This is the first major study in English for over half a century of one of Portugal's most important historical figures, Sebastiao Jose de Carvalho e Melo, marques de Pombal (1699-1782), who is best known today as the key figure in the reconstruction of Lisbon after the devastating earthquake of 1755.

Pombal's achievements, however, went far beyond the reconstruction of the capital. An unusually single-minded and ruthless first minister, he was also one of the eighteenth century's most successful "enlightened despots": for example, he reformed the Portuguese system of education, expelled the Jesuits from Portugal, thereby beginning the process leading to their suppression by the pope in 1773, and mounted a formidable challenge to British commercial hegemony in Portugal.

Recent renewed interest in the theory of enlightened absolutism has tended to ignore developments in the Iberian peninsula. This book is therefore essential to a full understanding of the complexities and paradoxes of enlightened rulership in a southern European context.