Book Projects
The Imperial Machine: Assembling the Spanish Commercial Empire in the Age of Enlightenment (First Book Project)
In the eighteenth century, a host of Spanish statesmen compared well-ordered empires to harmonious machines and devised a comprehensive plan to erect an integrated commercial empire centered on economic growth. While they drew on British and French thinkers to design their plans, Spanish ministers focused less on expanding international trade and more on synergizing Spain’s metropolitan and colonial territories. In fact, Spanish statesmen reasoned that the vast territories of the Hispanic world were a microcosm of the global economy that could become both self-sufficient and impervious to international commercial pressures. The Imperial Machine reconstructs how Spanish imperial officials endeavored 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. Challenging the idea that Spain was a backward pseudo-mercantilist empire, Fidel J. Tavárez ultimately brings to light the Hispanic world’s innovative solutions to the dilemmas of early modern globalization.
For the table of contents, click here.
Empirical Statecraft: The Emergence of an Information Empire in the Eighteenth-Century Spanish Atlantic (Second Book Project)
Empirical Statecraft reconstructs how and why information gathering became a central focus of Spanish imperial governance over the course of the eighteenth century. Convinced that Spain suffered from a shortage of “useful” information, imperial bureaucrats launched numerous research expeditions in order to collect economic, administrative, and botanical information about Spain’s overseas territories. The ultimate goal was to assemble a large information depository that would enable imperial administrators to make informed policy decisions. While Spain had long engaged in colonial information gathering, it was during the eighteenth century that Spanish officials made a deliberate effort to design imperial policy using empirical reports from the colonies. Empirical Statecraft weaves the histories of science, imperial governance, colonial information gathering, and the court’s political culture in order to demonstrate that the Spanish Atlantic became a vast and dynamic laboratory of the modern information age, a development that brought to the fore both the promise of knowledge-based governance and the perils of misinformation and distortion.
For the tentative table of contents, click here.
Empirical Statecraft reconstructs how and why information gathering became a central focus of Spanish imperial governance over the course of the eighteenth century. Convinced that Spain suffered from a shortage of “useful” information, imperial bureaucrats launched numerous research expeditions in order to collect economic, administrative, and botanical information about Spain’s overseas territories. The ultimate goal was to assemble a large information depository that would enable imperial administrators to make informed policy decisions. While Spain had long engaged in colonial information gathering, it was during the eighteenth century that Spanish officials made a deliberate effort to design imperial policy using empirical reports from the colonies. Empirical Statecraft weaves the histories of science, imperial governance, colonial information gathering, and the court’s political culture in order to demonstrate that the Spanish Atlantic became a vast and dynamic laboratory of the modern information age, a development that brought to the fore both the promise of knowledge-based governance and the perils of misinformation and distortion.
For the tentative table of contents, click here.