Some considerations on the influence of economic liberalism in the May Revolution of 1810?.

Lausanne

Congreso; 18th Annual Conference of the European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET): Liberalisms: perspectives and debates in the history of economic thought; 2014

European Society for the History of Economic Thought (ESHET)

The revolutionary process of May 1810 in Buenos Aires, capital of the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata, and its emancipatory consequences has a multiplicity of causes. The French Revolution, the independence of the United States, changes in the European countries? economies, which took place during the mid-eighteenth century, changes in the countries? economic and social relationships and their subsequent evolution constitute the context in which the events of this Spanish colonial territory occurred. Capitalist ways of economic organization in Europe have their roots buried in the sixteenth century, but in South America the dominant system after the age of "discoveries? was the feudalist one, which characterizes many of the existing relations in the American colonies despite its process of decomposition and the emergence of absolutist national states in Europe. In this historical context, the growing influence of liberal ideas, both political and economic, play an essential role in the revolutionary events. The new political ideas of European intellectuals together with the advent of works on the ?new science?, political economy, are the matrix of revolutionary thought. The opinions of Manuel Belgrano, Juan Hipólito Vieytes and Mariano Moreno, among others, are the key to understand the economic perspective of the revolutionary men. Late mercantilists, physiocrats and classical economists (mainly Spanish, British and French) marked these men?s economic thought. The relative economic ?backwardness" of the metropolis, its political reality and the social and political consequences this had for the Viceroyalty were a catalyst for the revolutionary process but also a limit which was reflected on disputes and debates among the protagonists of that historic moment. Changes of intellectual paradigms, the crisis of the colonial economy, the gradual emergence of institutions that would then characterize modern capitalism, political events in the Iberian Peninsula and the action of the "Men of May? gave birth to the new reality, although it did not happen without tensions and internal contradictions. The purpose of this paper is to review intellectual influences, mainly in the field of economics, based on the opinions of the main protagonists of that feat, as well as to consider some of the positions, (some more radical or eclectic than others), who decisively contributed to the end of the Spanish colonial system in South America.