The westernisation of a western country. Between liberalisation and the continuity of corporate models: Économie Politique, secularism and the organisation of industry in eighteenth-century Spain

Abstract

During the eighteenth century, a seminal debate took place all over Europe, concerning the need for the liberalisation of industrial production and trade or the preservation of traditional corporations of artisans, which were frequently linked to religious associations. The successful example of Great Britain in economic terms alarmed the rest of the countries of Europe first, and opened a period of reflection later. The British model was generally considered as worthy of imitation and at the same time regarded with suspicion. The moral consequences of the end of corporations referred to the religious aspects of the traditional organisation of industry. However, particularly in Spain, the links between corporate guilds and religion was not a governmental objective, but social peace and economic success. Eighteenth-century Spanish governments were willing to encourage economic growth, while secularisation and democracy were out of question. Brotherhoods and fraternities lost their economic features, and their properties were eventually expropriated, in order to be converted into organisations of a purely religious nature. Enlightened policies did not strengthen the secularisation of the country, but the unfolding forces of liberalism. During the nineteenth century, they just weakened the corporations and diluted the element perceived as contrary to the free market.