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  • Deconstructing Legitimacy: Viceroys, Merchants, and the Military in Late Colonial Peru
  • G.B. Paquette
Deconstructing Legitimacy: Viceroys, Merchants, and the Military in Late Colonial Peru. By Patricia H. Marks. University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007. Pp. x, 402. Illustrations. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $65.00 cloth.

This book, based on decades of meticulous research, is a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on the late colonial period, a period whose intellectual vitality is now being recognized after many decades of neglect. Focusing on the escalating conflict between the merchant guild and the last viceroys of Peru, Marks offers a richly textured portrait of the political culture of the Old Regime. From its inception, the Spanish empire’s smooth functioning was premised on bargaining between political authorities and local elites. Indeed, the longevity of the empire may partly be attributed to the persistence of mechanisms for diffusing conflict and generating consensus.

Such a tacit pact, however, showed signs of unraveling as the Bourbon reforms gathered steam after 1763. They then received a further, and fatal, shock from the economic dislocation provoked by the French revolutionary wars. As Marks argues, “The reforms provoked protests that went beyond the normal patterns of intra-elite bargaining: Their legitimacy was called into question. Merchants [in Lima] soon learned that reforms would seriously disrupt their accustomed ways of doing business, destroying their semi-autonomous submetropolitan entrepôt” (p. 6). When traditional modes of protest fell on deaf ears, however, the merchants of Lima “embarked on a campaign to sabotage the reforms or render them irrelevant by non-compliance” (p. 7).

Marks demonstrates how the relationship shifted from being rather symbiotic (and mutually enriching) to one of open hostility and revolt. Interestingly, and counter-intuitively, Marks shows that a key precondition for the end of Spanish rule was not the spread of revolutionary doctrines, incompetent political leadership, or the inexorable rise of nationalist sentiment. Instead, it was the breakdown of longstanding inter-elite agreements. “Ironically,” Marks observes, “it was the die-hard royalists who contributed most vociferously to draining legitimacy from the colonial regime” (p. 341).

As magnificently thorough as the research that underpins this book is, the analysis is not altogether convincing in all places. In spite of Marks’ clear respect for the intelligence and sound judgment of the viceroys she studies, she takes a rather dismal view of the Bourbon reforms in general, portraying them in a manner consistent with the stop-gap, “defensive modernization” thesis promulgated by Stanley Stein. The result is that not only is the complexity of the late colonial state lost in Marks’ account, but also the Spanish empire’s collapse appears almost inevitable, instead of a protracted, haphazard, highly contingent process of dissolution. A second problem is the assertion, made in the final pages of the book, that the “over [End Page 282] throw of Viceroy Pezuela…established a model of praetorian politics . . . in which a sector of the civilian population, unable to prevail politically and unwilling to compromise, persuades army officers that they must act to save the state” (p. 353). The point is highly contentious and not backed up with any evidence. Did nineteenth- and twentieth-century elites look back to this event as a precedent? Was it invoked? The reader is left to wonder, for Marks never follows up on her assertion.

Far more useful and enduring is Marks’ crucial contribution to scholarly understanding of the mentalities, aspirations, and anxieties of members of a particularly powerful late colonial elite. The Consulado, the merchants’ guild that assumed a prominent role in late colonial politics in Peru and elsewhere, has been strangely ignored by many historians of Spanish America, in spite of its vibrancy in the final decades of colonial rule. In fact, it is disappointing that Marks does not look at the Lima Consulado in comparative perspective. Elsewhere, particularly in Havana and Santiago, the members of the Consulado found it opportune to collaborate instead of entering into conflict with the colonial bureaucrats. But this is a quibble. Marks remedies the long-standing neglect of this crucial institution and has furnished the field with an important monograph.

G.B. Paquette
Trinity College, University of Cambridge, Cambridge...

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