Real Sociedad Bascongada de los Amigos del País (1765)

Spain's first economic society, licensed because the law forbade forming associations and holding assemblies without one. Its printed annual proceedings show what such a body actually did: a boarding school with public examinations, a members' roll that reaches Jalapa, Havana and Manila, a smallpox inoculation treatise built on five cases observed in the Caribbean, and a schools committee that names the emigration of the province's poor boys as the reason its own plan will not work.