Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues: The Court Society of Colonial Mexico, 1702–1710 (review)

Institutional histories of the colony of New Spain (Mexico, 1521–1808) commonly interrogate the extent to which the absolutism of Spain’s Bourbon dynasty (1700–1808) represented a radical break from the clientelism of the Habsburg monarchs (1516–1700). Most respond to David Brading’s work Miners and Merchants in Bourbon Mexico (1971), who argued that rulers and elite subjects in New Spain clashed over a “revolution in government,” intended to curb corruption, which introduced peninsular agents into creole (Mexican born) strongholds of local governance. “Direct” rule threatened bonds of political and economic patronage that loosely tied creole subjects to their distant monarchs and characterized the “indirect rule” of the Habsburg era. Subsequent works question the efficacy of the revolution, and whether struggles between royal rulers and colonial elites were anything new in the Bourbon era. Two questions emerge, one being how New Spain’s political culture, as Christoph Rosenmüller puts it, changed as a result of the expansion of state power under the Bourbons, the other being the role that patron–client networks played in this transition.

In his study of the tenure of Francisco Fernández de la Cueva Enriquez, tenth Duke of Alburquerque (1666–1733), viceroy of New Spain from 1702 to 1710, Rosenmüller elegantly answers the first question by examining the second. Patrons, Partisans, and Palace Intrigues focuses on the viceroy and his court in New Spain, considering the role of court patronage in mediating New Spain’s shifting institutional politics. The author looks at the relationship between political culture and patronage with an intense study of patron–client networks connected to the viceregal court.

As the book’s introduction indicates, its methodological basis is in the prosopography—the biographical study of colonial agents involved with the viceroy. The second chapter describes Alburquerque’s appointment as a political compromise for a court in Madrid divided into supporters of the last Habsburg monarch, Charles II (1665–1700), and Philip V (1700–1715), from the newly installed Bourbon dynasty, with Alburquerque representing the interests of nobles loyal to the Habsburgs. In New Spain, Alburquerque solidified his authority through patronage, sponsoring members of the colonial elite with court appointments. This occurred in spite of his legal obligation to detach himself from his subjects to ensure both impartial civil administration and his loyalty to the monarch. Rosenmüller contextualizes this contradiction in a third chapter, reconstructing the political and customary structures of the court. While Alburquerque’s patronage practices defined “corruption,” such practices were pervasive in the early modern world, only becoming the target of European reform projects in the early eighteenth century. The fourth chapter proves that for alcaldes mayores, corregidores, and other colonial offices, the viceroy drew from a pool of loyal followers: criados, followers from Spain; and clients, lackeys with ties to the Viceroy nurtured in New Spain.

Alburquerque’s networks impacted corporations, such as the Church and the merchant guilds (consulados) of Spain and New Spain. With the duke’s support (and in exchange for some of the profits), merchants of New Spain took advantage of a legal stopgap from 1701 and 1706 allowing them to trade piecemeal with French ships anchored in the port of Veracruz. The resulting swell in contraband wholesale trade drew the ire of Spanish merchants who operated fleets between Seville and Veracruz. This is the background for the fifth chapter, which demonstrates that the viceroy persecuted members of the Sánchez de Taglé family, who represented the interests of the Seville merchants, on behalf of merchants in New Spain. However, economic competition among individual merchants, not between the consulados, drove the duke’s intervention. The Sánchez de Taglé family also traded in contraband, but competed with the duke’s clients. Such rivalries formed independently of social factors that historians usually consider the bases of political factions during the Bourbon era, such as...