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

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’.

KEYWORDS:

• Early modern Spain
• Spanish Enlightenment
• corporations
• republicanism
• political economy

1. Introduction

In 353 B.C., the Greek statesman and orator Demosthenes delivered his famous speech, Against Timocrates. In his oration, Demosthenes defended the political equality safeguarded by Athenian democracy, and warned against the type of oligarchic corruption exemplified by Timocrates.¹ In the midst of peace negotiations with Caria, Greek ambassadors had captured an enemy merchant ship, and the Athenian government had declared that its goods could be sold for the benefit of the state. Instead, the ambassadors had sold them for their own private profit. When they were found to be in debt to the state, their friend and senator Timocrates sought to pass a law to allow debtors to post bail to temporarily avoid imprisonment. In response, Demosthenes claimed this proposal threatened the egalitarian nature of Athenian democracy.² Law-making required trust, reputation, and accountability, and to illustrate his point Demosthenes referred to the practice of the Locrians, a Greek tribe. The Locrians would judge the utility of new laws, and the private motives behind them, by asking their authors to stand trial before the Senate while a rope hung around their neck, under penalty of death.³ In 1732, the Spanish political economist and administrator Miguel de Zavala y Auñón restated Demosthenes’s speech and explained that the practice of the Locrians was ‘very present in his mind’ as he drafted his proposal for Philip V.⁴ Zavala was aware that the Locrian approach to accountability and reputation was a demanding one. After all, according to Demosthenes, it meant that the Locrians passed but one law in two hundred years.⁵ Zavala, however, believed that the assembly of public trust served to hold monarchs and officials to account, and hoped that his writings on political economy would put an end to the ‘fear of the new’.⁶ Only then would Spaniards invest in the future of the Spanish Monarchy.⁷

Zavala’s ideas about the need for assemblies to check and balance the power of the Spanish King set the terms of the political economy of the Spanish Enlightenment. The historiography on Spain has traditionally assumed that the eighteenth-century Bourbon Monarchy undercut Spanish republican ideas and institutions.⁸ This article argues instead that these ideas did not fade away. Rather, the engagement with this tradition of corporate governance, and the study of successful European companies, inspired the growth of Spanish political economy.⁹ This article generates a new contextualisation of Zavala’s writings and their role in inspiring forms of corporate representation in eighteenth-century Spain. Zavala explained that the Dutch had acquired ‘the permanent liberty they desired’ through the establishment of their companies, Britain had drawn great profits from their companies, and France had seen its own companies act as a creditor to the state.¹⁰ Drawing on the economic success of European shareholder companies, Zavala sought to regenerate the political economic influence of the Spanish Cortes.¹¹ In Zavala’s scheme, regulated companies would be established throughout the Spanish peninsula and would deliver regular reports to the King on the state of the economy. Learned women and men at court would draw on these accounts to debate economic reform.¹² The arbitrary, unpredictable, and short-sighted payments needed to finance responses to dynastic ‘accidents’ would be replaced by ‘a moral certainty to their pace’.¹³ These corporate assemblies would effectively control the revenues of the companies which, Zavala made clear, could not be used by the King or a minister to secure anything other than the wellbeing of the people.¹⁴ The creation of these councils that managed companies, and their public trusts, would serve to underwrite the Spanish Monarchy, to ensure that dynastic crises would no longer throw the social fabric of the Spanish peninsula into disarray, and to reaffirm the representation of urban corporate interests.¹⁵ Once the effects of dynastic crises had been neutralised, political debate and popular investment would determine the policies of the Spanish Empire.

Under Ferdinand VI’s reign, two Spanish ministers, the marquess of Ensenada and José de Carvajal, sought to implement the financial ideas found in Zavala’s plan and embolden the growth of Spanish political economy.¹⁶ Ensenada praised Frederick II’s Prussian Civil Code and established a cadastre and the Real Giro, a bank, to generate a fairer tax system.¹⁷ Carvajal, in turn, suggested that Zavala’s ‘scheme’ should be implemented ‘to the letter’, and established companies to revitalise Spanish commerce.¹⁸ Carvajal drew on these Spanish debates on corporations, and on the ideas of Saint-Pierre, to establish a project of European cooperation, and praised Britain, one of his desired allies, for being ‘republican enough’ to prevent a monarch from severing alliances for their own gain while lacking those aspects of absolute governments which made them vulnerable to divisions and fragmentation.¹⁹ Zavala’s ideas were at the core of the growth of mid-eighteenth-century Spanish enlightened political economic debates which saw Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu draw on the ideas of Samuel von Pufendorf to challenge the diplomatic approach of Philip V, and claim that access to the nobility should be based on merit; that there was ‘no King who has not descended from a slave, or a single slave who cannot claim a King as an ancestor’.²⁰ When the cadastre was drafted into law, Zavala’s text was republished together with an influential proposal written by Martín de Loynaz, Director General of the Tobacco Rent, which argued that corporate assemblies could stimulate the establishment of fairer and more efficient forms of taxation in Spain, as they had in the Netherlands.²¹

During the second half of the eighteenth century, new discourses, foreign and local, buttressed Zavala’s calls for reform, and debates over corporate assemblies and political representation galvanised the study of Spanish constitutionalism.²² The most radical Spanish thinker of the second half of the eighteenth century, León de Arroyal, disappointed by the government of Charles IV, drew on the works of Zavala, Loynaz, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Arroyal proposed that Spain could be understood as a ‘confederacy of republics’ protected by ‘its monarchs’, emphasised the role of assemblies in the generation of public trust, and established the need for a cadastre and fairer taxes.²³ For Spain to develop its economy and rely on the ‘forms of borrowing and credit’ that the Dutch and the English had established, Arroyal explained, would require ‘forms of public credit that were as robust as theirs’ and for the Spanish government to ‘clearly establish the limits of its power’. Only then, argued Arroyal, could Spain consider turning people’s public trust into a form of patriotism: by ‘achieving that popular constitution which stirs in men the spirit of patriotism and grants them a particular and a general interest in the causes of the public’.²⁴

This article argues that Zavala’s writings fostered the growth of the political economy of the Spanish Enlightenment, facilitated the political economic debates of the mid-eighteenth-century, and inspired the constitutional project of León de Arroyal. The early eighteenth-century parallels between the Spanish study of parliamentary traditions, eighteenth-century French visions of a republican monarchy, British hopes for a patriot king, and Neapolitan defences of public trust, suggest that Spain contributed to the European emergence of the science of political economy that grew out of that shared aspiration: to protect the republic from the arbitrary power of monarchies and the type of dynastic instability that they generated.²⁵ Throughout the eighteenth century, Spanish political economists believed that the assembly of public trust would foster the investment of Spaniards in the future of the Spanish Monarchy.

2. Republics, corporations, and early modern Spain

Scholars have traditionally suggested that the Bourbon Spanish Monarchy constituted a centralising enterprise that sought to limit the political influence of urban elites in Castile and which ended parliamentary structures in Catalonia and Valencia.²⁶ However, more recently, historians have pointed to the resilience of urban forms of representation.²⁷ This article considers how Spanish political economists turned to their parliamentary history to reconcile social fairness and economic efficiency. The analysis of this strand of political economy provides an alternative study of republicanism and parliamentarism; instead of searching for references to the concept, one may study its origins and transformations by looking at the uses of the values of republicanism: vindications of the rule of law, opposition to arbitrary power, and debates over the successes of foreign republics.²⁸

Parliamentarism developed in medieval Spain because rulers understood that taxation required representation.²⁹ This was the logic behind many of the eleventh and twelfth-century reforms in Spain, as the Spanish Catholic Kings sought to host and coordinate the interests of the estates that exercised a great deal of control over the growing system of urban authority throughout the peninsula. This led to the creation of the Cortes, parliamentary bodies that hosted estate representatives from various cities and communities to discuss political, religious, and financial matters regarding their respective territories with the King.³⁰ Limiting the degree of influence exercised by these urban representatives required a great deal of constant negotiation, and Niccolò Machiavelli, in his discussion of reputation, observed that Ferdinand II ought to be called ‘a new ruler’ because his management of divergent interests had allowed him to transform himself from a ‘weak king’ to the ‘most famous and glorious King in Christendom’.³¹ Ferdinand had expanded his kingdom in part by keeping the minds of ‘the Castilian barons’ occupied with the conquest of Granada ‘so they would not plan any revolts’.³² In the meantime, he had cemented his own authority as he ‘was acquiring prestige, and increasing his hold over them before they were even aware of the fact’.³³ He had thus kept his subjects ‘in a state of suspense and amazement’ since ‘these deeds of his have followed one another so quickly that nobody has enough time to be able to initiate a revolt against him’.³⁴ In this reading, foreign creditors and imperial tax payers were reassured by Ferdinand’s achievements, and were happy to supply the Spanish Empire with the credit needed to continue its expansion.³⁵ During the reigns of Charles V and Philip II, when the pace of successful enterprises slowed down, this unreliable system of reputation, credit, and trust was destabilised as bankruptcies came to be understood as forms of political negotiation, and precipitated a revolt.³⁶ In 1520, elite and lay subjects from urban centres in Castile spearheaded the Revolt of the Comuneros that rejected the tax rise of Charles V.³⁷ They vindicated the power of the ‘common good’, or the común, proposed cutting excise duties and taxes, and suggested that the parliamentary Cortes should be granted greater authority.³⁸ The revolt failed and led to a renegotiation of monarchical authority that provided short-term solutions to the question of taxation, equity, and fairness.³⁹ In 1557, Spain faced bankruptcy and Genoese bankers transformed short-term loans called asientos into long-term bonds with revenues that rested on a range of taxes.⁴⁰ This granted more power to the authorities in charge of collecting these duties and taxes, particularly the regidores, local officials in charge of the finances of the community who, in turn, consolidated their rentier interests and speculated on the value of land.⁴¹ Faced with these changes in the peninsula’s social fabric, Scholastic thinkers of the period, like Fernando Vázquez de Menchaca, felt the need to remind the King that his authority rested on consensus populi.⁴²

The Dutch Revolt fundamentally changed Spanish political culture.⁴³ While Dutch republican authors accused Philip II of violating the privileges, liberties, and the franchises of the Dutch provinces, Spanish authors, who frequently cloaked Spain’s imperial identity in Roman garbs, turned the argument on its head and suggested that the Dutch Orange dynasty were the oppressors, and alleged the Dutch Republic would rise and fall as quickly as the Roman Republic.⁴⁴ Instead, over half a century, the Spanish and the Dutch waged a devastating sequence of imperial conflicts that stretched from the Pacific to Central Europe.⁴⁵ In the eighteenth century, Spanish political economists like Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes would portray the conflict between the Dutch and the Spanish empires as a perpetuation of the civil wars of Granada, or the Reconquista, and traced the origins of the growth of Dutch and English smuggling in the Pacific to the early seventeenth century.⁴⁶ More broadly, the Dutch Revolt led to a different approach to the study of politics in Spain, and facilitated the birth of a local tradition of political arithmetic. The late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries witnessed the transition from the metaphorical to the literal and the mechanical in Spain. This transition encouraged the pursuit of earthly solutions to political disputes.⁴⁷ The humanist Pedro Mexía sought to explain the nature of comets through logic rather than theology. The scholar Juan Huarte de San Juan argued against attributing all things to God and thereby robbing them of their natural causes and solutions. The political economist Sancho de Moncada proposed the creation of a faculty of politics without theology or theologians, where one could cultivate the science of government as a coherent set of principles constituting an autonomous political philosophy.⁴⁸ Giovanni Botero’s ideals underpinned their proposals, and his emphasis on the need to ensure population growth, in particular, inspired many of their writings.⁴⁹ This movement became known as arbitrismo following the name given to the arbitrios, or proposals, that were sent to the King. Famous authors, like Francisco de Quevedo and Miguel de Cervantes, mocked this genre of writing for some of its outlandish proposals, but Quevedo himself agreed with their analysis of the inefficient flow of goods and wealth within the Spanish Empire, as money, he claimed, was born and honoured in the Indies, died in Spain, and was buried in Genoa.⁵⁰

One way to reform the monarchy, then, was to provide clear-eyed and sustainable economic reforms. Another way, however, was to rebel against the empire. In 1640, the failure of the Duke of Olivares’s programme fostered the Catalan and the Portuguese revolts. Portuguese nobles demanded that the King of Spain should respect the contractual nature of the terms whereby Portugal had acceded to enter into a union with the Spanish Empire, a rhetorical move that resembled the Dutch weaponization of Philip II’s oath to protect Dutch privileges.⁵¹ The Catalan Revolt, however, explored in more open terms the implementation of a republic and a system of greater democratic governance.⁵² The Dutch and Portuguese appeals to the contractual nature of political rule succeeded. The Catalan appeal to bolder republican ambitions failed. In the mid-seventeenth-century, Spanish debates about republics and assemblies then, did not fade away, but rather shifted their focus from constitutionalism to political economy, as Olivares sought to take over control of the Spanish administration with his Council of Finances, and proposed organising Spanish trade through ‘companies and consulados’ and ‘turning Spaniards into merchants’. His personal lawyer, José González, reminded the King his duty was to the estates, and not to private interests.⁵³

This turn was particularly clear in the ideas of the author and Spanish representative at the negotiations leading up to the Peace of Westphalia, Diego Saavedra y Fajardo. Saavedra suggested that republics were constitutionally too unstable to protect liberties.⁵⁴ He drew on the trope that the Netherlands had grown more in ‘seventy years than the Romans had done in four-hundred’ and that states that ‘grow too quickly are quick to decline’.⁵⁵ But with regard to economic matters, he defended the need for corporate councils. In his Empresas Políticas, he explained how the Dutch had ‘learned to build companies from the Roman creation of collegia’, or guilds.⁵⁶ Having established an imperial precedent to the Dutch companies, Saavedra explained that monarchies could benefit from them: Portugal had understood that state-sponsored guilds could expedite imperial expansion.⁵⁷ In Spain, these guilds ‘could be established’ and ‘secured by armed vessels, so that not only would our riches flow through them, but our navy’s strength would also flourish, and would be greater than those of other nations’.⁵⁸ When writing about Spanish politics, moreover, Saavedra defended the need to perpetuate the corporate structure of the Cortes to thwart tyranny, as ‘the universal republic’ was ‘congregated in the Cortes’.⁵⁹

In 1700, a new dynastic crisis, the War of Spanish Succession, fragmented the Habsburg Monarchy. The Treaty of Utrecht, which brought an end to the war, granted Britain the right to trade slaves in Spanish imperial ports, and enabled France to continue to expand its smuggling throughout the Spanish Empire.⁶⁰ The Treaty of Utrecht issued in an international order based on diplomacy and political economy.⁶¹ The new Bourbon King, Philip V, however, privileged war over peace. As part of his process of internal reform, the Aragonese Cortes no longer met after 1707 and some of their votes transferred to the Castilian Cortes, which retained some influence over tax reform, but were otherwise rendered powerless.⁶² Far from disappearing, the rich Spanish engagement with republicanism would return in an effort to manage the risk of dynastic crises and republicanise the management of the economy. With his repeated references to the demonstrations of Alfonso VIII’s wise rule, and the trust that Spanish sovereigns had inspired during the Reconquista, Zavala vindicated the origins and purposes of Spanish republicanism.⁶³ Under Alfonso VIII, Zavala explained, the subjects had willingly paid their taxes to their King. The people, it followed, rewarded good governance through their trust and their loyalty to the monarch.⁶⁴ The investment in provincial corporations would revitalise the political function of the Cortes and bolster the economy. Fostering the growth of political economy with his writings, Zavala featured information about the affairs of the French East India Company, calculations about the inefficiency of existing taxes, and a bold proposal to transform commercial contractual trust into ‘public trust’ in the future of the Spanish Monarchy.⁶⁵

3. Miguel de Zavala y Auñón and the question of public trust

Miguel de Zavala y Auñón was born in the late seventeenth century in Badajoz, a frontier town with Portugal. His father served in senior local administrative positions in the town, as both regidor and alcalde, but Miguel inherited his position as regidor of Badajoz from his mother’s side, Juana de Auñón Torregroso.⁶⁶ Early eighteenth-century women, according to recent research, actively participated in the workforce, frequently provided credit to merchants, and even served as intermediaries between Spanish and foreign merchants.⁶⁷ Spanish legislation banned women from acting as local administrators, but allowed them to possess titles which their sons could inherit.⁶⁸ During the War of the Spanish Succession, Zavala was involved in the administration of Badajoz, and favoured diplomacy and debate over conflict. He was asked to travel to the Spanish Court to represent the interests of Badajoz and the neighbouring Portuguese town of Campo Mayor, since the two, while Spain and Portugal waged war, had reached a pact of non-aggression that would ensure the economic recovery of the area. The goal was to ‘reduce the price of crops’ and to ‘repopulate those frontier territories’.⁶⁹ The following year, in response to the Junta de Comercio’s demand that a local administrator should study the ‘causes of decadence of Badajoz and the means of progress’, Zavala outlined the negative impact of repeated dynastic conflicts with Portugal on the local economy, and called for industrial reform in the region.⁷⁰ In 1714, following a meeting with the representatives of the main officials of the province’s towns, he was asked to draft a text to reform taxes and tributes.⁷¹

It was then that Zavala began his analysis of the economic dimension of the Bourbon policy of the Nueva Planta, which replaced the ancient privileges of the Crown of Aragon with the laws of Castile, removed its taxes and its tributes, and implemented a poll tax.⁷² Zavala analysed and recorded the process of its implementation in detail, and his analysis demonstrated how, over ten years, robust urban structures of accountability negotiated and contested the heavy-handed and inefficient measures of Bourbon administrators.⁷³ He concluded that the successful implementation of a poll tax turned on negotiation and coordination.⁷⁴ By the time his Representación was published in 1732, Zavala was familiar with the political economy of dynastic wars, and occupied influential regional positions as a member of the Council of Castile and a General Superintendent of Annuities.⁷⁵ In his Representación, Zavala studied how dynastic conflicts, which he referred to repeatedly as ‘urgencies’, had led to excessive and arbitrary taxation, and to the loss of public trust. This, he explained, was ‘the main purpose of writing this text’. The provision of sufficient funds to meet ‘the daily needs of the State, even if a crisis or several crises arose’ would ensure that the use of economic resources would be measured and limited. It would allow the state to make ‘demands that each individual could satisfy’ and guarantee that ‘there was enough for everyone’.⁷⁶

The three problems facing Spaniards were the multitude of local tributes, Spain’s poor agricultural production, and the lack of trade.⁷⁷ As regidor of Badajoz, Zavala was one of the officials in charge of the management of the taxed income and the wealth of the town, and his ownership of the title by virtue of descendance reflected the seventeenth-century expansion of patronage in Habsburg Spain.⁷⁸ It was significant, then, that he reserved his harshest criticisms for those local officials in charge of collecting people’s taxes and who ‘lived off the blood of the poor’.⁷⁹ Elites, he explained, ‘failed to pay the small fee they are asked to contribute’.⁸⁰ The ‘wealth of the state’, he explained, was ‘not founded on that of one individual or the other; it consists on the ability of individuals to live free of need’.⁸¹ It was ‘the poorest and those most in need’ who paid ‘the bulk of these tributes’.⁸² Small producers contributed what little they made in taxes, and some even had to turn to theft simply to cover the cost of the tributes. This explained the shortage ‘of those who could work in the mechanical arts’ and those who could labour in the fields.⁸³ It also helped to explain population decline: unable to pay their own taxes, bachelors were unlikely to marry because they knew they would be incapable of providing for their wife and children.⁸⁴ To remedy this issue, Zavala proposed the establishment of a cadastre, the cancellation of all local tributes and taxes, and the introduction of a tax system which would acknowledge differences in people’s incomes.⁸⁵

Company officials, in Zavala’s scheme, were to replace the regidores as the managers of the people’s wealth. They would encourage the circulation of the wealth of those ‘from various spheres and estates’.⁸⁶ The example of ‘all Nations’ showed ‘that the way to foment trade, build consistency, and augment their power, is to establish companies’.⁸⁷ Zavala studied the history of the establishment of companies in the Netherlands, Britain, and France, and considered five objections to the establishment of companies in Spain. The first was that the Spanish character prevented its people from engaging in trade. The second was that the nobility’s pride would preclude their investment in such schemes. The third was the lack of public trust, which would discourage everyone from investing in the same enterprises.⁸⁸ The fourth was that these companies were despotic, and assumed responsibilities that belonged to the sovereign. The fifth was that European states would simply oppose and obstruct the establishment of these companies.⁸⁹

Yet the Spanish character, Zavala argued, was a deeply commercial one: ‘Histories of Spain’ were full of ‘examples of their commercial inclinations’, including the ‘establishment of trade’ in the Americas.⁹⁰ Spanish workers, in turn, worked ‘day and night, in summer and in winter’, and demonstrated the necessary patience and foresight ‘over the long periods of time’ required to grow crops and manage business transactions.⁹¹ Labourers, as investors and traders, would understand ‘the need to wait’ to make a profit.⁹² The Spanish aristocracy would ‘accept that being a merchant’ was ‘nothing other than engaging in the act of buying and selling’.⁹³ European ‘rational and political’ nations, ‘would never pursue interests they have no right to through force or tyrannical means’, and particularly not ‘to prevent an Independent Sovereign from drafting and implementing their own political and economic policies’. This would constitute a betrayal of the terms that had been agreed through diplomatic negotiation.⁹⁴

Companies, above all, could ‘re-establish and conserve public trust’.⁹⁵ Since the lack of political and economic predictability undermined people’s trust in investment and trade, establishing corporations that fostered confidence in the Spanish Monarchy would revitalise commerce. Honour and trust were two traits of the Spanish character that foreign authors, he explained, always praised and sometimes mocked: ‘Foreign authors, who are not used to praising anyone, and particularly us, in their writings, praise the fidelity of Spaniards, and claim there is no nation in Europe more consistent in honouring agreements’.⁹⁶ Indeed, in The Spirit of the Laws, Montesquieu, in his discussion of the Spanish character, would claim that ‘the faithfulness they had of old they still have today’. But this trustworthiness had been mixed with laziness, and had contributed to Spanish imperial decline.⁹⁷ The Scottish historian William Robertson would later, in his History of America, cite Zavala’s work in order to draw the same conclusion about Spaniards.⁹⁸ But Zavala had pushed back against this view. Honour and trust, he explained, were not incompatible with trade: they were profoundly commercial values that relied on ‘the credit of honesty’.⁹⁹ ‘Neither threats, nor promises, nor self-interest’, according to Zavala, stood in the way of the commitment of Spaniards to an agreement or a treaty.¹⁰⁰ Companies could rely on this type of obligation: ‘bound by a company’, those who failed to deliver on their commitments, would find ‘their reputation, their wealth, and their identity’ exposed.¹⁰¹ The self-interest of investors would not replace the principles of Spanish honour.¹⁰² Instead, it would reaffirm the commercial values of trustworthiness, predictability, and reputability, embedded in the principle of honour.¹⁰³

Zavala, moreover, hoped that these companies would generate mechanisms of elite political debate. Officials and the nobility would not just lobby the King: they would remonstrate with him and defend the corporation’s interests. Threats to the interests of the company could not be ‘dismissed by an appeal to the common good’. Concerns and comments about the companies ‘would reach Your Majesty’s ears with much force’ since ‘subjects from both genders of the highest class of society, and those closest to you, would invest in the firm, and will continually publish the just motives of the Companies in clear and lively terms’.¹⁰⁴ Political economic debate would, in this way, serve to generate political accountability and social fairness since all would be ‘obliged to contribute on the basis of our means and our circumstances’.¹⁰⁵ Companies would increase people’s wealth and this would encourage subjects and government institutions to cooperate with them. They would ‘foster a disposition in the Royal Treasury and in the Subjects to help them’. Officials, nobles, and the Treasury, would remind the King of the importance of the companies. ‘Even when these interests are not obvious, or when considerations of justice and convenience were ignored’, explained Zavala, ‘there would be so many interested subjects in the conservation of the companies near Your Majesty that, beyond what the company representatives suggested, Your Majesty’s eyes would see the inconveniences’ of ignoring them ‘very clearly’.¹⁰⁶

This political structure would be enshrined in law and those who did not obey its rules should suffer an exemplary punishment.¹⁰⁷ The interests of the people would, in this way, be aligned with those of the nobility and would be represented at the Spanish Court. The financial needs of the companies, moreover, were to trump all other state interests. Even when an ‘urgent’ event occurred that required unplanned spending, when the King’s ‘hold over religion, the defence of his honour and his Kingdom were challenged and the Royal Treasury lacked sufficient funds to react’, Zavala explained, ‘it would not be precise, convenient, nor particularly safe’ for a Minister to draw on the capital of these companies to fund these urgencies.¹⁰⁸ Companies would therefore provide enough funds for the state to function and encourage elite political debate at Court, even if a crisis, dynastic or otherwise, was taking place. Compared to the polysynody implemented across the Pyrenees by French nobles to regain power from the Monarch and reorganise tax and trade, Zavala, drawing on a range of seventeenth-century authors who had proposed the simplification of Spanish taxes, favoured investment as a form of political participation for both nobles and lay subjects: ‘those stagnant funds of people of all estates and classes and from communities of both genders’ could be ‘deposited in these Companies’.¹⁰⁹

Other companies would be established, and these would strengthen the influence of political economists and encourage further debate. Two regulated companies, one for trade with Tierra Firme, and another for trade with New Spain, would be set up and managed by a council of ‘Commercial Deputies’ who would work with ‘other ministers’ to assess ‘projects that had been proposed to date’. They would acknowledge the efforts ‘made by curious and applied people who might not be in the council’, and study ‘the conditions that preceded the creation of foreign companies’.¹¹⁰ The King was to listen and inspire subjects ‘from all estates’ to invest in these corporations.¹¹¹ Once he invested his wealth in these companies, other members of the royal family and Spanish nobles would follow his lead.¹¹² ‘The main cities and towns’ would invest ‘some of their funds’ in this scheme and, on the basis of their profits, would build ‘bridges, roads, and other public works’ which Spain urgently needed.¹¹³ The trustworthiness of the Spanish character, the contractual nature of trading companies, and a fair and accountable Spanish King, would regenerate public trust in trade and bolster investment in the future of the Spanish Empire. As Zavala argued, commerce and trade constituted the ‘re-establishment of monarchies’.¹¹⁴

Public trust would be restored, and the economic effects would be felt throughout the peninsula, but not in the colonies.¹¹⁵ Zavala did not feel the need to consider their impact on colonial power structures. The companies would, he hoped, increase, and regulate, trade in Spanish colonial ports and, eventually, they would manage all of Europe’s trade to the Spanish Americas.¹¹⁶ Existing legal structures, he believed, would facilitate, rather than obstruct, the establishment of companies because they provided clear guidance for merchants to follow.¹¹⁷ Public funds and regulated companies would enhance the political influence of political economists and repair the social fabric of the Spanish peninsula. In this regard, Zavala’s ideas could be understood as a reinvention of the Spanish parliamentary Cortes.¹¹⁸ These companies would serve as checks on the King and as representative bodies that reflected the interests of the Spanish people. As Zavala had explained in his introduction, he hoped that, in writing his text, the appreciation of useful knowledge ‘would banish fear of the new’.¹¹⁹ The role of Philip V in Zavala’s plan was to foster trust towards these ventures, mirroring contemporary European ideas behind the establishment of Law’s companies and Bolingbroke’s The Idea of a Patriot King.¹²⁰ Zavala was aware of John Law’s schemes, as he cited the example of the French East Indies Company loan of five million to the French state, and the colonial dimension of his plan was in some ways similar to the proposals of the Scottish financier.¹²¹

4. Trust, the Spanish Monarchy, and the Spanish Enlightenment

Throughout Philip V’s reign, Spanish political economists sought to reaffirm the value of predictability and accountability before the Spanish King. In 1740, Philip V, in the midst of two costly conflicts, the War of Austrian Succession and the War of Jenkins’s Ear, sought to claim as his own the right to inherit the Habsburg Crown. This relied on an inconsistent argument about Philip’s dynastic lineage that the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht had sought to overrule and replace, and overlooked the fact that Philip had repeatedly abdicated his claim to the Habsburg Crown. Faced with this blatant imposition of arbitrary rule, and the prospect of the renewal of the dynastic crisis, the Spanish jurist Antonio José Álvarez de Abreu, who was the original architect of the King’s legal justification, felt compelled to draw on Samuel Pufendorf and the terms of the Treaty of Utrecht to remind the Spanish King that denying the value of treaties could lead to the resumption of war, and that it was incumbent on a wise ruler to avoid overtaxing their subjects.¹²²

When Philip died and his son Ferdinand VI rose to become King of Spain, a Spanish ambassador was informed that ‘since the Treaty of Utrecht, or perhaps the years following 1714, the maxims followed by the Spanish Monarchy have gone against its true reason of state’.¹²³ To re-establish trust in trade and in the monarchy, the leading reformers under Ferdinand VI, José de Carvajal y Lancaster and the marquess of Ensenada, sought to implement Zavala’s proposal and developed enlightened reforms. Carvajal believed that ‘the solutions to all our evils’ could be found in Zavala’s ‘system’.¹²⁴ It would, in his view, make society more equal and the King more accountable.¹²⁵ Carvajal and Ensenada sought to implement the cadastre and removed a number of excise duties to ensure ‘that each vassal contributes according to their means, with each person acting as their own administrator to avoid injustice or favours’.¹²⁶

Building on Zavala’s thèse nobiliare, Carvajal established a range of companies throughout the Spanish peninsula, tried to create twelve corporations to re-route imperial trade, and believed these corporate structures could be used not just for military, but for geopolitical purposes.¹²⁷ Where the Duke of Olivares had sought to establish councils that circumvented the Spanish administration, Carvajal drew on the self-interest of investors to consolidate his reforms.¹²⁸ Enlightened self-interest, he believed, would revitalise the Spanish Empire. Carvajal sought to create a European alliance, inspired by Saint-Pierre’s ideas, bound not by law but by the logic of self-interest and corporate accountability.¹²⁹

In mid-eighteenth-century Spain, efforts to reform the Spanish economy therefore bolstered a turn towards corporate governance through investment, corporation, and self-interest. The expansion of corporations generated a great deal of political economic debate. In 1749, when the decree to abolish the alcabala, the main excise duty, was implemented, Zavala’s text was reprinted with an alternative proposal. The author, Martín de Loynaz, Director General of the Tobacco Rent, explained that few would believe that a ‘concerted union’ strove for the common good in Spain, as it did in the Netherlands: ‘a Republic where wise, prudent men who love liberty’.¹³⁰ Loynaz believed that the inspiration for a range of successful Dutch tax policies could be traced back to the proposals to reform the excise duties of José González, the Duke of Olivares’s personal lawyer, and a member of Olivares’s Council of Finance.¹³¹ Loynaz went on to praise and study, in great detail, an idea that the Spanish government discussed under Philip II, and which has been the subject of study among historians of the industrious revolution: the introduction of taxes on flour mill production, rather than on bread itself.¹³² In 1590, the Dutch introduced a new system of bread price regulation. The goal was to standardise the price and quality of bread, legislate over the organisation and scale of the milling and baking industries, and crucially, redistribute costs among consumers. Its implementation generated the Dutch Republic’s largest single source of tax.¹³³ In his proposal, Loynaz explained that ‘the main tax’ in the Netherlands was based on flour production, and an official analysed ‘all the mills to take count of the production of wheat, and the causes behind it’ and those who did not contribute according to the registry were financially punished.¹³⁴ Through careful calculations Loynaz suggested that taxing mills would compensate for the income generated from taxes on common products like alcohol, soap, and gun powder.¹³⁵ Loynaz explained that ‘there was no shortage of texts in Spain’ that had proposed similar policies, but made clear that, even if this policy was introduced, it was best to ‘submit the proposal to those cities with votes in the Cortes, so they may send their one representative of their choosing’.¹³⁶ Loynaz’s reference to González – who had once felt the need to remind Philip IV that his duty was to defend and conserve his Kingdom, and not favour private entitlements – was not incidental. Rather, it was symptomatic of the broader tone of Loynaz’s text, which ended on a rather ominous note regarding the question of representation: ‘because the Kingdoms are themselves the most interested, and the best instructed, in that which benefits and harms them, and with their consent one would guarantee its success, and to proceed without it would be dangerous’.¹³⁷ Debates about the corporate past of Spain and Europe propelled a wave of new publications, and the republication of works by thinkers like Saavedra, and facilitated the growth of the ‘economic turn’ of the decades of the 1750s and 1760s in Spain.¹³⁸

These ideas on corporations and investment lacked, however, the patriotic impulse behind many of the investment initiatives that took place in other European empires.¹³⁹ During the reign of Charles III, a thèse royale emerged and criticised the type of inequalities that urban oligarchies could generate: Campomanes built on Zavala’s ideas and dedicated one of his most important works on land tenure reform to Charles, ‘the Patriot King’.¹⁴⁰ Drawing on a Peruvian tradition that was critical of systems of patronage, the thought of early modern Spanish thinkers like Saavedra and Navarrete, and the works of the physiocrats, Count of Mirabeau, and David Hume, one of those colonial subjects who were largely overlooked by many of these early eighteenth-century corporate schemes turned his attention to Spanish political economy.¹⁴¹ In his Informe sobre la Ley Agraria, or Report on the Agrarian Law, written in 1768, the Peruvian creole Pablo de Olavide, an important reformer during Charles III’s reign, revised Machiavelli’s praise of Ferdinand’s manoeuvres to criticise the political economic relations that arose from the medieval political power of corporate communities and the nobility. Given their control over land, Olavide argued that in the past ‘favour and strength were everything, and based on preferences and wealth’ capital was managed by ‘seven or eight of those who helped with war, the monks and other ecclesiastical fellows’ while ‘the rest was granted to those at the top, thereby leaving the people in poverty’.¹⁴² He accepted that ‘wealth inequality’ was ‘necessary’ and even ‘convenient’ for monarchies but explained that what was important was that there was ‘not too much of it’, and, above all, that it did not continue to ‘deprive the republic of useful people who can be contribute to this century’. It was time to trust Charles III, Olavide explained, as ‘heaven had reserved a great task for this century which is presided by an enlightened government that will know how to rule equitably’.¹⁴³ Over the following decades, the Bourbon Monarchy would seek to establish royal economic societies and consulados to inspire loyalty to the King, and to oversee debate among nobles and economic elites throughout the empire.¹⁴⁴ To thinkers like León de Arroyal, these were the right steps, but they were not enough.¹⁴⁵

In the concluding remarks of his Cartas, Arroyal criticised those who defended ‘the hereditary nobility as a pillar of the monarchy’ when this was in fact ‘a ghost’.¹⁴⁶ Like Zavala, he studied Alfonso VIII’s approach to taxation and explained that ‘the ignorance of centuries, failing to make a difference between King and Kingdom, has confused the needs of the body and the head’, and he suggested instead that ‘a kingdom’ was ‘comparable to a shareholder Company’ whereby benefits should depend on contributions.¹⁴⁷ Arroyal cited Zavala and concluded his text by praising and developing ‘Loynaz’s thought’ on shifting the tax burden so that ‘everyone’s contribution was based on their consumption and their property’.¹⁴⁸ ‘Civil liberty’ was ‘enslaved’ and the ‘citizens’ lacked ‘representation’.¹⁴⁹ The establishment of a cadastre and a fairer system of taxation would, Arroyal explained, ‘return civil liberty to the citizens’.¹⁵⁰ Arroyal’s constitutional proposal reinvented Zavala’s plan to re-establish public trust in Spain.

In early modern republics and monarchies, corporate forms of representation could be used to both encourage fairer forms of taxation and to consolidate power in the hands of the few. Spanish political economists like Zavala, Carvajal, and Arroyal sought to reaffirm a principle which was embedded in republicanism and which came into focus during the Enlightenment: the socioeconomic benefits of predictable and accountable rule. In eighteenth-century Spain, the figure of the Spanish King served to preserve loyalty throughout the empire but, in order to re-establish public trust and issue in the Enlightenment into Spain the management of the Spanish Monarchy’s wealth, Zavala believed, had to be republicanised. The crisis of the War of Spanish Succession, and Philip V’s approach to diplomacy, had a corrosive influence over trust in traditional forms of Spanish governance that relied on the King’s authority and support. During Ferdinand VI’s reign, the capacity of corporations to act both as representative bodies and as assemblies of private interests spurred the growth of Spanish political economic debates, and Carvajal found a way to harness this ambiguity in order to incentivise transnational commercial cooperation. By representing imperial interests within the board of a Philippine Company while securing the alliance with the logic of private interests, perpetual peace, he believed, could be achieved. For Carvajal, the internal economic growth brought about by these efforts likely made Spain, to use his phrase, republican enough. The discontent with the Bourbon Monarchy in the second half of the century galvanised thinkers like Arroyal to appeal to the representative dimension of these corporations, as he understood that enlightened governance was necessary to underwrite both monarchies and republics. Arroyal understood that the generation and dissolution of trust would shape the world that was to come: he criticised the East India Company’s influence on Britain’s social fabric, argued that the practice of jobbing had ruined Europe, and anticipated that ‘Africa’ would soon free itself from the shackles of slavery.¹⁵¹ Echoing the seventeenth-century Spanish scepticism towards the success of the Dutch Republic, Arroyal argued that Spain had become a ‘commercial nation’ and emphasised that there were few examples in history that suggested these could last. Spain’s true wealth, he argued, lay in the Iberian Peninsula, and it thus followed that stimulating trust therein should be the government’s focus. The ‘Spanish constitution’ remained a monarchy ‘as defined by Archytas’, the Greek philosopher, a form of mixed government that was represented in the ‘admirable organisation of our primitive Cortes’.¹⁵² In 1790, generating trust in this constitution remained an urgent topic of discussion. Trust, after all, would be needed to face the great challenges that loomed ahead, as Arroyal wondered: ‘we lost Flanders, we lost Italy; why then would we not lose Peru and Mexico? And, if we did, what role would we then play in the world?’¹⁵³

*

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Demosthenes, ‘Orations 24. Against Timocrates Demosthenes’, in Orations, Volume III: Orations 21-26: Against Meidias. Against Androtion. Against Aristocrates. Against Timocrates. Against Aristogeiton 1 and 2, trans. J. H. Vince, Loeb Classical Library 299 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1935), 369–512. See, in particular, Melissa Lane, ‘Popular Sovereignty as Control of Officeholders: Aristotle on Greek Democracy’, in Popular Sovereignty in Historical Perspective, eds. Richard Bourke and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 52–72.

2 J.H. Vince, ‘Introduction’, in Orations, Volume III, 370–1.

3 Demosthenes, ‘Orations 24. Against Timocrates Demosthenes’, 463.

4 Miguel Zavala y Auñón, Representación al Rey Don Felipe V para el más seguro aumento del Real Erario, y conseguir la felicidad, mayor alivio y abundancia de su monarquía (1732), Biblioteca Pública de Burgos — Signatura: 6088. Digital Copy (Valladolid: Junta de Castilla y León. Consejería de Cultura y Turismo, 2009–2010) Signature: 2, A-Z2, 2A-2Y2, 6. Zavala did not, however, cite his source.

5 Demosthenes, ‘Orations 24. Against Timocrates Demosthenes’, 463.

6 Zavala, Representación, 6.

7 The role of the ancient world in the political imagination of eighteenth-century Spain remains understudied. See Edward Jones Corredera, ‘Labouring Horizons: Passions and Interests in Jovellanos’ Ley Agraria’, Dieciocho 38, no. 2 (2015): 267–90.

8 On the historiography of this absence, see José Luis Villacañas Berlanga, ‘Republicanismo clásico en España: las razones de una ausencia’, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, 6, no. 2 (2005): 163–83. Pocock famously excluded the Spanish Empire from his analysis of civic republicanism, and Anthony Padgen largely avoided the eighteenth century in his study of Spanish imperial discourses. This article seeks to fill in the vaccum left by these authors. See J.G.A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment. Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition, ed. Richard Whatmore (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016); Anthony Pagden, Spanish Imperialism and the Political Imagination: Studies in European and Spanish-American Social and Political Theory, 1513–1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990).

9 This complements Regina Grafe’s study of the resilience of the economic influence of corporatist structures in eighteenth-century Spain. See Regina Grafe, Distant Tyranny: Markets, Power, and Backwardness in Spain, 1650–1800 (Princeton NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012) and Christopher Storrs’s assessment of the administrative role of the Cortes in Christopher Storrs, The Spanish Resurgence 1713–1748 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 145–52. Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, in turn, has written about the cultural repercussions of the durability of the corporativist model in Spain, and this article emphasises instead the ways new ideas about political economy galvanised reform. See Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, ‘El absolutismo frente a la constitución tradicional’, Historia Contemporánea 4 (1990): 15–30.

10 Zavala, Representación, 143–5.

11 See, in particular, Xavier Gil, ‘Parliamentary Life in the Crown of Aragon: Cortes, Juntas De Brazos, and Other Corporate Bodies’, Journal of Early Modern History 6, no. 4 (2002): 362–95.

12 Zavala, Representación, 152.

13 Ibid., 154.

14 Ibid., 157.

15 This was an early solution to the problem of the excessive influence of asentistas and corporate structures in Spanish political life as studied in Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, ‘El decreto de suspensión de pagos de 1739: análisis e implicaciones’, Moneda y Crédito 142 (1977): 51–85 and Anne Dubet, ‘José Campillo y las secuelas de la suspensión de 1739: un proyecto político para la Hacienda Real’, Cuadernos de Historia Moderna 42, no. 2 (2017): 629–52.

16 José Luis Gómez Urdáñez, El Proyecto Reformista de Ensenada, (Lleida: Milenio, 1996); Juan Molina Cortón, Reformismo y neutralidad: José de Carvajal y Lancaster y la diplomacia de la España preilustrada (Mérida: Editora Regional de Extremadura, 2003); José Miguel Delgado Barrado, El proyecto político de Carvajal: pensamiento y reforma en tiempos de Fernando VI (Madrid: CSIC, 2001).

17 Antonio Rodríguez Villa, Don Cenón de Somodevilla, Marqués de la Ensenada (Madrid: Liberaría de M. Murillo, 1878), 158; Ildefonso Pulido Bueno, El Real Giro de España: Primer proyecto de banco nacional (Huelva: Universidad de Huelva, 1994).

18 Edward Jones Corredera, ‘Perpetual Peace and Shareholder Sovereignty: The Political Thought of José de Carvajal y Lancaster’, History of European Ideas 44, no. 5 (2018): 513–27, 524–5; ‘The Memory of the Habsburg Monarchy in Early Eighteenth-Century Spain’, Global Intellectual History 3, no. 4 (2018): 1–21.

19 José Carvajal y Lancaster, Testamento Político: reducido a una idea de un gobierno católico, político, militar y económico, como conviene para la resurrección y conservación de España por Don Josef de Carbajal y Lancaster, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS/10446, 1–137, 14.

20 Jesús Astigarraga, ‘Spain and the Economic Work of Jacques Accarias De Serionne’, in The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Enlightenment Europe, eds. Sophus Reinert and Steven Kaplan (London: Anthem Press, 2019), 607–34, 612. Quoted in Francisco Precioso Izquierdo, ‘Un problema académico: la idea de nobleza en la primera mitad del siglo XVIII. Los discursos de Pedro Scotti y José Antonio de Abreu en la Real Academia Española’, Hispanic Research Journal 19, no. 4 (2018): 345–60, 355.

21 Jan de Vries, ‘The Political Economy of Bread in the Dutch Republic’, in The Political Economy of the Dutch Republic, ed. Oscar Gelderblom (London: Taylor & Francis Group, 2009), 85–114; Martín de Loynaz, ‘Instrucción’, in Miguel de Zavala y Auñón, Miscelanea económico-política (Pamplona: Herederos de Martínez, 1749), 181–270, 200.

22 On the political economy of the second half of the eighteenth century see Gabriel Paquette, Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).

23 Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes [León de Arroyal], Cartas político-económicas, ed. Antonio Rodríguez Villa (Madrid: M. Murillo, 1878), 214.

24 Arroyal, Cartas, 155–6; 165.

25 Michael Sonenscher, ‘Republicanism, State Finances and the Emergence of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France – or from Royal to Ancient Republicanism and Back’, in Republicanism: A Shared European Heritage, vol. 2, eds. Martin van Gelderen and Quentin Skinner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 275–92; Anthony Padgen, ‘The Destruction of Trust and its Economic Consequences in the Case of Eighteenth-century Naples’, in Trust: Making and Breaking Cooperative Relations, ed. Diego Gambetta (New York: Blackwell, 1988), 127–41.

26 Antonio Feros, Speaking of Spain. The Evolution of Race and Nation in the Hispanic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 160–1.

27 See Grafe, Distant Tyranny, 198–200; Storrs, The Spanish Resurgence, 145–52. On the question of austracismo see Jones Corredera, ‘The Memory of the Habsburg Monarchy’, 2–4.

28 On this, see the excellent study of Xavier Gil, ‘Republican Politics in Early Modern Spain’, in Republicanism, eds. van Gelderen and Skinner, 263–88; Pablo Fernández Albaladejo, ‘Monarquía, Cortes y “Cuestión Constitucional” en Castilla durante la Edad Moderna’, Revista de las Cortes Generales 1 (1984): 11–34. This article builds on the approaches found in Xavier Gil, ‘Parliamentary Life’; Joan-Pao Rubiés, ‘Reason of State and Constitutional Thought in the Crown of Aragon, 1580-1640’, Historical Journal 38, no. 1 (1995): 1–28.

29 Joseph F. O'Callaghan, ‘The Beginnings of the Cortes of Leon-Castile’, American Historical Review 74, no. 5 (1969): 1503–37. For a comparative perspective, see Jan Luiten van Zanden, Eltjo Buringh and Maarten Bosker, ‘The Rise and Decline of European Parliaments, 1188-1789’, The Economic History Review, 65, no. 3 (2012): 835–61; and on Spain, pp. 838–9.

30 O’Callaghan, ‘The Beginnings of the Cortes of Leon-Castile’, 1508–10. Thinkers like Carlo Denina would later note the parallels between the Cortes of León and the English parliamentary system. See Edward Jones Corredera, ‘Carlo Denina’s Lettres Critiques: Transnational History in an Age of Information Overload’, Journal of Early Modern History 23, no. 6 (2019): 519–41, 536.

31 Niccolò Machiavelli, The Prince, ed. Quentin Skinner and Russell Price, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 74.

32 Ibid., 75.

33 Ibid., 75.

34 Ibid., 75.

35 See Elvira Vilches, New World Gold: Cultural Anxiety and Monetary Disorder in Early Modern Spain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), 210–71.

36 For the most recent interpretation, see Bartolomé Yun-Casalilla, Iberian World Empires and the Globalization of Europe 1415–1668 (London: Palgrave, 2019), 173. See also María José Rodríguez Salgado, The Changing Face of Empire: Charles V, Philip II and Habsburg Authority, 1551–1559 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

37 Espinosa Aurelio, The Empire of the Cities: Emperor Charles V, the Comunero Revolt, and the Transformation of the Spanish System (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 14–34.

38 Ibid., 65–82.

39 Ibid., 28–34.

40 Vilches, New World Gold, 215.

41 Charles Jago, ‘The Influence of Debt on the Relations between Crown and Aristocracy in Seventeenth-Century Castile’, The Economic History Review 26, no. 2 (1973): 218–36.

42 Gil, ‘Republican Politics’, 268.

43 On how the historiography of the Black Legend distorted the meaning of the revolt in Spain see Edward Jones Corredera, ‘Early Modern Spanish Decline: A Nation Dead to the World’, in Decline, Decadence, and Decay, ed. William O’Reilly (Vienna: CEU Press, Forthcoming).

44 Martin van Gelderen, The Political Thought of the Dutch Revolt 1555–1590 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 122; Yolanda Rodríguez Pérez, The Dutch Revolt through Spanish Eyes: Self and Other in Historical and Literary Texts of Golden Age Spain (c. 1548-1673) (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2008), 232–3; Thomas Dandelet, Spanish Rome, 1500–1700 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001).

45 Jonathan Israel, Dutch Primacy in World Trade, 1585–1740 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 38–121.

46 Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, Inéditos políticos de Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, ed. Santos M. Coronas González (Oviedo: Junta General del Principado de Asturias, 1996), 10.

47 One can find fascinating parallels between this transition in Spain and the one that would take place a century later in France. See José Antonio Maravall, La oposición política bajo los Austrias (Barcelona: Ediciones Ariel, 1972), 205; Peter Burke, ‘The Demise of Royal Mythologies’, in Allan Ellenius, ed., Iconography, Propaganda, and Legitimation (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), 245–54. Gil Puyol has recently hinted at some of these parallels in his work. See Xavier Gil Puyol, La Fábrica de la Monarquía. Traza y Conservación de la Monarquía de España de los Reyes Católicos y los Austrias (Madrid: Real Academia de la Historia, 2016).

48 Cited in Maravall, La oposición, 205–8.

49 John Elliott, ‘Self-Perception and Decline in Early Seventeenth-Century Spain’, Past & Present 74 (1977), 41–61.

50 Francisco de Quevedo, ‘Poderoso Caballero es Don Dinero’, in Selected Poetry of Francisco de Quevedo: A Bilingual Edition, ed. Christopher Johnson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 156–61, 157.

51 Xavier Gil, ‘Republican Politics’, 280–2.

52 Ibid., 280–1.

53 John Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 52; John Elliott and José F. de la Peña, eds., Memoriales y cartas del Conde duque de Olivares: Política interior, 1621 a 1627 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1978–80), 98.

54 Xavier Gil, ‘Republican Politics’, 286.

55 Rodríguez Pérez, The Dutch Revolt, 233; Diego Saavedra Fajardo, Locuras de Europa (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes; Madrid: Biblioteca Nacional, 2011), 19.

56 Diego Saavedra y Fajardo, Empresas Políticas (Alicante: Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes, 2010), 477.

57 Ibid., 478.

58 Ibid.

59 Rubiés, ‘Reason of State’, 15. See Diego Saavedra Fajardo, ‘Introducción a la política y razón de Estado del rey católico don Fernando’, in Obras de Don Diego de Saavedra Fajardo y del licenciado Pedro Fernandez Navarrete, Biblioteca de Autores Españoles, vol. 25, ed. Manuel Rivadeneyra (Madrid: Imprenta de Rivadeneyra, 1853), 423–48, 430.

60 Matthias Pohlig and Michael Schaich, eds., The War of the Spanish Succession: New Perspectives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018).

61 J.G.A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion. Volume 1: The Enlightenments of Edward Gibbon 1737–1764 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 109–14; Antonella Alimento and Koen Stapelbroek, eds., The Politics of Commercial Treaties in the Eighteenth-Century Balance of Power, Balance of Trade (London: Palgrave, 2017).

62 Storrs, The Spanish Resurgence, 145–52.

63 Zavala, Representación, 3–4.

64 Zavala, Representación, 4.

65 Zavala, Representación, 40–5.

66 The most comprehensive biographical study of Zavala is Miguel Ángel Melón Jiménez, ‘Las rentas provinciales y la idea de una sola contribución real de Miguel de Zavala y Auñón’, in Felipe V de Borbón 1701-1746, ed. José Luis Pereira Iglesias (Córdoba: Universidad de Córdoba, 2002), 61–90, 65.

67 Carmen Sarasua, ‘Women’s Work and Structural Change: Occupational Structure in Eighteenth-Century Spain’, The Economic History Review 72 (2018): 481–509; Paloma Fernández Pérez, El rostro familiar de la metrópoli: redes de parentesco y lazos mercantiles en Cádiz, 1700–1812 (Madrid: Siglo XXI, 1997), 10–14.

68 Felipe Lorenzana de la Puente, ‘Sobre la incapacidad legal de mujeres para ejercer oficios públicos. Las regidurías de Badajoz: 1648-1700’, Norba 8/9 (1987–88): 189–94.

69 Melón Jiménez, ‘Las rentas provinciales’, 66.

70 Ibid.

71 Ibid., 67.

72 Jean-Pierre de Dieu, ‘La Nueva Planta en su contexto: Las reformas del aparato del Estado en el reinado de Felipe V’, Manuscrits 18 (2000): 113–39.

73 Zavala, Representación, 37–46.

74 Ibid., 44–5.

75 Ricardo Calle Sáiz, ‘La Hacienda Pública en España (El proyecto de Vauban y su influencia sobre el pensamiento financiero de Zavala y Auñón)’, Revista de economía política 77 (1977): 7–28; José Miguel Delgado Barrado, ‘Entre Reyes y Ministros de Hacienda. Bernardo Francisco Aznar y el «nodo 1732»’, Espacio Tiempo y Forma. Serie IV, Historia Moderna 30 (2017): 57–84, 59–61.

76 Zavala, Representación, 155.

77 Ibid., 5.

78 See Jago, ‘The Influence of Debt’, 218–36.

79 Zavala, Representación, 10.

80 Ibid.

81 Ibid., 8.

82 Ibid.

83 Ibid., 10.

84 Ibid.

85 Ibid., 10–11.

86 Ibid., 137. On the establishment, during the War of the Spanish Succession, of a similar scheme in Austria, the Vienna City Bank, and its role as a caisse d’emprunt, see Simon Adler, Political Economy in the Habsburg Monarchy 1750-1774: The Contribution of Ludwig Zizendorf (London: Palgrave, 2020), 89. On the banking services provided by the early eighteenth-century English East India Company see Antoin E. Murphy, John Law: Economic Theorist and Policy-Maker (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997), 113.

87 Zavala, Representación, 136.

88 Ibid., 146. On how the shared eighteenth-century engagement with risk generated ideas of civic faith in the North American territories see Jennifer Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 2–16.

89 Ibid., 147.

90 Ibid., 148.

91 Ibid., 148–9.

92 Ibid., 150.

93 Ibid., 151.

94 Ibid., 164.

95 Ibid., 155. On early eighteenth-century French debates on trust and banking see Murphy, John Law, 144 and 333.

96 Zavala, Representación, 153–4.

97 Charles de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 313.

98 William Robertson, The Works of William Robertson, D.D. To which is Prefixed, An Account of the Life and Writings of the Author, by Dugald Stewart. In Eight volumes, vol. 7 (London: T. Cadell, 1840). ‘The History of America’, 378.

99 Zavala, Representación, 154.

100 Ibid., 153.

101 Ibid., 153.

102 On European depictions of Spanish pride and laziness, see Ruth Mackay, ‘Lazy, Improvident People’: Myth and Reality in the Writing of Spanish History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2006), 111–20.

103 On trustworthiness and credit in early modern Spain, see Scott Taylor, ‘Credit, Debt, and Honor in Castile, 1600-1640’, Journal of Early Modern History 7, no. 1 (2003): 8–27.

104 Zavala, Representación, 157. In 1741, the austracista Amor de Soria would propose the creation of a General Assembly of Commerce at Court, along with the creation of three regulated companies, and the establishment of a single tribute. Lluch, ed., Aragonesismo austracista, 100.

105 Zavala, Representación, 157. On d’Argenson’s plans to foster a virtuous nobility, and to establish a network of district assemblies that were, in this case, accountable to the king, see Michael Sonenscher, Before the Deluge: Public Debt, Inequality, and the Intellectual Origins of the French Revolution (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 164.

106 Zavala, Representación, 158.

107 Ibid., 158–9.

108 Ibid., 157.

109 Andrew Mansfield, ‘The Burgundy Circle's plans to undermine Louis XIV’s “absolute” state through polysynody and the high nobility’, Intellectual History Review, 27, no. 2 (2017): 223–45. Many have seen Zavala’s text as an imitation of Sebastian Le Preste Vauban’s La dîme royale (1707), but it is far more likely that Moncada’s writings, which he cited, influenced his views. See Calle Sáiz, ‘La Hacienda Pública en España’, 7–8. On Navarrete, see Zavala y Auñón, Representación, 169–70.

Zavala, Representación, 139.

110 Zavala, Representación, 171. This echoed Marcenado’s scheme. See Edward Jones Corredera, ‘The Rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters’, History of European Ideas 45, no. 7 (2019): 953–71, 985.

111 Zavala, Representación, 178.

112 Ibid., 177.

113 Ibid., 178.

114 Ibid., 180.

115 Ibid., 155.

116 Ibid., 155.

117 Ibid., 160–2. Contra Grafe, Distant Tyranny, 188.

118 Roger Bigelow Merriman, ‘The Cortes of the Spanish Kingdoms in the Later Middle Ages’, American Historical Review 16, no. 3 (1911): 476–95, 487.

119 Zavala, Representación, 6. The parallels between early eighteenth-century Irish and Spanish political economic debates on public trust and banking deserve their own separate study. See Patrick Kelly, ‘Berkeley and the Idea of a National Bank’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr 25 (2010): 98–117; C. George Caffentzis, ‘Why Did Berkeley's Bank Fail? Money and Libertinism in Eighteenth-Century Ireland’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland / Iris an Dá Chultúr 12 (1997): 100–15.

120 Sonenscher, ‘Republicanism, State Finances and the Emergence of Commercial Society in Eighteenth-Century France’, 275–92.

121 Zavala, Representación, 40. On their broader context, see Thomas E. Kaiser, ‘Money, Despotism, and Public Opinion in Early Eighteenth-Century France: John Law and the Debate on Royal Credit’, The Journal of Modern History 63, no. 1 (1991): 1–28.

122 Jones Corredera, ‘The Memory’, 10–21.

123 Instrucciones a D. Melchor de Macanaz Ministro Plenipotenciario a las Conferencias de Breda, Instrucción de lo que vos D. Melchor de Macanaz habéis de observar y cumplir en el destino de un Ministro Plenipotenciario a las Conferencias de Breda para donde os ha elegido, Archivo Histórico Nacional, Estado, 3457. 39.

124 Carvajal, Testamento Político, 32.

125 Ibid., 33.

126 Zenón de Somodevilla, Marquess of Ensenada, ‘Representación’, in Don Cenón de Somodevilla, Marqués de la Ensenada, ed. Antonio Rodríguez Villa (Madrid: Liberaría de M. Murillo, 1878), 43–77, 51–2. Recent research drawing on the wealth of information found in the cadastre has found that more women worked in early eighteenth-century Spain than was previously thought. Sarasua, ‘Women’s Work’, 481–509.

127 See Edward Jones Corredera, ‘The Making of Pombal: Speculation, Diplomacy and the Iberian Enlightenment, c.1714–1755’, History 105, no. 365 (2020), 229–51.

128 Elliott, Richelieu and Olivares, 52.

129 Jones Corredera, ‘Perpetual peace’, 525–7.

130 Martín de Loynaz, ‘Instrucción’, 200. It was thus not a ‘Dutch model’ that thinkers of this period followed, but rather they reclaimed the parallels between the Spanish and the Dutch. For the ‘Dutch model’ interpretation, see Barbara Stein and Stanley Stein, Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 153.

131 Loynaz, ‘Instrucción’, 200. On González, see Alistair Malcolm, Royal Favouritism and the Governing Elite of the Spanish Monarchy 1640–1665 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 140.

132 de Vries, ‘The Political Economy of Bread in the Dutch Republic’, 85–114.

133 Ibid., 85–6.

134 Loynaz, ‘Instrucción’, 200.

135 Ibid., 204.

136 Ibid., 216.

137 Ibid., 216. Malcolm, Royal Favouritism and the Governing Elite of the Spanish Monarchy, 95.

138 Mariano García Ruiperez, ‘El Pensamiento Económico Ilustrado y Las Compañías De Comercio’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History 4, no. 3 (1986): 521–48, 532–6; Astigarraga, ‘Spain and the Economic Work’, 612.

139 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 85–98.

140 Pedro Rodríguez de Campomanes, Tratado de la regalía de amortización (Madrid: La Gaceta, 1765), iv. On this topic, Herr’s study remains the most valuable work: Richard Herr, The Eighteenth-Century Revolution in Spain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1969), 84–119.

141 On the political debates of early eighteenth-century Peru, see Ruth Hill, Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America: A Postal Inspector’s Exposé (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2005). On Olavide’s ideas, see Luis Perdices Blas, ‘El Desarrollo Intelectual de Jovellanos en la Sevilla de Olavide’, Dieciocho 36, no. 1 (2013): 51–78, 71.

142 Pablo de Olavide, Informe sobre la Ley Agraria y cálculo sobre ella, Biblioteca Nacional de España, MSS/18547/4. Pages not numbered.

143 Olavide, Informe.

144 Robert Jones Shafer, The Economic Societies in the Spanish World, 1763–1821 (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1958), 56–63; Gabriel B. Paquette, ‘State-Civil Society Cooperation and Conflict in the Spanish Empire: The Intellectual and Political Activities of the Ultramarine Consulados and Economic Societies, c. 1780-1810’, Journal of Latin American Studies 39, no. 2 (2007): 263–29.

145 José Pallarés Moreno, León Arroyal o La aventura intelectual de un ilustrado (Oviedo: Instituto Feijoo de Estudios, 1993), 86–8.

146 Arroyal, Cartas, 268.

147 Ibid., 30, 240, 247.

148 Ibid., 252. For his earlier critiques of Loynaz’s plan see pages 11 and 171.

149 Ibid., 20.

150 Ibid., 254–7.

151 Ibid., 159, 235.

152 Ibid., 27. Carl Huffman, Archytas of Tarentum: Pythagorean, Philosopher and Mathematician King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 603–4.

153 Arroyal, Cartas, 161.