Fidel Tavarez

I am a Ph.D. candidate in history at Princeton University. I study the intellectual, cultural and administrative history of the Spanish Empire. I focus on the eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms, paying particular attention to the issue of commercial and administrative reform beginning in the 1740s. Rather than tracking their effects, I study the intellectual impetus that gave birth to these reforms. Hence, I worry most about tracing the debates and conceptual dilemmas that contemporary administrators faced in Enlightenment Spain and Spanish America. I study these debates both by placing them in the immediate Spanish context of their production and by tracing how Spanish administrators read, appropriated and interacted with the classic works of the European Enlightenment, particularly those concerning political economy and the rise of commercial society.