From 1800 to 1808, merchants and royal officers in Cartagena de Indias requested the execution of an economic policy that allowed them to overcome the port blockades caused by the several wars Spain waged those years: comercio neutral. By taking the history of the discussions around this measure as a gateway to understand the economic thought of the time in the Nuevo Reino de Granada, this article seeks to explore the theoretical foundations upon which comercio neutral was grounded. Three moments are studied: 1800, 1805 and 1809. In each moment, those who proposed and those who attacked the measure argued for and against hinging upon two main premises: first, the observation of the application of economic policies was a valid method to analyze their pertinence and, second, an active commerce was the sine qua non for achieving felicidad pública. These two premises and their pragmatic end display the ideological syncretism that informed the theoretical foundations of Bourbon Reformism, from which comercio neutral stemmed. This article answers the question about the nature of New-Grenadine economic thought by situating it within its practical intentions and by suggesting that within this pragmatical boundaries new voices, new documents and a new historiographical proposal on the political economy of the Nuevo Reino de Granada are found.
