Blanco White y las cuestiones econo?micas

Between the end of the Enlightenment and the incipient liberalism, Blanco White was one of the most important Spanish intellectuals of the first half of the nineteenth century. His exile in England (1810)1841) and his mastery of the English language enabled him to relate to some of the great British economists and thinkers of the era, such as Malthus, Bentham, Whately, Senior or J.S. Mill. Despite this and his initial training in the business world, Blanco White never paid particular attention to socioeconomic issues. In fact, he has been primarily studied as political writer, journalist, man of letters or religious polemicist. However, he also addressed some issues of undoubted economic interest, as the slave trade, the situation of Spain in the early nineteenth century, the problem of the poor, or the colonial question and the overseas trade. This paper aims to examine how Blanco White approached these issues within the context of the ideas of his Spanish contemporaries. It also aims to show that Blanco’s ideas were largely rooted in a Spanish tradition of thought (full text in Spanish)