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Title: | José Pablo Valiente (1749-1817). Ilustración, reformas y realismo en España y América
| | Authorship: | Vidal Prades, Emma Dunia | Pages: | 255 | Size: | 3 Mb | Edition: | 1 (2019) | Price: | 7,75 € | Language: | Castellà | Binding: | Llibre electrònic | Support: | e-Book - EPUB | Other formats: | |
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Prior to 1809-1810, the Kingdom of Spain and the Indies presented a legal and conceptual complexity that was hard to define: a hierarchical structure and an organisation of the political and administrative power that was subject to an increasing degree of streamlining together with the centralisation and “Hispanisation” of the highest judicial positions and military commanders. And thus we are offered, based on primary sources of great documentary value, the figure of José Pablo Valiente throughout four decades of service on the Iberian Peninsula and in America, while dedicated to different overseas positions and in the mother country. The book reconstructs and confronts this historical figure with a period that also contains several contradictory circumstances, and with the deformed vision, transmitted up until this day, of Valiente, affected by the political changes that were taking place and before which he found it impossible to return to the world he had known in the colonies. If this world had been upset throughout the cycle of the (Atlantic and Peninsular) Napoleonic wars, it had now vanished altogether as he clung to the convictions in which he had been trained and had led him to devote a lifetime of service to the King – which was also where he had found a way to improve his wealth thanks to the close relations established with the Cuban “sugarocracy”. Little wonder, then, that the name of Valiente is tied to the promotion of the slave trade and the great sugar plantations, as well as to the liberalisation of the trade with allies and neutral powers that would make Cuba the Pearl of the Antilles.
Vidal Prades, Emma Dunia. 2019. José Pablo Valiente (1749-1817). Ilustración, reformas y realismo en España y América. Castelló de la Plana: Publicacions de la Universitat Jaume I.
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