Fiscal issues were central in the Portuguese enlightened reform at the end of the Eighteenth century, especially after revolutions in Western Europe and America that were triggered by tax conflicts. The writings of the Portuguese statesman D. Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho (1755-1812) show a great number of new ideas about taxation, which also helped to create new ways to legitimate the Crown's fiscal extraction of the economic surplus from Portuguese and American vassals. The article defends the position that under the influence of new economic currents (Smith and the Physiocrats' liberalism) and new absolutist government practices (the enlightened administration in Piedmont-Sardinia and Austrian Lombardy), these fiscal ideas were adapted and transformed, not just copied, to fit the Luso-Brazilian imperial framework.
fiscality; D. Rodrigo de Souza Coutinho; enlightened reform; Portugal; 18th century