What did Europe owe Spain in the eighteenth century? This infamous question, posed by Nicolas Masson de Morvilliers in the Encyclopédie méthodique, caused an international uproar at the height of the Enlightenment. His polemical article ‘Espagne’, with its tabloid-like prose, resonated with a French-reading public that blamed the Spanish Empire for France’s eroding economy. Spain was outraged, and responded by publishing its own translation-rebuttal, the article ‘España’ penned by Julián de Velasco for the Spanish Encyclopedia metódica. In this volume, the original French and...