companies such as the Companhia Geral, and others are inspired in more or less restrictive
system with or without a powerful regulating body. Others, still, are conceptions much closer
to the position held by free-traders such as the Manchester School of the Paris Group (French
liberals like Bastiat).
The first attempt at liberalization occurs in the 1820s and early 1830s. It is not a stable
system, as in 1838 the regulating body, the Companhia, is reinstituted. The debates continue
and intensify in the 1850s with a rising momentum in favor of liberalism. This is when the
Barao de Massarelos actively defend the free trade and the suppression of the regulation
system that imposes burdens on the wine merchants.
The great problem for the transformation of the legal and formal “restrictive” system
is not essentially one of economic doctrine or ideology, but one that is related to the financial
difficulties that the economy and the Portuguese state encountered in a recurrent manner
during the years 1807-1840 and 1880-1929. During these periods the state cannot just
suppress the taxes on wine exports and brandy imports because of the difficulty of finding
alternative fiscal revenues that can be as easily obtained as through the Customs (Alfândegas)
and privileged companies.29
The problems of regulation continued on and on in the period of the recuperation from
the terrible blight: the phylloxera. The winegrowers, because of the crises of the oidium and
the phylloxera, needed external help and sought ways of surviving in the making of their
wine. Paradoxically, the period of liberalization corresponds to an increase of intervention
from the once Ministry of Agriculture, the Ministério das Obras Publicas, Comércio e
Indusria.
The year 1865 marks the end of the Companhia Geral as a regulating entity and its
transformation into a mere trading firm whose importance, already greatly affected by the
civil war of 1833, its temporary extinction from 1834 to 1838, has nothing to do with the
previous periods (the Pombaline period of 1756 to 1777 and the end of the absolutism from
1777 to 1820).
This is one of the causes of the waning liberal arguments of the type found in Bastiat’s
works and those advanced by the Barao de Massarelos. The central object of discord, the
Companhia, no longer exists. Nevertheless, liberal ideas and liberalism are still striving in
29 The Companhia is collecting important taxes on the wine trade such as the subsidio Iiterario and the different
taxes for public works in the Douro and the city of Porto. Documents of this problem can be found at the
AHMOP, ANTT, AHTC and the AHRCV. Xxx to complete xxx
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