Designing Prosperity: Institutions, Ideas, and Projects in Latin America in the Early 19th Century

How did revolutionaries-turned-statesmen think of economic growth in the newly independent territories of the Spanish and Portuguese Americas? The literature on the legacies of colonialism has mainly focused on how institutions established during the Iberian empires have constrained economic development in the region to our days. Yet, to 19th-century actors tasked with the formation of new sovereign units, the inherited structures of bygone imperial regimes presented a rich patrimony, becoming the building blocks of what would become their own legacies. In the political communities that outlived the Spanish empire, actors had access to the legal, commercial and financial structure put into place by the Bourbon monarchy based on the works of the Spanish Enlightenment. Brazil followed closely in the footsteps of the Portuguese monarchy and adopted its slavery-supported conception of a mercantilist society. How did Latin American statesmen reconcile these imperial legacies with the imperatives of state formation? How did they respond to the spread of liberal and physiocratic economic ideas throughout the Atlantic world? What was the place of prosperity in their plans and visions of sovereignty? This paper will examine these questions by looking at the circulation of economic ideas in the region and their influence on the design of economic policies. It will look at how English, Scottish and French treaties on political economy were translated to adapt to the local realities of non-imperial states, and how long-term institutions such as the church and slavery affected the idea that the government and private actors had the power to produce prosperity as states struggled to produce order.