Ebook: Enlightenment, Governance and Reform in Spain and its Empire 1759-1808

Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759-1808 offers a new interpretation of political reform in Spain and its American empire in the second half of the eighteenth century. It examines the intellectual foundations of commercial, administrative, and colonial policy during the tumultuous reigns of Charles III (1759-1788) and Charles IV (1788-1808), and explores how crown reformers employed both the ideas of the European Enlightenment and Iberian juridical concepts to create a distinctive ideology of governance. They sought to use these ideas in order to reinvigorate the Spanish monarchy and to transform the institutions of the Old Regime into those of a modern state in both the Old World and the New. Drawing on archival research undertaken in Spain, Cuba, Chile, and Argentina, this book makes an important contribution to the histories of Spain, Latin America, and the Atlantic World.