Blanco White, Spanish America, and Economic Affairs: The Slave Trade and Colonial Trade

Abstract

Blanco White was one of the most important Spanish intellectuals of the first half of the nineteenth century. Being exiled in England (1810–41) and speaking English fluently enabled him to meet some of the period’s greatest economists, such as Malthus, Whately, Senior, and Mill. Despite this and his having been trained initially as a businessman, he devoted no special attention to economics. Nonetheless, he tackled certain topics of undoubted socioeconomic importance, such as the slave trade and the colonial question and overseas trade. This work aims to contextualize the way Blanco treated these topics within the framework of his Spanish contemporaries, to show that his approach was rooted in a Spanish tradition of thinking. Blanco was already familiar in Spain with some approaches to the slave trade and the colonial question, approaches that he would later fully develop in England.