ABSTRACT
During the eighteenth century, the Spanish and Portuguese monarchies, each governed by their recently installed dynasties—the Braganças and the Bourbons—ruled over large areas of territory covering the four known continents. Their origins were ancient ones, but their subsequent evolution was defined by features dating from much later. Spain and Portugal shared many things in common: Catholic faith; territorial domains outside Europe; convergent institutions and dynasties; and many close and intersecting ties between the elites of both kingdoms. To a large extent, in the eighteenth century, the two Iberian monarchies also shared a negative image projected onto them by Europe’s political and cultural centres, which attributed the peninsular territories with the stigma of being isolated regions dominated by superstition. In actual fact, such images were a reaffirmation of the Protestant ways of looking at the Catholics, now strengthened and renewed by Spain’s loss of its central political and economic importance. To some extent, the reforms of the Iberian monarchies resulted from the incorporation of those images and the attempts to overcome the diagnosed lack of development.
