trade cases and condemning ships that were in violation of the treaty. The court at Havana, as well as other courts of mixed commission set up by British European treaties during the 19th century, served as a slow legal invasion that could be used by Britain to increase its influence in the Atlantic world. British maritime hegemony and dominance of maritime law during times of war had grown over the course of the long 18th centuries European wars. But in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars and a general European wide war weariness, the anti slave trade treaties and courts could be used to extend this influence into periods of peace. This invasion, however, was resisted by the colonial government and society of Cuba. Given the balance of power between Britain, Spain and Cuba in this period, the legal invasion could not be fully arrested. Through deceit, faint ignorance and arguments over Spanish sovereignty, it could be effectively delayed and slowed. It is probably important to note here that the United States does in fact play a very critical role in this entire negotiation and period of history. Mostly due to time constraints, I'm not going to go into the role of the US, but happy to discuss that in questions. This paper will focus on the very start of this legal invasion. And through the example of a particular Spanish slave ship, the jealous will seek to show how the invasion was stymied by the Spanish and how few options Britain had in terms of enforcement during a time of peace and precarious power relationships in Europe and the Americas. At the time of the signing of the Anglo-Spanish slave trade treaty in September of 1817, the Spanish state was trying to hold together its splintering American colonies while also struggling between constitutional and absolute monarchies on the Iberian Peninsula. Ferdinand VII had been brought back to the Spanish throne in 1814 after the ousting of Napoleon's forces, but found that it was no simple task to revoke the Constitution of 1812 and reestablish absolute authority. On the other side of the Atlantic, New Spain or what is now Mexico had begun an armed revolt in 1810 that continued until independence was won in 1821. Chile had also begun a revolt in 1810 and achieved independence in 1818. By 1816, Buenos Aires and her provincial allies declared their independence. Not long after the treaty was signed, Nugra Nada declared independence in 1819 and the following year a liberal revolt in Spain forced Ferdinand VII to become a constitutional monarch once more. The state of war between Britain and Spain before 1808 was detrimental to transatlantic trade due to the British Navy's successful harassment of Spanish and neutral shipping. When France invaded Spain in 1808, a six year peninsula war did nothing to help trade or the Spanish economy. By the time Ferdinand had reestablished it as his absolute monarchy, the state was bankrupt. The role of Cuba at this time in Spain's history was that of loyal and prosperous colony. Without the disruption of an independence movement and benefiting from the influx of French planters and their slaves who arrived fleeing the Saint-Domingue slave revolt of 1791, the Cuban economy prospered during the Napoleonic wars. Sugar production on the island was dependent on slave labor, so it was not surprising that the Cubans were not in favor of any Spanish anti-slave trade policy. The contrast between the bankruptcy of the Spanish state and the prosperity of Cuba meant that it was in the interest of the government to maintain good political relations with its colony. Nonetheless, it is likely that the dire situation of Spain's revolting colonies and the fiscal problems on the peninsula led the Spanish government to agree to the financially beneficial treaty. As compensation for banning the trade, the treaty granted a payment of £400,000 sterling from the British government to the Spanish. The Havana and Sierra Leone courts of mixed commissions were set up on paper in the Anglo-Spanish anti-slave trade treaty of 1817. The opening article of the treaty declared that as of the 30th of May 1820, the slave trade would be banned throughout all of the Spanish dominions and on any part of the coast of Africa. However, a grace period of five months would be granted to allow for the completion of slave trade voyages that had lawfully cleared out before the 30th of May 1820. Between the 22nd of November of 1817 and May 1820, slaving voyages that shipped out from Spanish ports to any port in Africa north of the equator were declared illegal. Ships that cleared the port before the 22nd of November were granted a six-month grace period starting on the 22nd to complete the voyage. The punishment accorded by Spain for a violation of these new laws was the confiscation of the ship and cargo by the Royal Treasury and the condemnation of the purchaser, captain, master and pilot to quote, 10 years' transportation to the Philippines. In order for slave ships to be condemned at Havana or Sierra Leone, they first had to be captured at sea whilst engaging in illegal slaving activity. The task of capturing slave ships was left almost entirely to the British Navy as the undisputed maritime hegemon. More than 95% of all captures were made by the British Navy. The rules which governed British warships in their anti-slave trade duties were laid out in the 1817 treaty and originated in British prize law and prize courts. Captured slave ships were treated as prizes and the British crew received prize money if the slave ship was condemned by a court of mixed commission. Once a Spanish slave ship was captured, it was usually taken to either the court of mixed commission in Havana or Sierra Leone. Spanish cooperation became crucial at this latter stage. The laws governing how and under what circumstances a slave ship could be captured were fairly specific and rooted in the treaties of neutrality that Britain had used in its 18th century wars to limit neutral commerce. As per the 1817 treaty, Spanish and British merchant vessels could only be detained and visited if they were reasonably suspected of carrying enslaved Africans on board. What constituted reasonable suspicion was left to the discretion of the commanding officers. If upon boarding a merchant ship slaves were found on board, the ship could be brought into a court of mixed commissions for adjudication. There needed to be proof that the slaves found on board the ship were being trafficked from the coast of Africa. The language of the treaty stressed several times over that only in the case of slaves actually being found on board could a vessel be brought in and condemned. Evidence of the ship being fitted out for a slave voyage was not enough to deem it engaged in illegal activity, although this would be remedied in subsequent treaties. If enslaved Africans were found on board, they were to remain untouched and could not be disembarked until they arrived at the place of adjudication. So that should the ship not be condemned by the courts, the proprietors would suffer a minimal monetary loss that could be easily repaired. It's important to stress here, I think that this treaty was designed to protect the commercial interests of slave traders and not the welfare of lives of enslaved people. There is a branch of literature that looks to these slave trade courts and anti slave trade treaties as a foundational branch of international humanitarian laws. But I very much dispute that and I do not think that that is a particularly useful way of looking at these early anti slave trade courts. So the functions of the courts were also clearly laid out and follow the same principles as those applied to neutral vessels brought before prize courts in times of war. The purpose of the courts was to, quote, decide upon the legality of the detention of such slave vessels as the ships of war of both nations shall detain in pursuance of the said treaty. This is a critical point. The primary purpose of the court was not about ensuring that the slave trade ended. It was about making sure that British sea power was not used to abuse Spanish sovereignty in the form of Spanish slave ships. Condemning a ship for illegal slaving was a secondary purpose. The question of illegal seizures was important in terms of keeping the British Navy from becoming a belligerent force and abusing the right of search granted by the treaty. It was, in other words, a way of limiting Britain's legal invasion. Now the court technically only had jurisdiction over ships that were brought into Havana specifically for the purpose of being tried at the mixed commission. British authorities had no jurisdiction over Cuban or Spanish domestic laws and had no mechanism to compel the vast portion of illegal slave ships to be brought before the court. Even though any slave ship entering Cuba was technically in violation of the treaty. Slave ships that entered Cuba without having been captured at sea could only be tried and condemned if Spanish officials deemed them illegal and brought them before the court. British maritime dominance, while useful for catching slave ships during the Atlantic crossing, was useless as a policing force to make the Spanish authorities adhere to the treaty because any use of force or belligerent act inside Spanish ports would have been a violation of Spanish sovereignty. In the case of slave ships that arrived in Cuba without having first been captured, the Spanish and British officials found themselves at odds as to whether the treaty applied to them. Debates arose and much correspondence was sent back and forth between Havana and the two involved governments. As a consequence of these debates and over many decades, the treaties were altered and added to in order to produce a more comprehensive legal structure to deal with such situations. However, the Spanish and British officials were not always in agreement as to how this legal structure could or should be improved, and they employed all manner of tactics to delay the incursion of British driven anti slave trade laws. The British Foreign Office, which administered and controlled the courts of mixed commission, had no direct contact with the Spanish authorities in Cuba. The Foreign Office communicated only with the British officials in Havana and with Madrid. The officials in Madrid were almost always, in theory, acquiescent to British wishes, but often failed to communicate with Cuba on matters that had been agreed with Britain. This failure of communication was generally intentional on the part of officials in Madrid due to the Spanish government's fear of losing Cuba's colonial profits and Cuba's loyalty to Spain. Although orders were sent to Cuba, they were generally ignored or reinterpreted by the Cuban officials with no punitive consequences inflicted by the government in Madrid. So now I'm going to move on to the case study at hand of the slave ship the Jealous. So on the 6th of November 1820, seven days after the expiration of the five month grace period granted for the completion of all slaving voyages. The Spanish commissioners at Havana became aware that a Spanish slave ship, the Jealous, had arrived in the port of Havana. The ship was allowed to land a cargo of 178 enslaved Africans. The ship was in clear violation of the treaty, but had not been captured at sea by any warship. The Spanish authorities chose not to bring the Jealous before the court of mixed commission. The ship was therefore outside the influence or jurisdiction of the court of mixed commission and subject only to Spanish domestic law. The British commissary at the time of sorry the British commissary judge at the time Henry Kilby responded to the news of the Jealous by confronting the governor. On the 8th of November 1820, Kilby wrote to Lord Castle Ray, Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, recounting his interaction with the Cuban officials and asking for advice. He had approached the governor with a disclaimer that though the situation involving the Jealous was outside of his duty, it was, quote, incumbent upon me under all the circumstances of the case to call his Excellencies attention to the arrival of the Jealous, end quote. He reminded the governor of the 1817 treaty and the decree issued by the Spanish government that provided for the punishment of such ships and persons as engaged in the slave trade after the termination of the grace period. The governor's response was described as very quote, full and friendly, end quote, a discussion in which he pointed out that five months was just not enough for a voyage from Cuba to the coast of Africa south of the equator. This being the case and since the Spanish government allowed ships to sail up until the 30th of May 1820. It was expected in good faith that as long as the ships could prove that they had not delayed unnecessarily in their voyage, they would be admitted into port after the expiration of the grace period on the 30th of October. Now, Kilby legally was unable to do anything about the governor's interpretation of Spanish domestic law and the treaty. He politely pointed out to him, however, that his interpretation of the Spanish government's decree made any mention of the five month grace period superfluous, and that the governor was considering the grace period to be of unlimited length. The governor responded that the grace period would be considered to be 10 months, but that he could not say that the penalties mentioned in the decree would be imposed even after the expiration of the grace period. At a loss of what to do with these explanations from the governor, Kilby concluded his letter to the foreign office by saying that he did what he hoped was his duty as regarded the spirit of the treaty by bringing the jealous to the attention of the Cuban governor. Now, Castle Ray eventually responded to Kilby's letter about the jealous 16th of February 1821. It was a very short letter, and it simply stated his approval of how the commissioner had conducted himself in the affair. It included a copy of a letter written on the same date by Castle Ray to Sir Henry Wellesley, the ambassador to Spain. Now, Castle Ray described in brief the situation in Havana regarding the jealous and did not spare harsh words for the conduct of the Spanish government in a matter of the now illegal slave trade. He wrote that it was expected that the Spanish government would give orders for the treaty to be properly adhered to. Castle Ray went no further than telling the government in Madrid that they must send orders to their unruly colony. At no point was there any threat of force or threat of imposing sanctions upon Spain or Cuba should the authorities in Havana continue to disregard the treaty. On the 27th of August 1821, the Spanish government sent a letter to its commissioners at the mixed court of Sierra Leone, requiring that they adhere to all articles of the 1817 treaty with specific reference to the events surrounding the jealous. There was no explanation of what would happen should the orders not be carried out. A similar order does not appear to have been sent to Havana. Now, whether the government in Madrid did send orders to Havana about the treaty, the slave trade continued to carry on in the Spanish dominions pretty much unchecked. So in 1821, at least 22 ships are recorded as having landed slaves in Cuba or other Spanish American territories. This is likely by no means a complete number. Seven of these ships were Spanish slave vessels, all of which were in violation of the treaty and could have been condemned had Cuban officials engaged in the spirit of the law. None of them were actually condemned. Anglospanish negotiations over the five month grace period itself ran along very similar unproductive lines as those over the jealous. On the 12th of June 1820, five months before the jealous arrived in Havana, Don Santiago Usos, the Spanish envoy in London, in charge of treaty negotiation, wrote to Don Nevaristo Perez de Castro, the Spanish Secretary of State. He informed the secretary that he had spoken to Castle Ray about extending the five month grace period in order to prevent financial harm coming to the merchants of Cuba and Puerto Rico. The Castle Ray, having run out of patience at this point with Spanish attempts to alter the treaty, responded that since the treaty had been approved by Parliament, there was nothing that he or the government could do to alter it at this point. Castle wrote to the Spanish envoy in London on the 27th of July 1820 that there was an amiable way for both governments to get what they desired. If the British government gave orders to British warships not to detain any Spanish slave ships which might be carrying papers that marked them as having embarked on their voyage before May 1820, then there would be no need to alter the treaty. Parliament and the law would remain unchallenged. Cuban slave traders would have enough time to complete only their last slaving voyages, which were begun before the trade technically became illegal. This would keep the Spanish adhering to the principle of slowly ending the slave trade, which had been the intention of the lenient terms of the 1817 treaty in the first place. Now, it is possible that Castle Ray never responded to the Spanish Secretary's request or that the envoy chose, quite wisely to be honest, not to mention it to Castle Ray. Either way, no such instructions were given to British warships, and Castro does not seem to have received a response. However, though that was the end of Castro's idea to prolong the Cuban slave trade, it is important to note the origin of his duplicitous request. On the 7th of March 1820, the members of the Consulado in Havana wrote to Castro about the adverse effects of the slave trade treaty should the five month grace period be enforced. The solution that the Consulado proposed was to have the British government give orders to its warships not to stop any Spanish slave ship which left on its slaving voyages before May 1820. Castro and his political masters in Madrid were simply trying to avoid antagonizing either Cuban officials or the British government. So did this legal invasion work? Ultimately, as with many of these sort of historical questions, the answer is, well, kind of. As the decades progressed, Spanish and Cuban officials continued to use tactics like those exhibited in the case of the jealous and the five month grace period. However, slow advances were made, including a new treaty in 1835 that expanded the circumstances under which slave ships could be captured at sea, negotiations with the United States over the right of search bore fruit in the 1840s, and the Brazilian and Portuguese slave trade was eventually eradicated through more belligerent means. However, the legal invasion was characterized by its slowness and by the reluctance of Spanish participants. British attempts to expand their maritime legal hegemony through a mechanism based on wartime treaties and prize law was ultimately not very effective without the backdrop of an actual war. So very much. That is the end of my paper. I'll stop sharing my screen. Thank you. Thank you very much. Anna, let me go check here and make sure I got something in the chat from Lucas. You got a question, Lucas. Yes. Are you ready, Anna? Yeah. He says, important new project. Stop moving. Really interesting presentation. Short question. What happened when the enslaved persons on board after the slave ships were condemned as prize at the courts of mixed commission? What would have been the procedure? So this is a very interesting question and I admit it is slightly outside of my area of expertise, but Britain sort of took a couple different approaches. One was to create a sort of what came to be called an apprentice program, often in other colonies nearby like Jamaica, which to be honest was effectively usually just another form of slavery. Another sort of tactic that they took this mostly with the courts in Africa was to either, again, indenture them or apprentice them there, or often create territories of freed Africans and try to give them some sort of sovereign rule over this new land. But again, it tended to be very poorly administered. The instances of recapture and re-enslavement were very high. And to me, it really demonstrates just even further how much this is not really the origin of humanitarian law, fundamentally, I would say. Did you want anything else, Lucas, on that? No, thank you. No, you're good. All right, we'll go into the Q&A bit from Alan James. Great stuff as usual. You see most vociferous in your assault on the notion of humanitarian motives for the treaty in courts, yet it seems more damaging to the reputation of Britain as a great naval power, or even as a quote, slow legal invaded unquote. So who's the main target of your research? Well, fundamentally, the main target of this research is really to bring the origins of prize law and neutrality into discussions about anti-slave trade courts and anti-slave trade treaties. Not a lot of work has been done on that. And it is a very different branch of scholarship from, say, the abolitionist influences on anti-slave trade politics, anti-slave trade agitation in both Britain, the United States, and all the colonies. You know, that is its own important branch of research and influence. But from the point of view of sort of maritime power and legal history, I think what is most interesting here is, is that you have this post-Napoleonic period where Britain wants to exploit the maritime hegemony that it has just spent 100 years or more accruing. But it actually turns out it's quite difficult to do that in peacetime because you're supposed to not be very belligerent. And there's so little appetite for war in Europe and Britain itself is quite cognizant of the fragile state of peace in Europe that I think it tries to find legal means of solidifying this maritime hegemony, a way of sort of legitimizing it without having to turn to belligerence. And the only framework that Britain has for that type of action is neutrality and the price courts. And because it's had to do that with neutral nations throughout the course of the wars. So I just sort of found that combination very compelling and interesting. In terms of people, you sort of the main actors here are the usual suspects for this kind of thing. You know, the Secretary of War, the Secretary of State, all the ambassadors, the colonial governments, and the correspondence is rich, right? I mean, it's all there both at Q in the British Library and in the colonial archives and the Spanish archives. So that's that sort of motivation. So I hope that answers that, Alan. Are you good there, Alan? Yep. Okay. Excellent. In the Q&A and in the chat, Lauren's got a couple questions. So we'll go one read and then we'll go lie for the second one, just to mix it up. So the first question from Lauren is, I was surprised to hear you say that the Court of Mixed Commission could sentence slave traders to transportation. Did I hear that correctly? Most mixed commissions had no criminal jurisdiction. Have you seen judgments? So no, you're quite right. So the Court of Mixed Commission had absolutely no criminal jurisdiction whatsoever. The domestic Spanish law for being convicted as an illegal slaver was to be sentenced to transportation. I haven't actually seen evidence of that ever being carried out. This is similar in the same way that the, you know, in British domestic law, there were punishments of imprisonment for illegal slave trading, but the courts of mixed commission were purely about property and about the ability to condemn property and condemn enslaved Africans as prize. So it really is reliant on that sort of prize law mechanism fundamentally. Great. Lauren, do you want to come on and ask a question that you had for the second question for Anna? Sure. Thanks. And thanks for that answer about that question. I think it's important, the fact that they had no criminal jurisdiction is an important factor in the argument that they were not acting in humanitarian capacity as reformers. So my second question is, you know, I'm not so sure that I'm convinced about the wisdom of calling this a legal invasion. Because it is happening across actually not just the Atlantic world, but across the Indian Ocean and Pacific worlds too. Why not call it what I prefer to call it? So I mean, I'm kind of want to ask about that, which is, you know, Lisa Ford and I discussed this in the same period, this phenomenon and refer to it really as a kind of patchy prohibition regime or really a patchy attempt to create international order, but a regime that is very uneven and, you know, has lots of gaps and holes. And whenever I talk about it that way other people who study contemporary international order say, yeah, that's what an international order is full of gaps and holes, it's very patchy. And I don't see the benefit but I just like you to say a few more words about it and I'm, I don't want to express too much skepticism because I think you have a good reason for it but what what's the gain of calling it illegal invasion versus viewing it as this bigger transnational project. So fundamentally, I mean, I actually think you're absolutely right and I do very much by the argument in your book with Lisa Ford, but what put me on to this was kind of happenstance so I got asked to do a conference before on invasion, and I said to myself, I don't really work on invasion, but I'm sure I can come up with something. So I started thinking about what I was doing with this. I sort of started thinking I was like, well, I wonder, I wonder if I could argue this as a form of legal invasion, and I kind of put it on the back burner for a bit. As I was doing the work, the other work I'm doing right now on sort of strategic thinking in in the pre Napoleonic periods and before it was codified. One of the things that really strikes me about that research is that there is this perception that strategic thinking sort of before Klauschwitz and certainly before, you know, 1815 is is patchy and kind of random, and that there really isn't a school of strategic thinking. And secondly, if you look at the correspondence, you can start pulling together some really clear lasting threads across relationships of sort of friendship in family. I just started thinking, can I do the same thing with legal conceptions about slave trade laws. And so I started looking through the correspondence and whilst I can't say for sure yet because I haven't finished the research whether or not this is absolutely reasonable, I do find these similar threads so Castle Ray in this period is very much driving this idea of trying to make sure that the power of balance in Europe doesn't get messed up, trying to make sure that Cuba does not fall into the strategic influence of the Americans, or become independent. How does that correspond with Britain's influence in the West Indies. And there's actually some really sort of cold hard strategic thought going on here. And this sort of threads through to canning and then it threads through the Palmerston. So I think, you know, I am trying to be a bit provocative, because I'm not sure I buy it yet either. But I have found enough threads in the research to make me want to, to really pursue it and see if there is more coherence than I originally thought, only in this case because as I said I actually still very much think that you and Lisa Porter right. So that's that's just sort of where I am sorry that's probably not a very satisfactory answer. I don't see anything down there so I get I get a chance now because everybody else seems to have gone and had to had to look in. I wanted to talk about this question about strategic thought and the linking of different types of levers of power and it's I find it very interesting, your idea, and in your last slide the times of peace. It's hard to be able to push these kinds of changes or concepts of change. And I'm just wondering, you know, because it's, it's not that long since the end of, of, you know, what you would consider to perhaps be the first world war. You know, looking in this, this post war, and you could almost in some ways think of it, not in a sense I suppose of reconstruction but certainly of now the British dominant position being able to construct an international financial and international order from from their victory. And where the United States fits in there. So I guess my question to two parts of this, and I is this this question about the relationship between the need to have international law coincide with economic strategic visions. And particularly then the threat that the United States or the impact the United States has in Britain's maritime dominance of the maritime domain. Now that doesn't necessarily mean naively in terms of holes, ships, kinetic effect. But is this is this kind of a litmus test in terms of to be able to start to establish the ability to continue to keep any kind of American growth in that domain, in particularly it's commercial economic power in the maritime domain at at bay, as a demonstration through the span in those particular waters, etc, etc, because we're not long off from, you know, the idea of the Caribbean now as the, the playground of America and the dominance that it sees in that region. So I'm wondering, I'm just wondering kind of that that kind of connectivity for the British. Is it that sophisticated is that really coordinated, or is it just kind of random things come together. And that's the effect you get. No, so I think it is rather coordinated in the case of the United States because fundamentally in this period and really through through the 1860s, both Britain and the United States are vying for influence in Cuba. And whilst there, there is some back and forth about whether either of those countries actually want to, you know, rule Cuba or take on Cuba as a colony, they certainly want the influence there. And so a lot of the debates around the slave trade laws and ending the slave trade are fundamentally about American British maritime dynamics. And, you know, this this even goes so far as one of the big triumphs of British anti slave trade legislation is finally getting the Americans to acquiesce to a right of search, because one of the big problems is that a lot of Spanish slave trade is ships will fly under an American flag, and therefore the British Navy cannot stop them at sea. And so when this is finally given to the British in the 90 in the 1840s. What we've seen is a huge triumph both legally and in the fight to end the slave trade, and it is almost you could almost see it as as the United States sort of almost bowing to to the British in this regard and this allows Britain to maintain some more of its of its maritime hegemony at the time. The United States is perceived as as an emerging threat and you know this is true from the end of the American War of Independence. Britain is cognizant even back then that the next big neutral threat the next big threat to a maritime economic war that is based in Europe, but plays out in the United States is going to be the United States. So from that strategic thinking point of view. Yeah, there is definitely a thread here that involves the United States and it is a very deliberate set of ideas meant to try to curb emerging American maritime power for sure. Yes, thanks. Thanks very much and I'm good. I think we're on time on target. So thank you very much everybody for your attentions to Anna's paper and then thank you very much for the paper. We'll reconvene for Martha's session at 1845 I believe according to schedule so in approximately six minutes. Take care and we'll see you back here then. Thank you very much.