Adam Smith in Bahia, 1790–1810

In March 1797 the city council in the port city of Salvador, Bahia, in Portugal's Brazilian colony received a petition presented to it by a group interested in ending price controls on beef. At fourteen manuscript pages it is a virtual treatise on economic liberalism that, twice quoting Adam Smith (with page citations to the French edition), insisted that the public welfare was best served by protecting individual interests, a maxim “as obvious as the very principles of mathematics.” In making this case the author joined others there who demanded an end to the many restrictions placed on the trade in food, restrictions that derived from a long paternalistic tradition in the West according to which municipal authorities had the responsibility for ensuring an adequate supply of unspoiled food at an accessible price. The works of Adam Smith were crucial in providing a theoretical basis for the critics of the older system, ranging from local traders in Bahia to the Colonial Minister in Lisbon. The latter had been enthralled by The Wealth of Nations from the age of 22, just two years after its first publication. A Bahian lawyer published his Principles of Political Economy (Princípios de economia política) in 1804, just a year after Jean-Baptiste Say had published his equally effective treatise on the same topic in France. A series of measures enacted in the 1790s and early 1800s by the city council and the Governor-General in Bahia reflected the growing acceptance of these new policy directions by, for instance, lifting price controls not only on beef but on foodstuffs generally. These tendencies demonstrate an intellectual unity between Europe and the Americas and the imperative that historians adopt a broader Atlantic perspective in all their work.