The assembly of public trust: republicanism and the birth of political economy in eighteenth-century Spain

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ABSTRACT This article studies how a plan to reinvent the Spanish parliamentary Cortes generated the growth of eighteenth-century Spanish political economy. The article sheds light on how eighteenth-century Spanish debates over investment, assemblies, and corporations recovered parliamentary ideals, envisioned corporate boards of transnational cooperation, and deliberated on the political economy of patriotism. Contrary to the dominant historiographical view, Spanish republicanism did not wane under the Bourbon Monarchy. In order to resolve the social and economic impact of dynastic crises in the Spanish Empire, political economists argued that the establishment of corporations throughout the peninsula could republicanise Spanish finances and revitalise trust in the Spanish Monarchy. The article reconsiders early modern Spain’s republican and parliamentary traditions, and suggests that eighteenth-century Spanish political economy emerged from the need to escape the cycles of dynastic crises and to put an end to ‘the fear of the new’.