ABSTRACT
Vicente Alcalá-Galiano was a prominent scholar and Secretary of the Economic Society of Segovia. In the 1780s, he wrote one of the first translations of the The Wealth of Nations (WN) into Spanish. However, his work was not complete as it notably included a summary of book V of the WN. This chapter analyses how Alcalá-Galiano selected the excerpts of WN that he translated and their sources, which probably were French. The study extends to the historical context within which the WN was embedded and used as a theoretical framework to back the reform of the public finances prompted in 1785 by Pedro Lerena, Ministry of finance, for whom Alcalá-Galiano served during 1785–1788. Besides this, the chapter remarks on the different aspects of Smith’s thought that Alcalá-Galiano took from the WN and introduced into their writings in three critical moments of his life: 1785, 1806 and 1810–1813; these coincided respectively with Lerena’s reform, the approval of the Bayona’s Constitution and the period of the Cádiz Parliament.
