Free Ports within Empire: The Intellectual Origins of Spain’s Intra-Imperial System of Free Trade, 1765–1789

ABSTRACT Between 1765 and 1789, the Spanish crown issued a series of comercio libre decrees that liberalised trade between Spanish America and peninsular Spain. What was the crown attempting to do by relaxing trade restrictions within the empire? Because the comercio libre decrees only authorised free trade within the confines of the empire, it may be easy to conclude, as the extant scholarship has, that these decrees were a delayed attempt to revitalise an increasingly obsolete mercantilist system. Indeed, Spain’s new imperial system of free trade appears to be little more than an outmoded form of protectionism centred on hoarding bullion. This article pushes against this perspective and shows that Spain’s decrees of comercio libre were part of an attempt to erect a peculiar interconnected system of free ports within the empire. Even though Spain’s free trade system excluded international trade, its intellectual architects deployed Enlightenment political economy to dynamize and integrate the imperial economy while avoiding the increasingly bellicose competition for international markets that was ascendant among European empires.