How Eighteenth-Century Spain and Spanish America Challenge Scholarly Models of Modernity and Postmodern Enlightenment Paradigms

Ruth Hill's scholarship has long been required reading for Hispanists who study eighteenth-century Spain or Spanish America, and her books have been well and widely reviewed in journals studying the Ibero-American world. In all her publications and teaching, Ruth Hill has labored to move beyond stereotypes about Spain and Spanish America's "retarded" Enlightenment. Hill's latest book contributes to ongoing efforts that provide scholars of eighteenth-century England, Spain, or France with details on how Spain (traditionally peripheral or "marginalized" from the rest of Europe) and Spanish America's eighteenth-century viceroyalties might prove central to reevaluating North America and Western Europe's entrances into modernity. Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America: A Postal Inspector's Exposé reads the canonical El lazarillo de ciegos caminantes (1775) (translated by Hill as Guide for Blind Rovers or Guide for Blind Traders and previously translated as A Guide for Inexperienced Travellers) by Spanish-born Alonso Carrió de Lavandera (1715–83) as emblematic of the provocative complexities of Enlightenment-era Spain and Spanish America. It complements the work by scholars such as Ralph Bauer, whose publications have already suggested the central role played by the Ibero-American world (Spain, Portugal, Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America) in the "larger Atlantic developments" of North America and other territories within the British empire, and who has praised Hill as a "prominent voice of early modern Iberian intellectual history" (Bauer, "The Early-Modern Ibero-American World," Latin American Research Review 43 [2008], 228). Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America clearly has significance for scholarship on the Hispanic eighteenth century, but it also has broader implications beyond studies of Spanish America. This review will discuss Ruth Hill's timely challenge to conventional Enlightenment scholarly paradigms and methodologies.

Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America demonstrates how and suggests reasons why scholarly discussions surrounding the tensions between tradition and change (Spain's supposed resistance to or tardy entrance into "modernity") that have long characterized scholarship about the Enlightenment in transatlantic Bourbon Spain elide the complexities of the period. Hill grapples "with cultural practices, as well as religious and political institutions, that do not fit scholarly models of modernity," especially those based on eighteenth-century England and France (305). To that end, the book models a critical methodology pertinent for historians and literary scholars of any area and paints a wide and detailed canvas. Hill packs dense chapters with meticulous analyses of published, unpublished, and forgotten primary sources, and she incorporates secondary scholarship from economic and social historians as well as literary scholars. Her clarifications of viceregal Spanish American cultural contexts through analysis of eighteenth-century political, religious, and economic texts and terminology expose the interrelatedness of caste, blood purity, and status in relation to hierarchy, commerce, and fraud; this last concept includes both illegal commerce (contraband smuggling) as well as "passing" between different castes or between plebian and noble status during this period. All three parts, seven chapters plus an introduction and an epilogue (both of which constitute important scholarly statements in and of themselves), compel us to rethink existing paradigms and create new models for studies of the Enlightenment inside and outside Spanish America.

Readers of this review, not only Hispanists but all eighteenth-century specialists from the diverse disciplines represented by the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies (ASECS), will appreciate the erudition of Hierarchy, Commerce, and Fraud in Bourbon Spanish America. But they must also excuse this reviewer from the impossible task of summarizing the encyclopedic contents of Hill's book. As just one example from the lengthy introduction, to prove that jestbooks and riddles were "a cross-cultural enterprise" (24), Hill cites witty, almanac-inspired "guides" for travelers from four diverse sources—England (Defoe), Italy (Pallavicino), Spain (Rufo), and Spanish America (Carrió). Here and throughout the book she displays copious knowledge gleaned from extensive reading of primary sources...