ABSTRACT OF PAPER
Title: The Portuguese Economic Thought and the Debate on Free Trade in the late 18th Century and early 19th century
Author: Vilagra Bruno
This presentation will examine, in comparative approach, the writings of luzo-brazilian authors that were a part of a tradition concerned with the issue of free trade, in the context of Portuguese Empire in the late 18th and early 19th century. The theoretical eclecticism appears to have been the main feature of these authors when dealing with the freedom of economic agents mobilising different currents of thought to defend, sometimes, the same position. José da Silva Lisboa and Joaquim Rodrigues de Brito were protagonists of a huge debate, in early 19th century, on free trade in the Portuguese Empire frameworks. This discussion has been crystallised on historiography as the shock between two different economics theories: the physiocrats, and Smith's ideas. However, when we observe more carefully the luzo-brazislian writings, from the two final decades of the 18th century, we notice that the issue of free trade was already present in these texts, but with positions less defined than Silva Lisboa and Rodrigues de Brito, and sometimes not understood as opposites.
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