La circulación de las ideas económicas en el Río de la Plata: las “Noticias de los campos de Buenos Aires y Montevideo para su arreglo” [1794]

Abstract

This paper contributes to the knowledge of the circulation of economic ideas in the Rio de la Plata. It offers a recon-struction of the intellectual sources and references used by the author of a very well-known manuscript dated on 1794 titled Noticias de los campos de Buenos Aires y Montevideo para su arreglo. The main theme of that piece is how to grow and multiply regional wealth, a subject that forged many intellectual pieces in Spanish America along the late 18th century, when many thinkers and policy-makers were involved in the task of improving the position of the Span-ish Empire relative to their rivals. This paper makes evident that the Noticias’ author did a pragmatic use of concepts and statements that belonged to a kind of common sense of his time on economic development, and also that he deployed these ideas and statements as intellectual resources to defend his own interests.