Honorable Lives: Lawyers, Family, and Politics in Colombia,1780-1850 (review)

Honorable Lives: Lawyers, Family, and Politics in Colombia, 1780-1850. By VICTOR M. URIBE-URAN. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000. Map. Tables. Appendixes. Notes. Glossary. Index. xxi, 276 pp. Cloth, $50.00.

This work is an outgrowth of the author's 1993 dissertation at the University of Pittsburgh plus the eight articles he has published up to 1997. It also draws upon a broad and extensive range of archival, printed, and monographic sources.

Honorable Lives is rich in interesting historical propositions revolving around the place of lawyers in New Granadan history between 1780 and 1850. It clearly establishes the role of the legal profession as a state-service elite in colonial times and its continuance and leadership in the independence and early national periods. Divisions among the lawyer-bureaucrats saw temporary outbreaks of caudillismo (Urdaneta, 1830-31; the Supremos 1839-42; and Melo, 1854). Uribe-Uran maintains that many members of the legal elite came to a consensus by the 1850s to pursue economic business careers rather than to continue seeking "honor-status" ones in the bureaucracy. True in part, perhaps, but, because of the overall penury, lasting well into the twentieth century, Colombia's stagnant export economy, and poor infrastructure, the state remained a principal source of employment for a legal sector which kept on growing. The 1850s boomlet in tobacco export and others in the next 40 years was insufficient to absorb all the lawyers, as the civil wars from 1859 to 1903 might indicate.

Also, Uribe-Uran suggests the success of the Antioquia and Neiva "provincials" in winning access to power during the 1830s, despite the resistance of the older "aristocratic" sectors of the lawyer-bureaucrats. While the existence of "provincials" with lesser social credentials may be a convenient explanation, a deeper look at their family origins (for example, the Azueros of Socorro of Portuguese origin, local landlords since the late 1600s), might prove them less professionally educated, but still socially significant on the provincial scene.

Quite correctly, Uribe-Uran pleads that political history not be abandoned, but focused to promote the "social history of high politics" (p. 6). Lawyers, as he shows in his detailed study, were a pivotal sector of Colombian society in the nineteenth century. We owe him our thanks for explicating their historical importance in such detail. Honorable Lives has the potential of becoming a major contribution to nineteenth-century Colombian political and social history.

Yet this study's numerous errata detract from its overall quality. For example, José Acevedo y Gómez was a Monguí, Boyacá, native, not a Spaniard (p. 62); Joaquín Mosquera y Figueroa was a fifth-generation creole, not a second-generation one (p. 167); "El Salitre" hacienda was near Paipa (Boyacá), not on the Bogotá plain (p. 168); the Popayán Arroyos were originally Pérez de Arroyo y Valencia, not Pérez de Valencia (p. 179); and Carraciolo Parra-Pérez is correctly named thus, not Coroliano Parra-Pérez (p. 238). Unfortunately, the text and footnotes abound in other name changes: Tomás C. de Mosquera becomes "Thomas . . ."; Antonio José de Sucre, "Antonio J. Sucre"; and José Manuel Restrepo, "José M. Restrepo," to mention only a few. Spelling errors and omitted accents of Colombian patronymics and place-names are endemic throughout. Bibliographic mistakes (incorrect publication data and name modifications) clutter the notes. The slim index is but nominal in utility. The absence of a bibliography is deplorable. It seems a shame, too, that academic presses have abandoned all pretense at editorial supervision. Such a promising study deserved far better.

J. LEON HELGUERA, Vanderbilt University

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