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I'm Alexandra Otoliberte, a host of the channel, and I have the great delight today of being joined by Edward Jones-Gonadera to discuss his new book, the Diplomatic Enlightenment, Spain, Europe, and the Age of Speculation, published by Brill in 2021. Ed, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, Alexander. Thanks for having me.
Ed, we'd really love to begin by hearing a little bit about you. Could you tell us a little bit about yourself and your background and how you reach the topic of the Diplomatic Enlightenment? Yes, though. I mean, I've listened to a few of you interviews and a lot of people talk about research about its kind of underground and the kind of inspirational teacher.
I think I trace my story back a little bit to my upbringing, so I was born and raised in Madrid and Spain. And if I was English and my mother's Spanish, and I was really surprised by how the two sides of the family understood the culture of the other side. And in a sense, there's a way that you can read me trying to find the divergence of that divergence between the British Industrial Revolution and then what happened to Spain in the 18th and 90th centuries back to the study of the Enlightenment. So I think I was always trying to show that actually the two cultures were more likely than it seemed.
And I think that definitely drove me in studying this kind of thing. I think I was also quite aware of how different national historiographies and different kind of national sub perceptions can be and how there's a need to kind of critique and approach both sides with a kind of critical case. So yeah, I think that's kind of where it came from. I'm not sure I have much more to talk about.
No, I think it's brilliant. It's always lovely to hear when there's a kind of a personal connection to history because I think ultimately that's what drives so many historians and people who are interested in history to really take up these subjects with great gusto. And I think that that's a very positive way to get into it. But let's pick up then a little bit on these kind of national differences because that's something that really is fundamental to shaping the book a little bit.
And Spain, as many people know, quite often takes a backseat in Enlightenment histories or history of the Enlightenment. So I was wondering if maybe for those who are perhaps less familiar with the Spanish case, whether you could perhaps tell us a little bit about some of the ways in which the Spanish Enlightenment has been characterized, especially maybe throughout the 19th and kind of early 20th centuries, and maybe some of the problems that have come out of this characterization or dare we even say tropes of the Spanish Enlightenment and that maybe raise some problems for those like yourself who were studying this period. Yeah, that's a very good question of historiography on specific topics while understanding the limits of your own view of it as an important by present day debate. One of the things that I like to book is that by the time that 19th to early 19th century Spanish was supposed to start to think about the Enlightenment.
They've already kind of embraced a package of Enlightenment as defined by very mature enlightenment, particularly French Enlightenment work that presumably systems of a kind of logic where the Enlightenment needs leads to the nation and one nation state. And the Spanish have this problem that they clearly have a nation state because someone has beaten Napoleon famously and this is kind of the mecha of the nation upon which a lot of the politics of the science built on. But at the same time they can't seem to find the Enlightenment and everything around them points to the fact that they're made in the grarian, largely under educated, largely under industrialized territory with what seems like an owe to all imperial crisis. So they try to kind of figure out how they can then enlighten the nation but have come about somewhat more down at least and a lot of the progressive movement but emotionally in the 19th century, don't even really bother so much to study whether there wasn't a lifetime but rather just try to implement it so they see themselves as implementing in a kind of delayed way what's already happened in other countries, particularly Britain and France.
So, and by the time you get to the 20th century really a lot of the historiography that emerged by Spain on the topic of the Enlightenment is trying to explain the genealogy of the Franco dictatorship which makes a big sense that leads to a view of the 18th century as a kind of era of obscurity and fanaticism where the Inquisition was quite dominant and where kings kind of followed these evil queens and they're the very kind of misogynistic strain in the way that queens like Gernes and Foniis were seen at the time. And then what we get with the advent of democracy in Spain is the maturation of the kind of view of the Enlightenment in Spain as being kind of a moderate Catholic or Enlightenment that comes about toward the end of the century. That reads the classics and engages with them critically but that embraces them in a way that is perhaps Atlanticism and in that sense is interesting because it leads to different views of cosmopolitanism and different views of Spain's role in Europe. But it doesn't go much further than that and in a sense there's a number of pursuits I think of trying to find a more dire time to find a bigger life.
Then trying to find a Spanish thinker that is somehow off that rank of abstraction so people I guess were in the chol there's no need to claim to question that. So my effort in the book really in a sense what I was trying to say was even if you agree with my interpretation I'd agree to go back to the like and look at what actually happened rather than take the historiographical readings for granted and just projecting across 100 years and we can talk a little bit about some of the implications that with other sedimentary kind of layers that still remain in the one interpretation of the Enlightenment today. Yeah, it very much feels from the book that Spain and the Spanish Enlightenment has fallen victim to so much of this comparative Enlightenment approach that takes place within this historiography. But what you do so successfully is then you take this backdrop that you've just framed for us and then you reframe the Enlightenment in Spain as what you call then this diplomatic alignment, this lovely title of the book.
So I'm wondering then before we dig into what that means and whether we talk about it as a conceptual framework or something like that is to actually maybe just outline a little bit of what's actually happening in Spain at this time that renders diplomacy as such a vital part of its political and intellectual climate perhaps more so than in other, especially European nations at this time. Yes, I've been thinking a lot about this in part because I was expecting people to focus so much on the title because I, as we'll talk about later, I do qualify what I mean by it. But when you give it that much prominence in the book, it does seem to catch people's attention so it's going to people that try to ask what that means. What I think is interesting is if you think about the literature in Spain and kind of opposite monarchy or even the idea of polycentric monarchy, there's always this kind of constant negotiation across territories of power with different agents, with different interests, and even with kind of competing states interests within the context of the housework realm.
So this is really an empire that relies on diplomacy, if you think about child's affairs, or if you think about it for a second, a lot of these successes are the silk love of diplomacy covering up the fift of Spanish power. But the diplomacy is not before me, it really kind of plays a role and it's really instrumental to the preservation of the shaping of Spanish power in Europe. And so what happens in the treaty book, the war succession and the treaty book, so we're talking about 1700 to 1714, is that Spain is made away by its diplomacy, which wants an offense shaped much of European little debt, now carries no weight. So its representation of the Congress is minimal.
And in a sense, this is for me particularly clear in John Schrodling's recent recent book, Trading with the Enemy, the really in a sense that the, the, the, the, the problem to be managed, it's an object of speculation. And the main thing is to keep it away from the hands of singular king, and to kind of make sure that its resources and its territories are split up in a way that means that this kind of fear of universal monarchy is kind of vanished, and that the balance of power can be established in Europe. And so, you know, kind of, there's a kind of crisis of physical consciousness, you want to put in those terms, where this kind of, G&O power was kind of truncated, and, and Spanish kind of realized that there's a kind of crisis of diplomacy, which is a kind of vehicle, traditional vehicle with Spanish power. And so what I try to argue in the book is that this crisis then leads to a kind of intellectual regeneration that tries to adapt to the new world of 18th century diplomacy.
I like this idea of the difference between the performative diplomacy and the diplomacy that's kind of the nuts and bolts of the functioning of the empire, but we'll come to that in a moment. Something that I wanted to pick up on kind of before we talk about these kind of larger intellectual themes, but I suppose very much fits into that anyway is it's coming back to what you were saying about about going back to the archive and, you know, a really fascinating dimension of your book is, is it's, it's focused on a particular type, which is almonics, and this is certainly not a form of text, something like the treaties or the encyclopedia that we so commonly associate with the spread of enlightenment ideas and so I was wondering if you might kind of tell us a bit about the role that they were playing in this diplomatic and I'm coming back to this idea of diplomacy, and also perhaps how they were differing a bit from almonics in other parts of Europe because they seem to play quite a different role to the almonics that we particularly know, for example, in England at that time. Yes, so this was kind of my favourite part of the book and I think that was fun to write and it's the sort of the matters to be, I'm surprised that people are just interested to get it. I think it connects exactly the kind of way we're left off with the last question in the sense that by 1714, imagine in the future the political future is saying it's incredibly difficult.
The French prince is now the king and when France has been saying the enemy for a century, you have the Econceladors with two kind of overseas and also local, but particularly the overseas consoladors really kind of pushing back against the new boy being crowned in the reforms and really kind of entrenching some of those illicit commercial interactions that they've created with British and Dutch companies and powers during the war's lines of accession to compensate for the loss of the weakening of some of those imperial circuits that don't really thrive during the war. And even peritorially, there was a question of where the Spain kind of end and what are the new limits and during the war's under successions that actually will almost be wiped out of Europe, so I'm going to compare it to Detroit and I'm going to leave behind a contestant too. So it really is really difficult to imagine the future in off-site and in Spain at the time. And I was fortunate enough while doing a PhD to get funding from the DAD Cambridge hub, which is managed by Chris Crici and Chris Young to do a series of workshops on the global legacy, right now, and so fortunately I had people who knew and understood the kind of relationship between how and how I was talking to me about these things while I was looking through some of these thoughts on Almanac.
And in the end, my interpretation, my reading of these Almanac is that they combine, they become incredibly popular in Spain and they're the main author of these Almanac's is the author of Sousie D'Aruel, who is truly, I mean, he publishes this best-seller in Spanish context. And they're mostly doing alien writings, but there's also kind of a rock, criticism of power. And the main thing is that they're incredibly popular and they mix the kind of liquidation about the future that you see in traditional Almanac with a kind of increasingly critical political edge that really kind of gets taken up by other authors who realise that there's medium information in front of the popular one. And so use it to kind of underseminate choreographic, economic, and political information, even kind of historical information with the explicit reference in the text to kind of say, you know, this is to educate you and to educate the reader so that, you know, what happened that you can kind of, if not predict at least be ready for certain events that may come.
And there's kind of this proliferation of learning Almanac's that flows from this period of crisis when it becomes incredibly difficult to predict the future. And I have to say, I mean, this is maybe anachronistic, but I do definitely think that there's a connection with forms of information today to do with threads, something, you know, from Instagram, Facebook, and a lot of these platforms where the format is the same and kind of ridiculous, very serious political and kind of boring stuff is all presented in the same format. And one of the issues we're having today is precisely that these kind of platforms don't differentiate between between these, you know, between fake news and real news, between kind of heavy news and less heavy news. I mean, it's maybe the no need to be so kind of turning about, it's also going to something nice about the media that combined things and what you can just kind of scroll and scroll and scroll.
So, so I think the kind of view of the Almanac's is responding to a change in the public sphere today. And I think that the Almanac's have a lot to tell us about the 21st century type of medium by which we learn about the world today. Sorry, I have an answer to your point about how they differ from other countries, but just briefly, I mean, I'm not interested in thinking this. I think it's compared to Benjamin Franklin's four-year-old Almanac, which is kind of seen as planting seeds, as a broader independent, kind of in colonies.
But by and large, yeah, I mean, I think for my reading in the rest of Europe, the use of Almanac's a lot more land and mundane. And what we see in Spain probably has to do with the legacy of the Baroque and a very strong culture of the Picresque. So, that's kind of turned on its head so that the gaze we get is not the rich audience kind of thinking of the world through the kind of gaze of the imagined invented pool. But rather in attempt to really introduce people of all classes to the world of the courts and the world of diplomacy.
It really, I mean, it's such a fascinating part of the book. I mean, I was really engaged at this point. I wasn't throughout the rest of the book, but the Almanac's are particularly unique in that way. And I was wondering, do you have, I realize that this obviously isn't the focus of your research, but do we have an idea of who the actual readers were of the Almanac's?
Because it really does make a huge difference. If this really is a huge vehicle for enlightening the populace, which is such a popular idea at that time. That's right. Yeah, I know that would be the next step.
I hope that people will take up this point and investigate it because absolutely, I mean, I looked into how the writers were thinking about it. Interestingly, there is a source from the time that expresses the rise of the very popularity of the media. And does the mass basically in sales actually, if we look at the number of sales, we actually cannot just say that this is a source for ignorant people, actually a number of people who can read and write and who are capable of how they, this particular source, or how interpreted, who are educated, basically are interested in this medium going on the basis of the sales. So the next step, absolutely, would be to look at the fusion of the throughout the peninsula.
And we can of course talk about the point I tried to make with the contrast with the financial Atlantic and Pacific, where the medium is probably best. And you've anticipated where I wanted to go next, which is to really pick up on this Atlantic connection. You're not just talking about domestic concerns, a huge part of the book is thinking about Spain's vast empire. And part of this discussion examines the growth of political economy, and especially looking at arguments which are supporting what you call a corporate model of empire, in which empire is being refrained in terms of investment, in terms of profit.
I was wondering if you could tell us a bit about why this corporate model, well firstly, what is this corporate model, I suppose, of empire, and why is it seems being particularly beneficial because it has a very political dimension as well as an economic one. And how this then went on to kind of affect what was this existing, very longstanding by that time, Spanish colonial system. Yeah, no, it's a great question. I actually was asked about this recently in relation to Doukum even if the difference is never made explicit.
But yeah, I mean, what I think we see is kind of acceptance on behalf of a lot of Spanish officials that in a sense a lot of the Northern European corporate ventures have, if not replaced, re challenged by the Caribbean model, and above all really fostered cooperation with a lot of the elites in the Americas and in the Philippines. So it's not just kind of theoretical challenges, it's a very practical one. And the question of course, you know, the corporations and the Spanish empire is very complicated because in a sense the Spanish empire is always about corporate interest from the beginning to the court is something like that. So, my leaning into collapsing the difference between Northern European companies and this kind of by bearing corporate model was a kind of critique of a strand of a kind of historiography that kind of separated the British and Spanish empire, whereby the British empire was an empire of trade with the kind of democratic thought being embedded in something like a Virginia company.
And then Spanish empire has been one made up of patronage of religion above all of law. So law then serving as kind of a space of conversation or part of the conversation of power for the kind of implementation of power. And I mean, this is going off the tangent, but I think there's almost a kind of legal modernity that's been built around this model now in the field of avirium and sticky Spanish studies where people have really embraced this idea that in a sense a lot of what we would today would call modernity, a lot of the pursuit of certain values of the country with enlightenment, which is going off the line of the young government was the election on trial. The idea is that the legal structures really provides basis to seek justice from below and empower agency of everyone's agency really from below and there's work being done by 25 others on this idea of politicians.
So basically, yeah, this idea of seeking justice, seeking progress, seeking a community of not kind of the seeds of the nation through legal means. I think there's a lot to say. I mean, there's a lot of merit there and I think a lot of really interesting stuff is coming out. Sometimes I miss the economics of it and I miss the, I wonder whether it's worth just remembering that the political economy is an important European invention or domain in a sense and I think corporations to go back to that point really emphasize that because they said precisely the crossroads.
And economic issues that we can use is kind of brought to the ground. And so that was kind of the idea with the kind of exercise that the corporations and yes, effectively we see the organisations of corporations as doing political mechanisms more than commercial ones. So there's never an emphasis on how this company is going to make x amount of money. Usually it's more about how is the company going to remedy a lack of accountability on the ground, a kind of corrupt fight for how would it so to check his rule.
If the king is in the case of the, particularly, arbitrarians and kind of Mexico's and engaged in kind of a romanticism. How can corporations be used to kind of check that power and create kind of pockets of investment that can say for the wellbeing of the people while these kind of imperial funds and eventually kind of happening at the same time. And I think one of the most interesting findings was this. Peruvian scheme to kind of send a polyglot and a minor to the kind of a grand tour of Europe to learn about the improvements in the mind that has happened in the century in which the techs, the keys of these kind of off-life keeping from the Americas and kind of stalling the development of this monside in the Americas.
It all feels strangely contemporary, doesn't it? This idea of corporations and a kind of speculation is somehow having a kind of political check. But that's probably something that we shouldn't go down right now. But so obviously then, you know, this kind of outlook to this kind of counter in this colonial attitude more generally is a universally accepted I think, it's probably not a difficult thing to imagine.
And you move and in the book to kind of discuss some of the backlash to a lot of these ideas that take place in the Spanish colonies, which is a really fascinating juncture in the book, and you focus a bubble here on Venezuela. And I was wondering if you might just tell us a bit about what happened in this specific scenario and actually some of the repercussions that this kind of backlash, these kind of confrontationalist had for the Spanish empire. Yeah, so conceptually this is quite difficult, and I didn't really elaborate it, well elaborate on it in the book, but effectively the way that this environment is understood is through this idea of kind of factitimal, whereby there's a kind of agreement between the king and subject, and it's a kind of contractual understanding which carries it instead of kind of a responsibility and obligation to some by-sorry. And I think what happens is that corporations use a different particularly joint stock or even regulated companies, they introduce a different relationship between the king and subject because all of a sudden there's something in between that and ultimately companies pursue their own profits, whether they can kind of capitalise the growth of trade or channel trade towards different areas of the empire, which is how the advocates of these companies even and defend that they're an unstiffed, that's one thing.
So there's no denying that they kind of get in the way of existing economic relationships, which in the case of the Caracas Company was very much the goal to kind of disrupt some of the connections between the Duchess and the company and the locally and also the company of free blacks in Caracas. And so what happens is that for the War of Jenkins the Caracas Company tries to regain some of the economic weight that had in the region, but during the War a lot of the local merchants have kind of recovered a lot of the economic link that we have with Gresau and the kind of Dutch merchants. And so this leads to a bubbling tension that there really can be because the Caracas Company is found different, which really explodes in 1749, and there's a massive riot in Caracas against the company. And immediately you're questioning where does the company end and where does the kind of crown begin emerges, right, because in the sense it's a royal company so it's sponsored by the king, but at the same time the king is meant to provide for the subject, so not for a company.
And so it was fascinating reading about the Spanish kind of in the council within these trying to make sense of the protest on the ground because it's a real fear that it will lead to a dominant effect, this protest and that it will then go to Cuba because the Havana Company is equally popular in amongst some sectors of the commercial elite, although it has to be said that the Havana Company is different because it actually benefits the local elite. And so this is going to be a clear thing that they will lead to the collapse of the empire and it will lead to a wave of independence. And there's an incredible quote actually by one of the authors that I would say we take the introduction of the book with where the author basically says people are really suffering in the Indies and if they see that some truly rebel against the king that will be inspired by that model and they'll see that you really can project your authority across this much, this much distance and space. So yeah, basically this kind of attempt to reinforce some of these corporate elements of the empire that grants more authority to the crown leads to a kind of huge debate on what it means to be a subject in the empire, what it means to participate in commercial and everything in the Spanish empire.
And in the end it leads to an entrenchment of those who are the positions of those who believe that pre-trade is better than one of the type of commerce that relies on the choice of companies or regulate companies and those who advocate for companies. So in the end it would be actually an institution arranged with interest in the result after all this revolt because the company is actually given a little bit more authority on the ground but it's also institutionalised so it's meant to be more directly meant to be in dialogue with the other political authorities, more traditional political authority on the ground. And something that I think that example also does is really draw attention to the role of individuals within this entire framework that you're talking about and throughout the book more generally because it's not just the abstract kind of level of state and governmental corporations or kind of larger groups but it's also the mechanization of the individuals who are part of these. And that's something that I wanted to kind of move to talk about because obviously it's very difficult to talk about diplomacy and the diplomatic enlightenment without talking about those who are actually doing diplomacy.
So not just those who are diplomats per se and with title but those who are involved in the various multifaceted processes of diplomacy. So I was wondering if you might kind of give listeners, I don't know maybe a couple of examples or just a kind of an insight into who maybe some of these figures are who become these diplomatic players whether it's a kind of more formal or informal role. Yeah I mean that's a very good point. I play around with the idea of diplomats a lot in the book in the book and I think of someone like Thomas and I guess Thomas in Portugal he really kind of makes his career by being a diplomat in London and in Austria.
I think of someone like the Mackey the vaginal saw he's very keen on kind of thinking about French foreign policy and some BS schemes and all of these things. I am something I'm working on in a piece in a volume of country seeing a chapters two precisely on kind of in a sense relaunting some of the stuff that the Heng Scott worked on some time ago and on the relationship between between diplomacy and enlightenment and a kind of topology of yeah the precisely these agents who really make it quite difficult to kind of call them different as we think of people like go to a number of a column more recently has kind of said what do we do with some of these enlightened figures who also serve as a diplomat and unwed as the kind of traditional republic of letters and where to see and where to be the diplomatic space of stents. Anyway that's kind of theoretical rambling but in terms of the actual examples yeah I mean in terms of how we find the example of a particularly unfortunate man called John F. I was in my ganath who is instrumental in the early decades of urban rule and is incredibly stubborn and is very punitive and writes a lot on kind of different themes of reform and getting to trouble for trying to detail some of the powers of the Inquisition and so it's banished but from abroad as the case with many many different officials who are banished for instance by the Jesuits after the 1667 expulsion, the 1667 expulsion story they actually they continue to write and continue to act in the service of the urban Spanish crown and the people who got to characterize these people because they kind of disappear and they keep reading writing and then they service lives and then they send the skilled artists into this main form kind of core preventative to set up the three types of manufacturing and develop say for instance the clock or what's in the street and then they get sent as envoys to congresses and then they kind of say back again anyway so so one of the most interesting examples is precisely this one of my ganath who at this point in the 70s and he's asked to go to the congress of breeder which is in a particularly significant as long as anything happens in the middle of the war of Austro-congression and the war of dengue d'et and he has the exact opposite worldview of the minister is sent in there and the minister is trying to create a kind of plan of equilibrium in Europe and kind of make things into an arbitrage of Europe through diplomatic negotiations and this might not be able to do because that's really where that's an idea of some of these mathematical and maybe kind of theoretical aspects of the transmission of information and ideas from secret manuscripts to then published the secret manuscripts sound incredibly enticing I feel like every student will be zooming in to kind of hear about these but if we're talking about individuals you know someone who I found really fascinating in the book is Karl Wachal who is a really key player and is towards the latter half of your writing I wonder if you might just tell us a bit more about him and how he came to be such a fundamental intellectual and political role at this time so I mean Karl Wachal is really the protagonist of the book he is a difficult figure to study he didn't leave all that much behind in terms of kind of work but concerned like on his theoretical views of power but it did lead to an extent of correspondence and is not drawn that extensively so Karl Wachal is the sentence of Henry the Navigator and is frequently described as being Portuguese and not Spanish by both foreign and Spanish contemporaries and he's one of the who knows what to do with Timor Hosek's show and we're going to contest it with Portugal and his lineage as Duke of Adantus is again to do with a point in time when Spain and Portugal were quite nice he kind of has his transnational identity which is frequently explored in the literature on the 17th and 16th century I mean that story of uni-galobarians is quite common in the mainstream literature on the kind of Spanish golden age and the 17th century becomes a little bit fusent so Karl Wachal has this interesting dimension that he's going into this very noble family and many most about some time he has a very traditional upbringing and sent to study law and some philosophers a number of philosophers kind of remember one is particularly my Jans who's a particularly important philosopher remembers recalls seeing his father and recalls being quite impressed by his family this could also be a way to ingrati think of course one with Karl Wachal but I think it's significant that he recalls that he's got to go to his life and I'm hoping to go to Wachal's library of my dolis which traditionally could be very important kind of imperial European body but by that point it's influenced by his kind of but this is a fascinating place to study in general in terms of very long space because they have an insane amount of comedy and public facility and so a relationship with and the time so there are events they had a lot of them and in charge of choreographing this demonstration of power and his experience there shows you the look at the base that they had on a weekly basis as a bloody envoy the 1740s had been a lot of diplomatic context with a lot of alternated in Europe but I mean he actually said I feel uncomfortable lying about your claim to the throne this is in the context where the first thing is trying to claim it is the happened it's immediately rebuffed by an honest text that appears which is kind of Spanish as Spain's because playing an important episode for coming up with a really refers to your friend's Spain's space to go back from the Congress he hasn't needed that experience of arbitration so it's a bit of a center that separates it from France and then kind of it's a kind of absolute crown reduck so it would be kind of post post to Portugal and Spain but also including very importantly Britain so the idea is to have Britain and Spain work together and there's a scheme to effectively use a to a to a regulate European will invest in the company so they will have no incentive to be but that money that they invested and together will be so powerful turns to money and says can trust the bloody agreements we can definitely trust scary thought and the idea today that we can trust investment but I'll keep my point of view myself but it actually ties in quite nicely to what you've just been saying I was wondering if you might kind of thinking beyond the book a little bit here to reflect a bit on what actually your research is contributing with regards to kind of rethinking the sites of enlightenment so we know about the salon we know about all of these kind of traditional sites and spaces of enlightenment but I think what your book does is actually really challenge a lot of that and we've already discussed in our podcast today about the world almanacs but there are lots of other examples that you explore things like the silver mines or example mines more generally corporations economic societies and so forth but I think could quite easily be argued or made a case for as being sites of enlightenment as we might then talk about you know the different types of individuals and groups who become the enlightenment figures as well so just kind of interested to hear what you think your book is kind of contributing to this discussion regarding the spaces and sites of enlightenment yeah I mean I just put on that to be honest I mean so there is a kind of base in the book where you do get the somewhat traditional salon so there will be a guy that will be a guy that will be managed by of course if I do it when you like ask me there's a kind of aristocrat from the time and that kind of connects the standard bureaucracy with the legend I do have more confrenched salon and I think it's kind of in between but no like you say this question of sites is quite interesting and I mean the dramatic one is one maybe we want to talk about a lot but I was struck by the fact that we have to forget the dramatic settings where spaces fall in the exchange of ideas and I think the different have quite interesting in themselves now I'll move away from different in a second I think it's worth just stopping thinking about them because there's a lot of interesting thinkers because they don't have to be consistent they can gather and cross reference sources a lot of the material they leave behind is not well I got and a lot of the ideas and a lot of the kind of working through what we would call maybe political thinking is is and you only receive the progress in the way that they change about the way they think that if you follow it they correspond so thinking about the mundane administrators which other regional literature do I think of something like cameras and I think it's an important aspect of the book and I would hope that the more people would do that and yeah I mean in terms of the site specially in the context of and again, as I go back to the diplomatic role of the, or the tentative intellectual role of diplomacy in the revolutionary period also.
I don't really have any reason I have to say, I would just to say that it's just worth investigating the sources without thinking too much about historiographical prejudices over what type of information you expect to find there and really to approach the icon, obviously with a critical eye about the voices that are being listened to there. But not to assume that things might not be debatured or recorded in a specific site. That was very rambly, but I think that kind of, yeah, I think that's the main thing I have to say about some sites I think. And then you bring the book to a close by kind of closing and bring the end to the Spanish alignment and you offer here a number of broader conclusions and among them you offer some reflections on the relationship between diplomacy and reform, which is somewhat touch upon, but more precisely you really talk about the relationship between diplomatic failure and reform.
I was wondering if you might tell us a little bit about why this particular dynamic is such important consideration and maybe how it alters some of those existing preconceptions about the Spanish enlightenment that you so kindly outlined at the beginning of our discussion. Yeah, I think the idea of failure is fascinating. Even though in the Spanish literature, particularly in the 19th and 20th century, a lot of modernism is kind of riffing on a kind of fail but there's a very exciting project in the dream happening called failure, I think, failure 2020. And it does try to explore actually what we mean by failure and I would hope the more people will interrogate that.
I think again, attached to the black legend, there's a kind of sense of inevitability about failure. Whereas I see this kind of galvanizing force at least for these thinkers where there's a nice metaphor that I quite like, which is the idea of board games and seeing failure as a kind of, you've lost a game but we're playing another game and thinking about the social ability and speculation and a lot of these values that imagine in the 18th century as dealing with failures with toy incredibly common in economic life, in its country, Europe and throughout the world and we need to be in kind of the modern economy. And that not being really the end but a galvanizing intellectual force for thought and to reconfigure the angles and to think about the way you're playing differently and thinking about the type of speculation that you're making and going to hate and even though the way the idea of speculation should. And yeah, so I guess thinking about how different people for history have thought about failure and what did they talk about when they talked about failure would be an interesting way of analyzing this phenomenon in different contexts, particularly now that especially in the world, this idea of failure is now taking on a new meaning in the context of climate change and the way with approach to industrial progress and that model of economic growth.
And I think we'd better leave something for people to read and buy the book to kind of think about. So as we draw to a close, I was wondering if you might tell us a little bit about what you're currently working on and where the diplomatic enlightenment has led you to or is leading you to in the future. Yeah, so the next step is to look at the question of debt for the question of death and peace run throughout the running thread throughout the book. And I'm very interested now so I have a second book project which will be coming out recently, being accepted by reviewers for the publication and will be coming out whenever I get around to writing it on the relationships between external debt and the pursuit of Latin American nation and independence.
And there again, if we think of the work of David Eimettage and how many others there is a real winner that actually the pursuit of constitutional nation that was a diplomatic process. And an example of the book in the book of by A4 and a significant enough for a need in his case, he really wants to win picks to accept it. And you really see the challenges and the kind of the needs, great incentives for others to accept a change in the kind of geopolitical system by giving you independence that may not help them. And they have the relationship between finance and sovereignty takes on a very interesting dynamic through this idea of debt.
And basically having to incur in pretty difficult debt in order to find independence and then to secure that independence from the Spanish. I look forward to reading it in the near future. The book is the diplomatic enlightenment Spain, Europe and the age of speculation published by Berlin 2021. And thank you so much for being on the podcast today.
It's been a fascinating conversation. Thank you.