Reviewed by: Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759–1810 Stanley J. Stein Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759–1810. By Gabriel B. Paquette. (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008) Enlightenment, Governance and Reform is a concise yet wide-ranging review of the concept and implementation of “reform” in Spain and its peripheral American colonies, mainly under Charles III. It joins studies of reform in the Spanish empire, a growing cottage industry among academics, which induces no small wonderment given the meager outcomes of reform policies when finally initiated in the metropole and colonies. Paquette offers an enlightening introductory chapter outlining the contours of the debate over reform, reminding readers that his concern is the “political ideas and sentiments which guided the reformers” (22). This monograph is history from the top down, following high functionaries speculating on the possibilities for change or, as some might say, adjustment, at home and abroad, and on elements incorporated in policy as well as their emphases. A leit-motif threading Paquette’s argument is the “meteoric” surge of the concept of regalism in late eighteenth-century Spain, the assertion of central government (“Crown”) control over governance, and its contestation with a privileged ecclesiastical establishment owning and leasing out large rural properties in an essentially agrarian economy and society. Policy speculation and formulation, Paquette argues, was driven fundamentally by the requirements of state finance: increasing revenues. While high functionaries reckoned with the resilience of inherited (often obsolete) structures and interests in sketching models (proyectos) of reform, many were attracted to the model exemplified by the powerful neighbor north of the Pyrenees, where French ministers managed to invigorate the metropolitan economy and, with the private sector of merchants and planters, turned Saint Domingue into one of the wealthiest colonies in the world. Paquette, moreover, expands Spaniards’ model -searching to include England, as they marveled at the accelerated development of its agriculture, industry, overseas trade and naval reach. In designing policy, the political class in Madrid emphasized the role of the state in generating population and trade to enhance “public happiness,” which he ranks as “the key justification of the state’s infringement on ecclesiastical wealth and property” (82). This leads to Madrid’s timid and ultimately failed experiment in agrarian reform at home, the Sierra Morena agricultural colony in Andalusia; and he traces another attempted reform, the revision and updating of the colonial code (Novíssima Recopilación) which “curiously and inexplicably…never took effect in the Indies” (91). The latter half of Paquette’s monograph covers “how institutional structures and the ideology of empire functioned in practice” (94). First, he outlines Madrid’s policy for trade, agriculture and population but only on the Spanish empire’s colonial periphery: Chile, La Plata, Venezuela and Cuba. The policy’s economic emphasis, he finds, sought a less-regulated trade (comercio libre) and preserved only one chartered enterprise, the Compañía de Filipinas. Second, in a refreshing methodological innovation, he recaptures a “new and under-appreciated insight into enlightened absolutism…in overseas administration” (113) by retrieving how colonial officials, in particular lower-ranking ones, evaluated Madrid’s directives. No surprise: he concludes that the reaction of on-the-ground colonial officers reflected “demands of the most powerful colonial mercantile and agrarian groups” (117). He balances administrators’ views with the concepts and interests of the elites who were members of colonial consulados and economic societies founded in the closing years of the century at Buenos Aires, Santiago and Havana. Again, no surprise: the policies of the “Bourbon intelligentsia” in the metropole were frustrated by colonial conditions and “personal preferences” (126). For those probing reform initiatives for harbingers of the imminent collapse of the first Spanish empire, there is no solace. To be sure, there were conflicts between metropolitan and colonial interest groups, but resolved by compromise rooted in “colonial elites’…commitment to incremental reforms and collaboration with metropolitan reformers” (150). Which raises the question: why the long shelf-life of the study of Caroline reform? Stanley J. Stein Princeton University Copyright © 2009 Stanley J. Stein and The Johns Hopkins University Press