A Unifying Enlightenment: Institutions of Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Spain (1700–1808)

Abstract

The most traditional way of looking at the European Enlightenment is to see it almost exclusively as a major change in the world of ideas. Starting with either Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, or Locke, this approach focuses on how the scientific and philosophical developments of ideas led to the prominent figures of the movement such as Rousseau, Montesquieu, Hume, and Smith. The corollary usually is that a few “individual minds may, at crucial moments, through their thoughts and writings, lend decisively formative expression to rising impulses across an entire continent” (Israel 2001: 160). The question is, Are these ideas enough to understand what the Enlightenment was (and is)? Maybe the conversion of these ideas, beliefs, and values into institutions is a step required to define and understand the Enlightenment. Could it be possible to understand the European Enlightenment without the Bank of England or the Académie des sciences? If your answer to these questions is no, this is an essential book highly recommended to Enlightenment specialists, because if institutions matter, it would also be relevant to know what happened in Spain, Sweden, Russia, and Ireland. If your answer to these questions is yes, readers will be indebted to Jesús Astigarraga for opening up rich new seams of material and proposing new possibilities for a fuller understanding of eighteenth-century Spain.Astigarraga's book is the direct result of his several decades of research on the Spanish Enlightenment. It is a long-term project that has dealt with “the institutions that grew up around political economy” from Felipe V to the abdication of Carlos IV. In this book, the author brings together previously published and new material to provide a longue durée view of institutions created by the political establishment and that used education and print culture to promote economic growth, spread information, and manage affairs within the government. This category includes economic societies, political economy and commerce chairs, magazines, the economic press, merchants' handbooks, and commerce dictionaries.The author discusses several fundamental hypotheses about the Enlightenment in the introduction of his book. The intellectual history of the Enlightenment can be constructed on the basis of “moderate” thinkers—for instance, Montesquieu, Hume, Genovesi, and Smith. The materialist, atheist, and radical currents of thought did not dominate the Enlightenment mainstream in most of Europe. Therefore, the Spanish variant was not the result of a clash between “radical” and “moderate”—à la Jonathan Israel—but of a selection of these moderate strands in order to bring about a gradual transformation of a political and Catholic legacy. Therefore, the approach chosen comes from the works of Alfred W. Coats, John Robertson, Massimo Augello, and Marco Guidi. A second hypothesis is that economic institutions in the Spanish Enlightenment were “largely prompted from abroad” by means of a process of acclimatizing foreign experiences to the national context. Therefore, it is important to study the circulation of economic ideas, their acclimatization to Spain, and their conversion into institutions. His third hypothesis is excessively restrictive. He considers that the new science “emerges as a new way of imagining a world of peaceful competition between rival trading states.” The influence of the Treaty of Utrecht may be valid for understanding the model of international relations behind Forbonnais's “science of political commerce.” However, this case is not enough to grasp the complex process of the emergence of political economy due to the heterogeneity of views concerning international relations—for example, domination in Melon's islands model or the physiocrats' “fraternity of nations” (Demals and Hyard 2015). For instance, the defeats suffered by France during the Seven Years' War unleashed an exacerbated outpouring of patriotism, and attempts were made to restore the nation's greatness by increasing its economic resources (Shovlin 2006). In his popular work L'Ami des hommes (1756), the Marquis de Mirabeau called on landowners to return to their estates and take an active part in their management. For Quesnay, the key to the military imbalance between France and Britain was an erroneous consideration of the origin of a state's power (Quesnay [1757] 2005: 265). He takes certain chapters from Political Arithmetick, in which William Petty argues that the military superiority of England over France does not stem from the total volume of funds available (higher in France in absolute terms) but from a greater income in relative terms. For the doctor, there was no need to seek arguments in the use of trade policies but rather in the means of increasing production. I say this even though I know Astigarraga is certainly an expert on the influence of physiocracy in Spain.The structure of this book follows the order in which the institutions discussed appeared in Spain. We have eight chapters dedicated to publications in the form of magazines, books, and dictionaries and two chapters largely focused on educational institutions providing special needs training. The epilogue summarizes the more general issues and returns to the hypotheses discussed in the introduction. It is followed by an appendix, a bibliography (separated into newspapers, merchants' handbooks, primary sources, and secondary sources), and an index.Chapters 1, 5, and 9 are dedicated to merchants' handbooks and commerce dictionaries. Astigarraga demonstrates that in the first half of eighteenth-century Spain these volumes had no alternative to cover essential social functions as “the spread of information, the reduction of transaction costs, the passing on of professional techniques and the struggle against fraud.” Throughout the last third of the century, the role of the handbooks changed. The quantity and complexity of economic reforms stimulated the demand for knowledge about trade. An increasing production of local handbooks (in Cadiz and Barcelona) tried to fill this gap. This was not the case with commercial dictionaries, a product produced in many places in eighteenth-century Europe. Widely known in Spain for decades, none of these famous commercial dictionaries was translated into Spanish. Astigarraga claims that the cause of this anomaly was the projects for a Spanish dictionary of commerce, promoted from official institutions, that culminated in Eugenio Larruga's unfinished forty-five-volume Memorias políticas y económicas sobre los frutos, comercio, fábricas y minas de España.Chapters 4 and 8 explore the role of economic societies, starting with the pioneering Basque Society, founded in 1765. The formation of these institutions throughout the Spanish territory was one of the early efforts toward a polycentric attempt to articulate local elites and local initiatives into the overarching national policy. Because economic societies became a public sphere for the discussion of economic topics—with reports, lessons, or translations—it was not surprising that the first chair of political economy was founded in Zaragoza by the Aragon Economic Society in 1784. In particular, Astigarraga in detail examines the controversies this chair generated—it was opposed by the University of Zaragoza and religious officials.The rest of the book (half of the chapters) is devoted to explaining the origin of economic journalism in Spain, from Graef's pioneering Discursos mercuriales (1752–56) to the Semanario de agricultura y artes dirigido a los párricos (1797–1808). Astigarraga explores the contents and sources of such important journals in detail. The first wave of the economic press (1752–67), likely backed by the government and supportive of its reform projects, is based on heterogeneous strands of French economic thought, from the traditional Oikonomia to the new science of political economy—in particular, the writings stemming from the Gournay circle. Astigarraga explains that the thread to these publications is the ideal of a “commercial monarchy” as a necessary response to the military and commercial dominance of Great Britain and the “trading republics.” The second wave corresponds roughly to the last two decades of the century. The rise in status of journalists, the growth of potential readers, the subscription system, and the weakening of the role of the Inquisition promoted the “golden age” of the press in Spain. Memorial literario (1784–1808), a highly successful monthly journal that had official support, was at the forefront of the press, with articles on a wide variety of topics, among them political economy. However, journalists started to be less dependent on political power and to expand their range of topics. The economic content of El correo de Madrid o de los ciegos (1786–91) and El espíritu de los mejores diarios (1787–91) served as vehicles for a more radical generation of thinkers before the repressive reaction in Spain that followed the French Revolution. Through translations of essays, reviews from the foreign press, and original articles, El espíritu de los mejores diarios played a key role in disseminating the thought of Necker, Smith, Turgot, Condorcet, Filangieri, and the physiocrats. In these publications and others (El censor and El observador), the discussions on economic matters were controversially extended into the political arena by the new radical language. Finally, Astigarraga explains the first instances of Spanish professional journalism specializing in economic issues. In the last decade of the century, the Board of Trade supported the publication of two periodicals, Correo mercantil and the Semanario de agricultura y artes dirigido a los párrocos, which were instrumental in spreading information on the useful arts. The Board of Trade (mainly controlled by Cabarrús and Campomanes) also launched other government agencies such as the Balance of Trade Office, Spain's first official statistics agency, in 1786 and the Development Authority. In this final chapter, Astigarraga also takes the opportunity to review the criticisms of the Board of Trade for its failure to adapt to the changing times and serve as a centralized agency for economic growth.Paradoxically, I leave for the end my opinion about the introduction. Throughout his publications, Astigarraga has displayed a vast breadth of knowledge on the circulation of economic ideas and economic policy in eighteenth-century Spain. This breadth of knowledge is distilled and brilliantly packaged into twenty-three pages to describe to readers how Spanish economic policy was fashioned during the eighteenth century. It is an introduction that any (new) researcher on Spanish history should read.