Juan Polo y Catalina: From Mercantilism to Adam Smith
Juan Polo y Catalina, of Aragonese birth, studied humanities and jurisprudence and then devoted his life to the clergy He combined his university studies with those of economics at the Catedra de Economia Civil y Comercio of the Real Sociedad Economica Aragonesa de Amigos del Pais, just founded in 1784, which followed the model of the university chair created in Naples by Bartolome Intieri and directed by Antonio Genovesi.2 He belonged to the third graduating class (1795-99) and studied under the first professor in this subject, Lorenzo Normante, an attorney of the Reales Consejos who taught his students cameralist ideas, and most especially those of the Baron of Bielfeld, as well as those of Richard Cantillon,Jean Franςois Melon, David Hume, Etienne Bonhom de Condillac andJosiah Child.
Bernardo Danvila’s (1779) Lecciones de economia was initially used as the textbook for teaching economics, and it was closely inspired by Cantillon’s agrarian mercantilism.3 Soon after these classes were initiated, Aragonese attorney Victorian de Villava translated the Lecciones de Comercio, o bien de Economia Civil, by Abbot Genovesi (1785-86), and from then on, it became the basic textbook of the university chair for teaching the subject. From the beginning, however, there was opposition from the more reactionary sectors of Zaragoza society, especially from the clergy, who condemned these teachings before the Court of the Inquisition.4
This was what Polo y Catalina was taught in the very beginning, and he proved to be an outstanding student and conducted several highly meritorious studies, among them, the elaboration of the balance of trade for the Kingdom of Aragon. As a result, when his teacher, Lorenzo Normante, was summoned to Carlos IV’s court to work in the Treasury Secretariat, Polo y Catalina temporarily occupied the university chair, but for a short period of time, for two years later he himself was summoned to the court to occupy a position in the Department of Public Works of the Kingdom and of the Balance of Trade (Oficina de Fomento), very possibly at the request of another Aragonese, Eugenio Larruga, who had been assigned to the Trade Balance Office in 1795.
It was there that the first economic statistical studies were drawn up, among which the Censo de frutosy manufacturas de Espana e islas adyacentes, published in 1803, stands out. Larruga had an industrialist tendency (Fontana Lazaro, 1995, 15-16), which very likely, together with the studies carried out for the creation of the census, were responsible for Polo y Catalina abandoning the mercantilist ideas he had learned as a student. Little by little he began to embrace the industrialist creed that we analyze later on.5
At the previously mentioned Trade Balance Office, Polo y Catalina collaborated in finalizing and publishing the Censo de frutos y manufacturas (1803), which would later be highly criticized, and he was asked to prepare an “Interrogatorio a los pueblos de Espana,” whose purpose was to draw up industrial statistics annually in the country. With this aim in mind, he prepared a programmatic text that established the work procedure for preparing these censuses, to which he attached an explanation based on theoretical grounds intended to justify the operations to be carried out.
The goal was none other than to determine the status of the factories and industry in Spain, for as he declared,
If we do not know the total production of our industries, it is not possible to correctly establish the entrance and exit duties, for if we do not know the lack or excess of the different commodities, the duties would be arbitrarily established, and this arbitrary taxation could result in the prosperity or the devastation of our factories. (Polo y Catalina, 1802)
This text takes on special importance because, in the notes prepared for the elaboration of the previously cited Interrogatorio, Polo y Catalina evidenced a great deal of knowledge about the work of authors who had carried out similar studies in other European countries, such as Ambrose Marie Arnould, Jacques Peuchet, Jean Franςois de Tolozan, Arthur Young, Thomas Brook Clarke and Franςois Gerboux, and he also relied on the theoretical grounds presented by Smith, Cesare Beccaria, Germain Garnier and Jean Herrenschwand, even though, as we will see in the next section, Polo y Catalina criticized the latter two due to their anti-industrialist orientation (Sanchez, 2005, lvi- lviii).
And finally, in 1804, at the request of his superiors at the Treasury Secretariat, he prepared a long text entitled “Introduction a las descripciones historico-politicas de las fabricas e industria de Espana, en las que se desentranan elementalmente los principales puntos de la economia civil sobre esta materia y se expone el metodo seguido en estos trabajos.”The text did not have any scientific pretensions, but it will help us analyze two relevant matters: Polo y Catalina was one of the Spanish economists who was most familiar with Smith’s work, and he was also the one who conducted the most furious attack known against physiocracy and its followers in the period in which he wrote.
Polo y Catalina was especially critical of Garnier, author in 1796 of the Abrege ele- mentaire des principes de l'economie politique (1796), and in 1802 of the most widely known translations into French—after those of l'abbe Blavet and Jean-Antoine Roucher—of Wealth of Nations (Smith, 1802). Polo y Catalina’s text, prepared as an introduction to economic statistics of the Castilian province of Avila, was not published for reasons of political opportunity, and it remained unpublished and somehow ended up for fortuitous reasons in the British Library.6
Polo y Catalina remained in the Treasury Secretariat of the Spanish government in which he was promoted as a government official until the country was invaded by Napoleonic forces in 1808. At a time when members of the government, together with the most prestigious intellectuals, were divided between the defenders of the national forces and the supporters of the emperor’s brother, Jose Bonaparte—the so-called afran- cesados, or pro-French supporters (Artola, 1989)—he opted for the national side and was elected as a member of the Cortes of Cadiz in 1810, of which he was temporarily appointed president. He belonged to several commissions, although we lost track of him in 1813, before the Cortes Extraordinarias was dissolved. When the despotic king Fernando VII returned to power in 1814, he carried out a brutal purging that did not include Polo y Catalina, for if he was alive, he would have surely been among those suffering reprisals (Villanueva, 1820).
That same year Polo y Catalina had requested a leave due to illness. In the years 1812 and 1813, there were several serious epidemics in Cadiz, one of which could have been responsible for his death. We should remember that if his papers, which included the “Informe sobre las fabricas e Industria de Espana,” appeared in Bordeaux and from there ended up in the British Library, it is because his colleague at the Treasury Secretariat, Bernardo de Iriarte, was a pro-French supporter and found among his belongings the writings of his friend and colleague Polo y Catalina.
3.