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.
Why this wins its question: English-language coverage of the Spanish economic societies is a clause - "Enlightenment reform societies were founded in Spain from 1765" - usually attached to the Sociedad Matritense and rarely to a page any of them printed. This object reads two of the Bascongada's own imprints: the royal cedula that concedes the society's existence because the laws forbade forming unions and holding assemblies without licence; the September 1772 proceedings with their four commissions, their borrowed hall and their vote of thanks to the Caracas Company; a school examination on Basque compared with Latin, French and English; a members' roll printing residences at Jalapa, Havana and Manila; and a retired naval surgeon's inoculation treatise resting on five cases he watched in Havana and Cartagena de Indias in the early 1770s. The same pages supply the counterweight in the society's own voice - a province with more hands than work, exporting poor boys to Cadiz and America every year, and a committee that treats that export as the reason its schooling plan is unnecessary.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
The society printed its own constitution. The title page reads "ESTATUTOS APROBADOS POR S. M. PARA GOBIERNO DE LA REAL SOCIEDAD BASCONGADA DE LOS AMIGOS DEL PAIS", with the society's device - two clasped hands ringed by the motto IRURAC BAT, "the three are one", for the three Basque provinces - and the imprint "CON LICENCIA. VITORIA, Por Tomas de Robles, Impresor de la misma Sociedad." The title page carries no year; the digitisation used here is catalogued as 1773.
The royal cedula that opens the volume states the society's purpose and, in the same sentence, the reason it needed a king's permission to exist. Some gentlemen of the three Basque provinces had agreed among themselves to unite in a society under the name of the Amigos del Pais, "con el fin de cultivar las Ciencias y las Artes, y promover la Agricultura, la Industria y el Comercio", and drew up rules for how they would work and how many members they would have; "pero como por las Leyes está prohivido formar uniones y celebrar Juntas sin licencia del Gobierno, recurrieron á mi suplicandome les concediese permiso para executarlo." Carlos III found the rules conducive to the end proposed. The founding document of Spain's first economic society is therefore also a record that voluntary association was not free.
The general assemblies were held in public and the proceedings printed annually. The Extractos for the assemblies held at Bilbao in September 1772 record the business day by day: admission of new members and transfer of others from one class to another under the statutes; the four commissions presenting the extracts of the works, notices and experiments they had made and gathered, to be read out at the last public assembly; thanks voted to the university and the consulado of Bilbao for lending their hall; and a letter ordered to the direction of the Real Compañia Guipuzcoana de Caracas and to the Casa de Contratacion of San Sebastian for the "auxilios y luces" they gave the society's patriotic work.
The society ran a boarding school, the Real Seminario y Escuela Patriotica, and examined its pupils in front of the assembly. In 1772 Don Miguel Lucas de Lili, a cadet of the Reales Guardias, was examined on geometry, the art of war and translation from French; and Don Xavier Maria de Eguia on Latin grammar "y su conformidad y diferencias con la de las lenguas Bascongada, Francesa è Inglesa", on the geography and description of the province of Guipuzcoa, and on translation from Latin and French. A comparative exercise on Basque against Latin, French and English was a school examination in the Basque provinces in 1772.
The printed roll of members gives, for each man, the year of admission, his class and where he lived, and the residences run across the monarchy. On one page of the 1772 catalogue: "1771... Amezaga (Don Matias Ochoa de) B. En Jalapa de la Nueva España"; "1769... Anda (Ilustrisimo Señor Don Simon de) Presidente y Capitan General de las Islas Filipinas. H. En Manila"; "1771... Armona (Don José Antonio de) del Consejo de Hacienda, Director General de Correos y Rentas en la Isla de Cuba. B. En la Habana." Others in the same list sit at Caracas, Cadiz, Seville, Madrid and Paris. The membership was transatlantic and transpacific in fact, not in aspiration.
The 1772 proceedings carry a treatise on smallpox inoculation whose evidence came from the Caribbean. "El Licenciado Don Atilano Calleja, Cirujano jubilado de la Real Armada" sent from Santander, where he lived, a "Tratado practico theorico de la Inoculacion" which, after definition, etymology, method and preparation, "refiere cinco observaciones hechas por si mismo en America (tres en la Habana, y dos en Cartagena) resultando de ellas un exito feliz en esta practica", devoted its last chapter to the difference between natural and artificial smallpox, and concluded by lamenting the inaction on the matter "baxo el especioso pretexto de que no debe hacerse un mal por evitar otro; siendo asi que todos los dias se está contraviniendo en la Medicina à este mal entendido principio." Inoculation observed at Havana and Cartagena de Indias was being reported to a Spanish society in 1772, thirty-one years before the Balmis expedition sailed.
A second piece on the same subject immediately precedes it and ends in an appeal rather than a report: of all the means study and art have invented for human utility this one should be preferred incomparably to all, being the safest, easiest and most proportioned to guard against so mortal an enemy - "Ojala en toda nuestra Peninsula se establezca tal practica para librarse de los asaltos que de tiempo en tiempo dá este Herodes maldito!" (the printed sentence opens with an inverted exclamation mark, dropped here). The author of this second piece is named on the preceding page, which was not opened, so the quotation is reported here without attribution.
The statutes made the fostering of schools an obligation of the commissions, leaving to those of Agricultura, Ciencias and Industria the care of their own objects; and the commission reporting on schools in 1772 put the cost of its own province on the record while explaining why a proposal would not be adopted there. The circumstances of the country were against it: in the numerous population of the Basque provinces "exceden los brazos y manos à los que necesitan su agricultura y artes", and, "siendo considerable el numero de muchachos pobres que salen todos los años para Cadiz y America, se mejora à lo menos la suerte de algunos de ellos los mas acrehedores por sus prendas, costumbres y necesidad." The emigration of poor Basque boys to Cadiz and the Indies is named by the emigrating province itself, as an argument, not as a complaint.
What this object rests on and what it does not. It rests on two printed volumes of the society's own production - the statutes with the royal cedula, and the Extractos of the general assemblies of September 1772 - read as page images of full-view digitisations. Both are the body reporting on itself: the achievements are its own account of them, which is why nothing here is above 0.9. The society's best-known result, the isolation of tungsten by the Elhuyar brothers at the Vergara seminary in 1783, is later than these volumes and is not evidenced by them; the later Extractos, the Ensayo de la Sociedad Bascongada and the modern literature were not opened.