Conference Review
Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, 1750-1830
12-14 December 2007
Summary Abstract
The workshop sought to broaden and reinvigorate the debate about the connections between enlightenment thought and government reform in Southern Europe and its overseas empires.
The participants, drawn from universities in Britain, Latin America, Continental Europe, and North America compared and contrasted the varieties of enlightened reform in Italy, Portugal, France, Spain, Brazil, and Spanish America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Emphasis was placed on the exchanges of ideas about reform across states and empires, and between the Old World and the New.
The workshop, which took place in CRASSH, was sponsored by CRASSH, Trinity College, the Centre for History and Economics, the Centre of Latin American Studies, the Royal Historical Society and the George Macaulay Trevelyan Fund of the Faculty of History at the University of Cambridge.
Event Report
The conference was a tremendous success. What was perhaps most surprising was the willingness of the participants to ‘trespass’ beyond their sub-fields and try to address problems of broader interest. Among these were: what role did ‘public culture’ play in limiting or expanding the state’s ability to shape society? How did the meaning(s) of reform shift in European as opposed to American contexts? Were Spain, Portugal and Italy merely ‘imitating’ French innovations? What role did British ideas and Britain’s imperial ‘example’ play as policy-makers devised plans for reform? The emphasis of the discussion, therefore, was on exchanges of ideas across state boundaries and the transmission of ideas across the Atlantic. The conference volume will be published by Ashgate as part of its ‘Empires and the Making of the Modern World’ series, probably in late 2009.
