I share Professor Zenker's concerns, and my own 
curiosity has taken me into Latin American 
economic thought: I began with Oreste Popescu's 
work, "Studies in the History of Latin American 
Economic Thought" (Routledge, 1997).  He argues 
the broad foundation for Latin American economic 
thought was scholastic philosophy, upon which was 
placed a second building block of mercantilist 
ideas, with economic liberalism as a tiny turret 
upon the top (p. 4)--one sentence that 
immediately clued me in to a great deal.  This 
suggested I explore Spanish scholastic ideas, 
which I did through Odd Langholm's work, 
"Economics in the Medieval Schools," E.J. Brill 
1992, and "The Merchant and the Confessional" 
(Brill 2003), which in turn led me to the work of 
Tomás de Mercado.  The first fruit of this 
research was an article on how scholastic ideas 
influenced Franciscans in Latin American California in HOPE 2005.

Next, to explore that "tiny turret" of economic 
liberalism in Latin America, I read an essay by 
Mexican liberal Jose Maria Luis Mora.  He 
published an essay in 1833 justifying 
expropriation of church land and wealth: 
Disertacion sobre la naturaleza y aplicacion de 
las rentas y bienes eclesiasticos y sobre la 
autoridad a que se hallan sujetos en cuanto a su 
creación, aumento, subsistencia o 
suppression.  (Interlibrary loaned from Puerto 
Rico!).  To understand the larger Iberian 
literature which had influenced him, I then read 
Pedro de Campomanes, advisor to King Carlos III 
in the 17th century.  He had argued that the 
church should no longer be subject to tax exempt 
status in Tratado de la regalía de amortización 
(1765).  This was widely read in Europe at the 
time, it seems he touched a nerve.  A generation 
later Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos wrote the more 
elegant (in terms of economic logic) Sobre la Ley 
Agraria (1794), in which he argued that the only 
way the price of land would fall to a level where 
farming could be profitable is if lands 
bequeathed to the church (especially to the 
regular orders) were expropriated and put back on 
the market--a straightforward supply and demand 
problem.  I have submitted an article on the 
Campomanes/Jovellanos part of this project to JHET.

I'm still working on tracing how those Iberian 
ideas filtered through the Mexican liberal milieu 
of Mora into the "secularization" of the Mexican 
California in the 1830s. It amazed me initially 
that there were so few books on these topics of 
non-European and even non-English speaking 
political economy.  It is like pulling on the tip 
of a very large iceberg.  If anyone reading this 
finds that they are working on similar topics, it 
would be nice to hear from them. My email is [log in to unmask]

Marie Duggan