ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to redress the imbalances and to fill the lacunae by presenting a series of case studies that bring Southern Europe and its Atlantic colonies both under the same analytical lens and fully into historiographical mainstream. The chapter provides a long-running scholarly discussion of the connections tenuous and robust, explicit and subterranean between enlightenment thought and government reform in the long eighteenth century. The scope and contours of enlightened reform must be adjusted in order to accommodate a typical, unfamiliar, or divergent conditions and factors, many arising from the peculiar conditions wrought by colonialism or vast gulf separating social and economic conditions in Southern Europe from the rest of the Continent. The chronological boundaries of enlightened reform, therefore, must be expanded because the same issues and debates persisted and even became more important during, the tumultuous epoch which coincided with the French Revolutionary wars and the dissolution of the Iberian empires.
