Introduction: A Lost Text in the British Library

After an unsuccessful attempt at creating a great library in his residence at Ashridge, Francis Henry Egerton, the eighth Earl of Bridgewater, in 1825 ceded to the British Museum a large number of books and manuscripts from a variety of French, Italian and Spanish authors, which he had acquired over a period of several years.

This made it possible for the British Library to acquire the so-called Yriarte [sic] col­lection in 1835, which included several manuscripts from Bernardo de Iriarte, a Spanish politician and economist exiled in 1813 for having sided with the Napoleonic govern­ment after the French invasion of Spain and the “War of Independence” (Cotarelo, 1897). Iriarte died the following year in the city of Bordeaux without leaving any direct descendants, and his niece—his only heir—sold his manuscripts, which were added to the Egerton collection under the name of the Yriarte [sic] collection.

Afterward, the erudite Spaniard Pascual Gayangos, who had established his residence in London, between 1875 and 1893 drew up a catalog containing all the Spanish manu­scripts he had found in the British Museum’s library (Gayangos, 1875-93), an under­taking that allowed Aragonese historiography expert Eduardo Ibarra to select from that catalog those manuscripts that came from Aragonese writers, and he included them in an appendix to a work on social economic history studies in Spain (Ibarra, 1934).

The two aforementioned works include a set of texts written by the Spanish author Juan Polo y Catalina, which contained a study on the factories and industry in Spain, written in 1804 but unpublished, together with statistics from the kingdom of Aragon and other interesting texts of an economic nature (Gayangos, 1875-93, vol. 2: 128; Ibarra, 1934, 77-78).

If we consult this manuscript, we will discover the existence of a work by one of the leading followers of Adam Smith in Spain, which up until now has been unknown to historians of Spanish economic thought due to the simple fact that it had not been pub­lished and had not yet been located in the British Library’s collections. Robert Sidney Smith, the North American Hispanicist historian, who carried out the first exhaustive study of how English economic thought was received in Spain between 1776 and 1848 (R. Smith, 1957), did not include it among the authors who were familiar with and made reference to the work of the Scottish economist in Spain. Nor was it included in some of the more recent, documented and exhaustive works carried out on the reception in Spain of the ideas of the classical economists (Lluch and Almenar Palau, 2000; Almenar Palau, 2004).

It is well known that, due to the rigors of the Inquisition and later on to the cordon sanitario—which Floridablanca, the minister of Spanish king Carlos IV, established in 1791 as a result of the developments taking place in France after the outbreak of the rev­olution—Smith’s main economic work, Wealth of Nations, was not translated in its entirety by diplomat Jose Alonso Ortiz until 1794 (Smith, 1794).¹

This was made possible in conjunction with the connivance of the powerful Minister Manuel Godoy, who collaborated in mitigating the rigors of the Inquisition (Schwartz, 2000; Fuentes Quintana and Perdices, 1996). However, two years before, the Compendia (Esquisse) attributed to Condorcet, had been published and it appeared in the Bibliotheque de l'homme and referred to Smith’s work, although the author was not explicitly cited in the Spanish version.

The subsequent reception of Smith’s work in Spain has been studied extensively over the last three decades by several Spanish researchers (Fuentes Quintana, 1999-2005) and has led to diverse controversies as to the real or direct influence on some of the main Spanish economists of the Enlightenment (Llombart, 2000).

For the period included between the first complete translation of the work into Spanish (Smith, 1794) and the interruption due to the War of Independence, during which the previously cited work by Polo y Catalina had appeared, several direct or indirect influ­ences of Wealth of Nations were identified on writers such as the Count of Campomanes, Valentin de Foronda and G. M. de Jovellanos, among the leading Spanish economists of the period of the Enlightenment. In the decade of the 1790s, several more direct refer­ences like those appeared in other works by Alonso Ortiz, the translator of the work, together with Vicente Alcala Galiano and Ramon Campos.

The latter wrote in 1797 what was probably the most complete Smithian text to appear up until that time in Spain—in reality it was a summary of the work—entitled La Economica reducida aprincipios exactos, clarosy sencillos (Campos, 1797; Almenar Palau, 2004, 269-70).

2.