Cameralism in Spain

Abstract

Elements of Police was undertaken in the 1780s, there was already an understanding of the "science of police" in Spain. Crucial to this dissemination was a jour-nal that had been influential since the 1760s. Justi's translations, how-ever, were undertaken as part of a broader translation project that played a fundamental role in promoting the improvement of the monarchy's resources. Two sets of actors in this process can be identified: (i) those individuals involved in the Economic Societies of Friends of the Country in the Crown of Aragon and (ii) the powerful Castilian-Asturian group of ministers. The first disseminated new ideas for increasing the happiness of the people, including the promotion of the liberty of trade across the trans-oceanic Spanish dominions of authority; the adoption of new techniques to improve agriculture, mining; and they also encouraged the colonisation of uninhabited areas through the establishment of military regimes to organise new settlements.This chapter considers the place of cameral science in eighteenth-century Spanish political-economic thought, with an emphasis on two Spanish translations by the cameralist thinker Johann Heinrich Gottlob von Justi. His Elements of Police ( Grundsätze der Polizeywissenschaft 1756) was translated into Spanish twice, the first in Barcelona in 1784, the second in Madrid in 1791. 1 Other Cameralist writers, including Jakob Friedrich Bielfeld (1717-70), Friedrich II (1712-86) and Joseph Sonnenfels (1732-1817) were all translated into Spanish around the same period. However, the historiography has misattributed the translation of Justi's Élemens from 1791, questioning the appropriation of cameral ideas in Spain over the second half of the eighteenth century as established by the pioneering studies of European cameralism by Ernest Lluch, and opening a path for further research into Justi's translations into Spanish. Despite their differences, both translations were part of a common initiative disseminating European economic ideas so as to shape the ongoing Bourbon reforms, which were intended to improve circumstances in the vast intercontinental territories of the Spanish monarchy. There is evidence that, before the first translation of Justi's