A Hispanic Interpretation of the British Crisis: Flórez Estrada and the Debate on the Banking Panic of 1825

This article reinterprets the 1825 financial crisis by recovering the overlooked contribution of Álvaro Flórez Estrada, a Spanish economist whose 1826 pamphlet proposed a bullion-scarcity thesis as the root cause of financial collapse. Rather than attributing the crisis to speculative mania or domestic mismanagement, Flórez Estrada linked monetary contraction to the disruption of silver and gold inflows from Latin America following independence wars. Drawing on archival pamphlets, economic correspondence, and periodicals, this article traces the transnational circulation of Flórez Estrada’s ideas—through parliamentary debate in Britain, journalistic controversies in France, metaphorical reframing in Italy, and reprinting in postcolonial Latin America. By centering a Hispanic interpretation of crisis causality, this article challenges Anglo-centric narratives and reframes early financial thought as inherently global, multilingual, and geopolitically embedded.