“The Spanish Monarchy as an Imperial Machine, 1765—1795”

Fidel Tavarez (University of Chicago)

This paper explores the implications of political economy for the geography of Spanish commerce and, more crucially, of its resource transfer, which played a key role in the transformation of the Spanish monarchy’s confederation of territories into a modern empire. Out of the conviction that a new international order was on the rise—one where trade and economic improvement, not mere military capacity, determined the power of states—a host of eighteenth-century statesmen endeavored to transform the Spanish Monarchy into a powerful commercial empire capable of competing with Britain and France. They drew on Enlightenment political economy to design a new imperial system centered on stimulating trade, production, and consumption. Because they realized that economic improvement required integration and administrative coherence, they envisioned the Spanish Monarchy as a kind of machine, with the king as its engineer and imperial officials as scientific advisors. To concretize this machine-like commercial empire, Spanish ministers embarked on an ambitious project of imperial reform that culminated with the implementation of comercio libre (free internal trade) as a replacement for the old fleet and galleon system of Atlantic trade. They expected that comercio libre would allow the metropole to control Spanish American markets, thus transforming the previously autonomous American kingdoms into dependent colonies. This paper demonstrates that this new commercial system was not a mere attempt to centralize the empire, but rather an effort to create one where none had existed before. In doing so, it ultimately uncovers how, in spite of its “liberal” proclivities, the Enlightenment idea of economic improvement was intimately enmeshed in imperialism.

“Transforming the State: The Role of the Science of Geography in the Bourbon Reforms”

Matthew Franco (College of William & Mary)

Further exploring the theme of an “imperial machine” from the vantage point of its political publics, Matthew E. Franco examines the role that the science of geography played in the constitution of an imagined community for both the Spanish empire and the international order. As he argues in his paper “Transforming the State: The Role of the Science of Geography in the Bourbon Reforms” following defeat in the War of the Spanish Succession, government officials argued that the Spanish Monarchy needed comprehensive reform, part of which would include policies informed by the analysis of new, accurate geographic renderings of the realm. As reformers attempted to transform the Bourbon Spanish state, ministers therefore debated the nature and purpose of the science of geography. Although there existed a number of competing geographic epistemologies within the eighteenth century Spanish Empire, the reform of cartographic centers in peninsular Spain highlights two traditions as predominant. It was the difference between these two – the community of “scientific officials” centered at the naval academy in Cádiz and the “studio cartography” of the Royal Academy of History – that gave geographic reform in Spain its unique character. These differing methodologies also spoke to different audiences. The empirical geography employed by naval officers produced data that defined the global Spanish monarchy in the eyes of foreign governments, while the historical evidence collected by studio geographers spoke to Spaniards across the empire by uniting both the peninsula and the colonies under the banner of a global Spanish monarchy.

“Statistics and the Public: Information Gathering, Networking, and the Birth of Modern Political Culture”

Barbara Naddeo (CUNY: The City College and Graduate Center)

This paper further investigates the ramifications of data gathering for political culture, by examining the geography of information collection, transmission and networking in the Kingdom of Naples, which, she shows, yielded a public sphere whose basis lay not in its discussion of the print materials but the raw data of statistics. If not the progenitor of statistics, one of its leading exponents in Enlightenment Europe was Giuseppe Maria Galanti, an author and publisher in the city of Naples, who dedicated much of his adult life to the compilation of an encyclopedic description of the resources of the Kingdom, which was remarkable and noted in his time for its unprecedented publication of extensive data, some mined from the privy archives of royal secretaries and much solicited from an extensive network of correspondents, whom Galanti had either met or learned in the field. If Galanti’s work was remarkable in its time, it was also criticized by his own Neapolitan contemporaries, who considered it disparaging of the Kingdom’s great cultural wealth, and whose vociferous opinions have long rendered elusive the ostensible significance of his text for the political culture of the Kingdom. However, archival work on the manuscript correspondence of Galanti rather suggests that historians have been looking for clues about the political importance of Galanti’s text in the wrong places: for it was Galanti’s enterprise per se that engendered a participatory public for the science of statistics and provided for its debate about the state and policies of the Neapolitan territories.