ABSTRACT
This chapter explores British attitudes toward Spain and its empire in the Age of Enlightenment. It examines how “Spain” was used as an example or counter-example in a range of British debates, from political economy to population to political thought. Far from a uniformly disparaging portrait, some eighteenth-century British observers were enamored of the Bourbon reforms while in the first decades of the nineteenth century, Spanish liberals were held up as a model to emulate.
