Abstract
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title> <jats:p>In the eighteenth century, a host of Spanish statesmen compared well-ordered empires to harmonious machines and devised a comprehensive plan to liberalize and integrate the imperial economy. The main initiative of this economic plan was a commercial policy that contemporaries called comercio libre, which entailed replacing the traditional fleets and galleons with a new system of free trade within the empire. The statesmen who designed this new imperial vision became convinced that the pursuit of markets, rather than military power alone, was the key to succeeding in a modern commercial society. But where their European counterparts remained committed to international trade, Spanish ministers focused on integrating Spain’s metropolitan and colonial territories. In fact, Spanish statesmen reasoned that the Hispanic world’s vast territories were a microcosm of the global economy that could become both self-sufficient and impervious to international commercial pressures. They also recognized that the viability of this closed commercial empire depended on synergizing millions of subjects across Spain’s dominions, which is why they insisted on the importance of integrating Indigenous and Afro-descendant wage workers and consumers. Combining intellectual history, Atlantic history, and the history of the Bourbon reforms, Assembling an Imperial Machine shows that, rather than a mercantilist atavism, the Hispanic world’s commercial reforms represented a genuine attempt to solve the dilemmas of early modern globalization, an endeavor that, in turn, inaugurated the enduring fascination with erecting a free trade bloc in Latin America.</jats:p>