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The Making of Pombal: Speculation, Diplomacy and the Iberian Enlightenment, c .1714–1755
Author(s) -
JONES CORREDERA EDWARD
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
history
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.12
H-Index - 15
eISSN - 1468-229X
pISSN - 0018-2648
DOI - 10.1111/1468-229x.12973
Subject(s) - geopolitics , enlightenment , alliance , political science , diplomacy , shareholder , economy , economic history , humanities , history , law , economics , corporate governance , art , management , philosophy , theology , politics
This article sheds light on the influence of José de Carvajal y Lancaster's establishment of shareholder companies in Spain on the economic programme of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, better known as the Marquis of Pombal. Early eighteenth‐century Spanish debates on the capacity of shareholder companies to foster geopolitical reform informed the overlooked project of European cooperation of José de Carvajal y Lancaster. Carvalho studied and praised Carvajal's commercial reforms and understood that closer diplomatic and commercial collaboration between Spain and Britain would undermine Portugal's geopolitical interests. Carvalho's early economic schemes were thus the result, in part, of Iberian commercial emulation. The Iberian establishment of regulated and joint‐stock companies catalysed reform and reconfigured trans‐imperial commercial relations. Paradoxically, Carvajal and Carvalho's parallel views on European geopolitics, and their understanding of Enlightenment ideals, foreclosed the possibility of a Luso‐Spanish alliance.