Books by Edward Jones Corredera
The Unseen History of International Law: A Census Bibliography of Hugo Grotius' De Iure Belli Ac Pacis (1625-1650 Editions)
The Unseen History of International Law: A Census Bibliography of Hugo Grotius' De Iure Belli Ac Pacis (1625-1650 Editions), 2025
This book locates and analyses nearly 1,000 surviving copies of the first nine Latin editions of ... more This book locates and analyses nearly 1,000 surviving copies of the first nine Latin editions of Hugo Grotius’ De iure belli ac pacis (IBP), which were published between 1625 and 1650. Regarded as the foundation of modern international law, IBP was reissued at pivotal historical moments and celebrated by major scholars and politicians. This book explores IBP as a physical object, revealing its complex publication history and a treasury of handwritten marginalia that argue, agree, and adapt its contents. Reconstructing the publishing history of these first nine editions and cataloguing copies across hundreds of collections, The Unseen History of International Law provides fundamental data for reconstructing the impact of IBP across time and space. It examines annotations left by thousands of owners and readers over four centuries, offering unique insights into the evolution of international law. This book expands our understanding of IBP and the theory and practice of international law.
https://www.brepols.net/products/IS-9782503611211-1
Odious Debt: Bankruptcy International Law and the Making of Latin America Oxford University Press 2024
Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law (MPIL) Research Paper No. 11, 2022
This paper is a summary of a section of my forthcoming book, The Age of Odious Debt: Money, Const... more This paper is a summary of a section of my forthcoming book, The Age of Odious Debt: Money, Constitutions, and the Making of Latin America, under contract with Oxford University Press. The origins of the idea of odious debt, this book argues, can be traced to the Latin American pursuit of independence. The book reconsiders Alexander Sack’s timeline of the concept and shows that Latin American revolutionaries drew on international law and studied the works of Hugo Grotius, Emer de Vattel, and Jeremy Bentham to formulate consistent constitutional responses to the accumulation of colonial and foreign loans. This paper focuses on the political, legal, and economic thought of the Mexican revolutionary Lorenzo de Zavala, and shows how he tried to resolve the complex relationship between international finance, Mexico’s pursuit of a robust constitutional framework, and the price of independence.
Suggested Citation: Jones Corredera, Edward, The Age of Odious Debt: Money, Constitutions, and the Making of Latin America. A Research Note (May 31, 2022). Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law (MPIL) Research Paper No. 2022-11, Forthcoming in: The Age of Odious Debt: Money, Constitutions, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press), chap. 6., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4140679 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4140679
The Diplomatic Enlightenment, or the Spanish Reinvention of the Habsburg World
While scholars ha... more The Diplomatic Enlightenment, or the Spanish Reinvention of the Habsburg World
While scholars have suggested that the War of Spanish Succession fundamentally severed Austro-Spanish relations, eighteenth-century Spanish writers and reformers drew on the memory of the Habsburg Crown, and the study of its contemporary policies, to generate reforms, formulate new ideas about the global balance of power, and reaffirm long-standing commercial networks. This talk sheds light on the transversal eighteenth-century cultural and political connections between Austria and Spain; it draws attention to the ways these ties influenced the emergence of the Diplomatic Enlightenment, and considers the applicability of the term in a Central European context.
Papers by Edward Jones Corredera
Why International Lawyers Measure Time with a Telescope: Grotian Moments & Richard Falk’s Histories of the Future
Grotiana, Nov 18, 2021
This article contextualises the origins of the term Grotian Moment, coined and frequently redefin... more This article contextualises the origins of the term Grotian Moment, coined and frequently redefined by Richard Falk. By generating a conceptual history of the idea and its uses, the article draws attention to the ways that Falk’s sustained interest in the question of temporality and the nature of change in international law can inform present legal debates. The recovery of Falk’s efforts to engage with critics, geopolitical changes, and new legal ideas by reinterpreting and reimagining the meaning of a Grotian Moment sheds light on its relationship to questions of free trade, Eurocentrism, and revolutions in international law. By considering the methodological parallels with the work of Reinhart Koselleck, this article emphasises the importance of both historiographical and historical debates for the study of change in legal history, the analysis of the global legacies of Hugo Grotius, and the generation of expectations of the future in international law.
The End of Composite Monarchies: Hugo Grotius’s De iure belli ac pacis and Mid-Seventeenth-Century Iberian Diplomacy [A Critique of John Elliott's Work], The English Historical Review (Open Access)
English Historical Review, 2024
Free trade and the ghost story of the Bourbon alliance: Spain, free ports, and the Mediterranean Sea (1648–1765)
Free Trade and Free Ports in the Mediterranean, 2024
This chapter sheds light on the Spanish Crown’s response to the emergence of free ports in early-... more This chapter sheds light on the Spanish Crown’s response to the emergence of free ports in early-modern Europe. In the seventeenth century, rival European powers capitalised on and gradually replaced Spain’s careful balancing act of dynastic and commercial interests in the Mediterranean Sea. Following the Peace of Utrecht, Spanish officials sought to harness novel ideas of perpetual peace to improve the Crown’s standing in Europe. This chapter focuses on how eighteenth-century inter-imperial disputes over free ports in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans informed Anglo-Spanish negotiations on neutrality and arbitration. The start of the Seven Years’ War disrupted diplomatic efforts to reconcile Anglo-Spanish commercial interests and led to the reaffirmation of the Bourbon alliance. French expansionist ambitions, however, soon encouraged Spanish ministers to establish free ports throughout the empire. By drawing attention to the proposals of the Spanish prime minister Ricardo Wall and his network of officials, this chapter suggests that the growth of free ports in the Spanish Empire responded to debates about the prospect of an Anglo-Spanish balance of power in Europe and sought to undermine the establishment of an equilibrium that would turn Spain into a French province.
Why International Lawyers Measure Time with a Telescope: Grotian Moments Richard Falk’s Histories of the Future
Grotiana, 2021
This article contextualises the origins of the term Grotian Moment, coined and frequently redefin... more This article contextualises the origins of the term Grotian Moment, coined and frequently redefined by Richard Falk. By generating a conceptual history of the idea and its uses, the article draws attention to the ways that Falk’s sustained interest in the question of temporality and the nature of change in international law can inform present legal debates. The recovery of Falk’s efforts to engage with critics, geopolitical changes, and new legal ideas by reinterpreting and reimagining the meaning of a Grotian Moment sheds light on its relationship to questions of free trade, Eurocentrism, and revolutions in international law. By considering the methodological parallels with the work of Reinhart Koselleck, this article emphasises the importance of both historiographical and historical debates for the study of change in legal history, the analysis of the global legacies of Hugo Grotius, and the generation of expectations of the future in international law.
The History of Fair Trade: Hugo Grotius, Corporations, and the Spanish Enlightenment
Grotiana, Jul 1, 2021
The early Spanish Enlightenment was shaped by debates over corporations, sovereignty, and the bal... more The early Spanish Enlightenment was shaped by debates over corporations, sovereignty, and the balance of power in Europe. Spanish officials, in this context, turned to the ideas of Hugo Grotius to establish joint-stock companies that could allow the Crown to regain control over its imperial domains and establish perpetual peace in Europe. This article recovers the writings of Félix Fernando de Sotomayor, Duke of Sotomayor (1684–1767), who drew on the works of Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Charles Dutot in order to show that the history of these corporations chronicled the contestation and erosion of Spanish power and the diversion of European states from their true interests. Sovereigns, not merchants, argued Sotomayor, could guarantee fair trade and the equitable distribution of wealth. The study of Sotomayor's views on trade, natural law, and alienation challenges traditional interpretations about the Iberian engagement with Grotius, the rise of capitalist hopes in Southern and Northern Europe, and Spain's investment in the Enlightenment.
Chapter in Adriana Fabritius, Ere Nokkala, Marten Seppel, and Keith Tribe eds., Political Reason ... more Chapter in Adriana Fabritius, Ere Nokkala, Marten Seppel, and Keith Tribe eds., Political Reason and the Language of Change: Reform and Improvement in Early Modern Europe (London: Routledge, 2022). - https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781003206675/political-reason-language-change-adriana-luna-fabritius-ere-nokkala-marten-seppel-keith-tribe?refId=b3132366-c5c0-4757-b20a-f91e4010fd9e&context=ubx
This chapter sheds light on the role of diplomatic manuscript writings in the transmission of Enlightenment ideas in eighteenth-century Spain. Drawing on the overlooked manuscript titled Memorias para la historia y juntas de Breda (1745-1748) penned by the Spanish political writer, official, and diplomat, Melchor Rafael de Macanaz (1670-1760), this chapter shows how diplomatic debates encouraged new ideas of reform, as flyleaves annotated in a hurry, brisk and brief diplomatic letters, and disorganised aide-mémoire fostered the growth of Enlightenment debate in Spain. The chapter focuses, in particular, on the connections between the Memorias and a coeval book attributed to Macanaz, the Nuevo Sistema de Gobierno Económico para la América. The Nuevo Sistema saw the growth of manufacturing in the Spanish Americas as a way of ending the empire’s reliance on the slave trade, ‘the cruel commerce of the human species’, proposed the establishment of corporations managed by Amerindians, and sought to turn Manila into a clearing house for the silver trade. Macanaz’s idea of a closed commercial state, as this chapter shows, emerged from his frustration with the plans of the Spanish minister José de Carvajal y Lancaster (1698-1754), as he sought to carry these out during his time as ambassador at the negotiations at the Congress of Breda (1746-1748). Carvajal hoped to make Spain the arbiter of Europe and reform the empire through diplomatic channels. Macanaz, as the negotiations dragged on, grew more critical of this view and argued instead that the creation of a closed commercial state would force Spain’s rivals to accept its role as the arbiter of Europe. By drawing on the parallels and the differences between the Memorias and the Nuevo Sistema, the chapter proposes a new interpretation of the authorship of the Nuevo Sistema. This chapter argues that the printed version of the text was edited, collated, amended, and reconceptualised by other authors, on the basis of Macanaz’s Memorias and other writings, to suit new contexts and new challenges. In this way, the chapter encourages a more nuanced reading of the various contexts of reform, improvement, and political change in eighteenth-century Spain.
Why International Lawyers Measure Time with a Telescope: Grotian Moments & Richard Falk’s Histories of the Future
Grotiana, 2021
This article contextualises the origins of the term Grotian Moment, coined and frequently redefin... more This article contextualises the origins of the term Grotian Moment, coined and frequently redefined by Richard Falk. By generating a conceptual history of the idea and its uses, the article draws attention to the ways that Falk’s sustained interest in the question of temporality and the nature of change in international law can inform present legal debates. The recovery of Falk’s efforts to engage with critics, geopolitical changes, and new legal ideas by reinterpreting and reimagining the meaning of a Grotian Moment sheds light on its relationship to questions of free trade, Eurocentrism, and revolutions in international law. By considering the methodological parallels with the work of Reinhart Koselleck, this article emphasises the importance of both historiographical and historical debates for the study of change in legal history, the analysis of the global legacies of Hugo Grotius, and the generation of expectations of the future in international law.
The History of Fair Trade: Hugo Grotius, Corporations, and the Spanish Enlightenment
Grotiana, 2021
The early Spanish Enlightenment was shaped by debates over corporations, sovereignty, and the bal... more The early Spanish Enlightenment was shaped by debates over corporations, sovereignty, and the balance of power in Europe. Spanish officials, in this context, turned to the ideas of Hugo Grotius to establish joint-stock companies that could allow the Crown to regain control over its imperial domains and establish perpetual peace in Europe. This article recovers the writings of Félix Fernando de Sotomayor, Duke of Sotomayor (1684–1767), who drew on the works of Grotius, Samuel Pufendorf, and Charles Dutot in order to show that the history of these corporations chronicled the contestation and erosion of Spanish power and the diversion of European states from their true interests. Sovereigns, not merchants, argued Sotomayor, could guarantee fair trade and the equitable distribution of wealth. The study of Sotomayor’s views on trade, natural law, and alienation challenges traditional interpretations about the Iberian engagement with Grotius, the rise of capitalist hopes in Southern and Northern Europe, and Spain’s investment in the Enlightenment.
Investing in the Enlightenment: The Financial Revolution and the Global Origins of the Enlightenment in the Spanish Empire
Co-Edited Special Issue on Imperial Times. Storia della storiografia 77/1, 2020
This article explores the transatlantic discourse of early eighteenth-century His- panic official... more This article explores the transatlantic discourse of early eighteenth-century His- panic officials based in Lima and Madrid who envisioned the growth of regulated companies, banking, and investment as ways to generate Enlightenment reform. Throughout the Spanish World, tax collectors and mining officials explored how investment could provide economic predictability and catalyse the generation of cultural reform. The article suggests their views challenge traditional periodizations about the growth of enlightened hopes and capitalist principles in the Spanish world. The article concludes by suggesting that, despite the existence of conflicting political expectations, early eighteenth-century Spanish officials in Lima and Madrid turned to bargaining and Enlightenment ideas to facilitate trans-imperial negotiation. The article thus proposes a fundamental re-evaluation of the origins of the Enlightenment and capitalism in the Spanish empire.
The Assembly of Public Trust. Republicanism and the Birth of Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Spain (Open Access)
History of European Ideas, 2021
This article studies how a plan to reinvent the Spanish parliamentary Cortes generated the growth... more This article studies how a plan to reinvent the Spanish parliamentary Cortes generated the growth of eighteenth-century Spanish political economy. The article sheds light on how eighteenth-century Spanish debates over investment, assemblies, and corporations recovered parliamentary ideals, envisioned corporate boards of transnational cooperation, and deliberated on the political economy of patriotism. Contrary to the dominant historiographical view, Spanish republicanism did not wane under the Bourbon Monarchy. In order to resolve the social and economic impact of dynastic crises in the Spanish Empire, political economists argued that the establishment of corporations throughout the peninsula could republicanise Spanish finances and revitalise trust in the Spanish Monarchy. The article reconsiders early modern Spain’s republican and parliamentary traditions, and suggests that eighteenth-century Spanish political economy emerged from the need to escape the cycles of dynastic crises and to put an end to ‘the fear of the new’.
History: The Journal of the Historical Association, 2020
This article sheds light on the influence of José de Carvajal y Lancaster's establishment of shar... more This article sheds light on the influence of José de Carvajal y Lancaster's establishment of shareholder companies in Spain on the economic programme of Sebastião José de Carvalho e Melo, better known as the Marquis of Pombal. Early eighteenth‐century Spanish debates on the capacity of shareholder companies to foster geopolitical reform informed the overlooked project of European cooperation of José de Carvajal y Lancaster. Carvalho studied and praised Carvajal's commercial reforms and understood that closer diplomatic and commercial collaboration between Spain and Britain would undermine Portugal's geopolitical interests. Carvalho's early economic schemes were thus the result, in part, of Iberian commercial emulation. The Iberian establishment of regulated and joint‐stock companies catalysed reform and reconfigured trans‐imperial commercial relations. Paradoxically, Carvajal and Carvalho's parallel views on European geopolitics, and their understanding of Enlightenment ideals, foreclosed the possibility of a Luso‐Spanish alliance.
Transnational Perspectives on the Conquest and Colonization of Latin America. Edited by Jenny Mander, David Midgley and Christine D. Beaule (London: Palgrave, 2020), 2020
Journal of Early Modern History , 2019
This article recovers the transnational historical approach of the eighteenth-century Piedmontese... more This article recovers the transnational historical approach of the eighteenth-century Piedmontese thinker Carlo Denina (1731-1813) and his Lettres Critiques. The Lettres, which have remained largely overlooked to this day, addressed a number of cultural debates on the epistemology of the Encyclopédie, the art of translation, and European geopolitics, by drawing on a transnational approach to the history of Europe. This article frames Denina’s transnational gaze in the context of early modern concerns over information overload and eighteenth-century ideas of cultural superiority and alterity. The article follows the ways the Lettres Critiques responded to three querelles: Morvilliers’ 1782 rhetorical attack on Spain, German debates on the merits of French culture and the nature of knowledge, and Madrid’s protracted response to William Robertson’s History of America (1777). The article sheds light on an overlooked eighteenth-century vision of transnational history as a solution to embryonic forms nationalism and the politicization of knowledge.
History of European Ideas, 2019
This article provides a reappraisal of the history of proyectismo. Scholars have employed the con... more This article provides a reappraisal of the history of proyectismo. Scholars have employed the concept to categorise early eighteenth-century Spanish authors and reforms, and have thereby severed them from their historical context. This article explores the imperial origins of this political culture by shedding light on the generation of knowledge in early eighteenth-century diplomatic and imperial spaces. The article focuses on the overlooked thinker Álvaro José Navia-Osorio y Vigil, Marquis of Santa Cruz de Marcenado (1684–1732) – long considered to be a proyectista – and his appeal to the Spanish Republic of Letters to assist him in his project for a universal dictionary; an enterprise that predated Chamber’s Cyclopedia and Diderot and D’Alembert’s Encyclopédie. Marcenado’s contributions to the establishment of Spanish intellectual connections with foreign thinkers were, moreover, symptomatic of the political approach of early eighteenth-century ilustrados – transterritorial, transnational, and transversal thinkers who drew on the peninsula’s ties with the Flanders and Italy to revitalise the intellectual life of Spain. These thinkers recovered the study of Muslim Spain, and envisioned the establishment of councils and academies in Mexico and Peru. The Spanish Enlightenment, then, originated in the early eighteenth-century from their rediscovery of the Spanish Republic of Letters.
“Amazing Rapidity” Time, Public Credit, and David Hume’s Political Discourses
Contributions to the History of Concepts, 2019
This article explores David Hume’s views on public credit, the state, and geopolitics as outlined... more This article explores David Hume’s views on public credit, the state, and geopolitics as outlined in his Political Discourses. By drawing attention to Hume’s analysis of the speed of political economic dynamics, the article suggests the philosopher feared that public credit, a crucial source of eighteenth-century European economic growth, fundamentally revolutionized the pace of social relations, the mechanics of the state, and European geopolitics at large. Hume’s study of public credit highlighted its role in reshaping eighteenth-century visions of time, and the philosopher’s disappointment with his own solution, in turn, reinforces the need to consider the multifaceted effects of public credit in the modern world.
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Books by Edward Jones Corredera
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/odious-debt-9780192888280?lang=en&cc=es
Suggested Citation: Jones Corredera, Edward, The Age of Odious Debt: Money, Constitutions, and the Making of Latin America. A Research Note (May 31, 2022). Max Planck Institute for Comparative Public Law & International Law (MPIL) Research Paper No. 2022-11, Forthcoming in: The Age of Odious Debt: Money, Constitutions, and the Making of Latin America (Oxford: Oxford University Press), chap. 6., Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4140679 or http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.4140679
While scholars have suggested that the War of Spanish Succession fundamentally severed Austro-Spanish relations, eighteenth-century Spanish writers and reformers drew on the memory of the Habsburg Crown, and the study of its contemporary policies, to generate reforms, formulate new ideas about the global balance of power, and reaffirm long-standing commercial networks. This talk sheds light on the transversal eighteenth-century cultural and political connections between Austria and Spain; it draws attention to the ways these ties influenced the emergence of the Diplomatic Enlightenment, and considers the applicability of the term in a Central European context.
Papers by Edward Jones Corredera
This chapter sheds light on the role of diplomatic manuscript writings in the transmission of Enlightenment ideas in eighteenth-century Spain. Drawing on the overlooked manuscript titled Memorias para la historia y juntas de Breda (1745-1748) penned by the Spanish political writer, official, and diplomat, Melchor Rafael de Macanaz (1670-1760), this chapter shows how diplomatic debates encouraged new ideas of reform, as flyleaves annotated in a hurry, brisk and brief diplomatic letters, and disorganised aide-mémoire fostered the growth of Enlightenment debate in Spain. The chapter focuses, in particular, on the connections between the Memorias and a coeval book attributed to Macanaz, the Nuevo Sistema de Gobierno Económico para la América. The Nuevo Sistema saw the growth of manufacturing in the Spanish Americas as a way of ending the empire’s reliance on the slave trade, ‘the cruel commerce of the human species’, proposed the establishment of corporations managed by Amerindians, and sought to turn Manila into a clearing house for the silver trade. Macanaz’s idea of a closed commercial state, as this chapter shows, emerged from his frustration with the plans of the Spanish minister José de Carvajal y Lancaster (1698-1754), as he sought to carry these out during his time as ambassador at the negotiations at the Congress of Breda (1746-1748). Carvajal hoped to make Spain the arbiter of Europe and reform the empire through diplomatic channels. Macanaz, as the negotiations dragged on, grew more critical of this view and argued instead that the creation of a closed commercial state would force Spain’s rivals to accept its role as the arbiter of Europe. By drawing on the parallels and the differences between the Memorias and the Nuevo Sistema, the chapter proposes a new interpretation of the authorship of the Nuevo Sistema. This chapter argues that the printed version of the text was edited, collated, amended, and reconceptualised by other authors, on the basis of Macanaz’s Memorias and other writings, to suit new contexts and new challenges. In this way, the chapter encourages a more nuanced reading of the various contexts of reform, improvement, and political change in eighteenth-century Spain.