As Jordana Dym reminds us in one of the many compelling monographic chapters of this rich collection, more than a dozen years ago John Lynch lamented the absence of a ‘general study of Enlightenment ideas in Spanish America’ (‘El reformismo borbónico e Hispanamérica’, in Agustín Guimera (ed.), El reformismo borbónico: una vision interdisciplinar (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1996), p. 56). Simply by dint of the fact that of this volume's 21 chapters, only nine relate to the Americas, the present text cannot be said to provide that general study. However, its editor may well be said to have done so the previous year, with his own rich and substantial monograph Enlightenment, Governance, and Reform in Spain and its Empire, 1759–1808 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). Moreover, the enterprising organisation of this volume, based on a conference held at Trinity College, Cambridge, in December 2007, provides strong and suggestive elements of a general survey as well as some compelling monographic studies.

First, Paquette himself undertakes a general thematic introduction in which he discusses three forms of linkages (dynastic–diplomatic, intellectual, overseas empire) between the southern European and Atlantic colonial experiences, then introduces four general themes: the diffuseness of political, cultural and intellectual power in the late eighteenth century; the role of governments in incubating ideas of Enlightenment and reform (not always the same thing); the importance of political economy; and the varieties of periodisation proposed in the historiography. While Paquette touches only lightly on the contributions in the rest of the volume, his introduction is followed by four short ‘overviews’ in which the chapters of the four remaining parts are briefly summarised and contextualised by experts on different regions (John Robertson on Italy; Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra on the Spanish Empire; Emma Rothschild on France and the French Atlantic; and Francisco Bethencourt on Portugal and Brazil). The remaining 16 chapters are not organised regionally but by broad themes that are not always strongly distinguishable as the reader works through some quite disparate and detailed case studies. Part 2, entitled ‘The Rise of Public Political Culture: The Efflorescence of Civil Society and its Connection to State Reform’, contains some fine politico-intellectual studies on the Americas (Víctor Peralta-Ruiz on Jesuit historiography in Peru; Jordana Dym on the Gazeta de Guatemala; and Luiz Carlos Villalba on readings of Montequieu's Persian Letters in Brazil and Portugal, as related through the inquisitorial archive in Lisbon). Part 3, ‘The State as an Incubator of Enlightenment and as an Engine of Reform’, also possesses a strong Hispanic and American character, closing with a frankly revisionist study of the legal philosophy of Francisco Xavier de Gamboa; this chapter captures the transgenerational character of the 2007 conference, since it sets out a PhD-based interpretation of late eighteenth-century Mexican mining administration that is quite distinct from that of David Brading, one of the senior scholars animating the event in person as well as through his writing. Whereas Albi makes a strong but counter-intuitive case for Gamboa's combined defence of reform and derecho indiano, Charles Noel, whose essay on the Spanish Bourbon court stands at the centre of the volume, provides a condensed general depiction of the Enlightenment to augment Paquette's introduction and show why it would be so hard to reach a single, synthetic account:

Perhaps it is this spatial as well as social variability that has contributed to making geography such an Enlightenment-associated discipline? Indeed, notwithstanding the sub-editorial presence here of Jorge Cañizares, one does rather feel that science and scientific travelling are rather modestly profiled in the thematic mix. However, the historiography in those fields has been considerably enriched in recent years by, among others, David Livingstone and Charles Withers' edited collection, Geography and Enlightenment (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1999), and John Cañizares-Esguerra's Nature, Empire and Nation: Explorations of the History of Science in the Iberian World (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006). Kenneth Andrien's close and compelling study of the secularisation of the doctrinas de Indios in Peru (1746–73) certainly builds on a strong historical recognition of the Church as a complicated and contested site of institutional as well as doctrinal interests. Whereas in Víctor Peralta's essay the Jesuits occupy centre stage, here, right on the cusp of their expulsion from Bourbon possessions across the globe, they are afforded some protection precisely by dint of their local weakness and marginality.

Part 4 is entitled ‘Political Economy and the Reform of Society and the State’ and contains three chapters on France and Naples. Here the limits of any collective survey are perhaps most evident, and not only for Hispanists and Americanists. Indeed, the final section of the volume, Part 5 (‘The Limits of Enlightened Reform’), almost self-consciously confronts the real and analytical constraints of such an enterprise. Manuel Lucena-Giraldo's survey of the limits to reform in Spanish America is rather perambulatory in English, but it provides plenty of discrete insights and has plainly contributed to one of the most successful popular surveys among titles published on the bicentenary of independence. Matthew Brown begins his discussion of Bolívar's 1826 constitution for the erstwhile Alto Perú with an open admission that this might well be stretching the concept of ‘Enlightenment’ beyond even the generous flexibility allowed by his editor, who completes the volume with a treatment of José da Silva Lisboa's role as the ‘Burke of the tropics’, full of energetic ambiguities in Brazil. Here there is also discussion of independence, but that is scarcely a dominant theme of this collection, which, of course, cannot deal with the European experience over these 80 years with post-colonialism as a principal leitmotif.

What does come through most persuasively is the reward to be gleaned from comparative study when it is practised judiciously and with due regard to the detailed historical record. It is no coincidence that the work of Derek Beales and John Elliott is frequently cited in the footnotes. As in Elliott's Empires of the Atlantic World, the overall claims for this approach are initially voiced in modulated fashion and subsequently vindicated in an accumulating, narrative-driven effect. Mention should also be made of the role of Kenneth J Maxwell, whose influence has ensured a properly full treatment of the Lusophone world here, just as it has acquired a proper place in comparative work by Francisco Bethencourt and Jeremy Adelman as well as Paquette himself. Perhaps the biggest single bonus, however, is the high profile given to Italy, which today has one of the weaker Latin Americanist scholarly communities in Europe and which, from Savoy to Sicily, shows the Mediterranean world to be both as diverse and as unified as that of the Atlantic. It is a traditional reviewer's tic to complete appraisals of edited collections with a nod to their unevenness, and if that is here almost determined by the nature of the subject matter and current scholarly approaches to it, I came away from this set of essays very much hoping that it would form the first of a new series of regular themed and comparative titles in the mould established by Eduardo Posada-Carbó at the London Institute of Latin American Studies in 1995, since when it has become ever clearer that the variety and cogency of a workshop of real quality are never frozen, swapping salience over time and through scholarly transitions.