Book Projects

​Assembling an Imperial Machine: Spanish Commercial Reform in the Age of Enlightenment
​Under Contract with Oxford University Press
 
In the eighteenth century, a host of Spanish statesmen compared well-ordered empires to harmonious machines and devised a comprehensive plan to liberalize and integrate the imperial economy. The main initiative to emerge from this economic plan was a commercial policy that contemporaries called comercio libre, which entailed replacing the traditional fleets and galleons with a new system of free trade within the empire. Combining intellectual history, Atlantic history, and the history of the Bourbon reforms, Assembling an Imperial Machine provides an innovative interpretation of this momentous period in the history of the Hispanic world.

Deeply engaged in Enlightenment debates about political economy, the Spanish statesmen who designed this new imperial vision became convinced that the pursuit of markets, rather than military power alone, was the key to succeeding in a modern commercial society. But where their European counterparts remained committed to international trade, Spanish ministers focused on integrating Spain’s metropolitan and colonial territories. In fact, Spanish statesmen reasoned that the Hispanic world’s vast territories were a microcosm of the global economy that could become both self-sufficient and impervious to international commercial pressures. They also recognized that the viability of this closed commercial empire depended on synergizing millions of subjects across Spain’s dominions, which is why they insisted on the importance of integrating Indigenous and Afro-descendant wage workers and consumers.

Moving seamlessly between developments in Spain and Spanish America, Fidel J. Tavárez demonstrates that Spanish statesmen sought to create a closed commercial empire—an imperial machine—in order to avoid the perils of modern commercial society, namely commercial warfare, while reaping its benefits, economic growth. By bringing this effort to light, Tavárez shows that, rather than a mercantilist atavism, the Hispanic world’s commercial reforms represented a genuine attempt to solve the dilemmas of early modern globalization, an endeavor that, in turn, inaugurated the enduring fascination with erecting a free trade bloc in Latin America.

Plantation Dreams in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Caribbean 
​In Progress

Starting in the 1760s, local elites from the Spanish Caribbean began to request numerous concessions from the crown in order to create slave societies centered on producing tropical commodities for export. Their demands included policies of tax relief, permission to sell their crops in foreign colonies, and, most importantly, freedom to import enslaved Africans. Combining political and Atlantic history, this book traces the relentless efforts that local elites from Cuba, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico made to erect slaveocracies in the Spanish Caribbean and the responses their petitions received from the Spanish court.

While historians have long recognized the second half of the eighteenth century as a pivotal transition period in the emergence of slave societies in the Spanish Caribbean, especially in Cuba, few have pointed out the often-explicit impediments the Council of the Indies and the crown placed before the colonial elite’s plantation dreams. The crown, to be sure, was not opposed to slavery per se, but the king and his ministers preferred to employ enslaved Africans as future subjects who would eventually become settlers in underpopulated areas of the empire. The creole elite, in contrast, endeavored to employ enslaved Africans as disposable labor to produce cheap commodities for global markets, in imitation of the lugubrious plantation experiment being carried out in Saint-Domingue.

Undoubtedly, creole elites eventually succeeded between 1789 and 1818, when they secured the right to import enslaved Africans and to sell their commodities in international markets, but the earlier story of failure, in large part because the crown remained ambivalent about erecting slave societies in the Caribbean, remains untold. If in the end these elites succeeded, it was because the crown succumbed in the face of an unprecedented imperial crisis beginning in the 1790s, which demonstrates that the rise of slave societies in the Spanish Caribbean was an act of imperial defiance by the plantation-owning local elites.

Empirical Statecraft: The Emergence of an Information Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic
In Progress

To an unprecedented extent, information gathering became a central focus of Spanish imperial governance during the eighteenth century. Convinced that Spain suffered from a shortage of “useful” information, imperial officials launched numerous research expeditions to collect economic, administrative, cultural, geographic, and botanical information about Spain’s colonies. Empirical Statecraft interrogates what lay behind this obsession with collecting empirical information, which transformed the Spanish Atlantic into a dynamic, though also conflictive, space of information flow.

The key to understanding Spain’s empirical exuberance is the emergence of the policy paper, which, together with its corollary notion of informed policymaking, was once a transformative information technology, intangible though it was. These transformational and disruptive aspects of the policy paper were especially pronounced in the Spanish Empire, where the king derived his legitimacy from processing petitions, not policy papers. Petitions, which subjects from across the empire could write directly to the king, were the key to maintaining dialogue and negotiation between the king and his subjects, perhaps the central pillar of good government. The policy paper disrupted that dialogue by positing that policymaking should result from information gathering rather than dialogue and negotiation. 

Combining perspectives from the history of science, imperial governance, colonial information gathering, and the court’s political culture, Empirical Statecraft investigates why and how Spanish ministers sought to replace the petition and response system with a new paradigm of informed policymaking, potentially dismantling a political system that enabled Spain’s global empire to exist for centuries. Tavárez demonstrates that, convinced that they would bring about a future of prosperity, ministers unwittingly transformed the Spanish Atlantic into a vast laboratory of the modern information age, a development that brought to the fore both the promise of informed governance and the perils of misinformation.

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Contact Information:
Queens College, CUNY
History Department
Powdermaker Hall, 352-G
65-30 Kissena Boulevard
Flushing, NY 11367
​Tel: 718-997-5118
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