The Bishop’s Utopia: Envisioning Improvement in Colonial Peru by Emily Berquist Soule (review)

Emily Berquist Soulé’s work on Baltazar Jaime Martínez Compañón is worthy of its determined, dynamic, enlightened subject. This is no small feat. As bishop of the northern coastal area of Trujillo, Peru, in the late eighteenth century, Martínez Compañón brought unbridled enthusiasm to his work. He offered the region’s native population a series of educational, urban planning, and scientific programs designed to remake them into ideal imperial subjects, rationalize their work, and classify their knowledge. Utopian though they were, his reforms were also practical, and however grand his pretensions, Martínez Compañón also valued native thinking and things. This makes him an intellectual avatar of an “American-born epistemology linked to, but different from, the scientific epistemologies of the Enlightenment” (p. 4).

Any historian of this bishop must be as much of a polymath as he was, and Berquist Soulé more than rises to the occasion. The book is equal parts biography, history of science, and visual, intellectual and social history. Each of its seven chapters is written in language as vibrant as the color plates that adorn the interior. The first chapter, on the books the bishop brought with him when he first traveled from Spain to his post in Trujillo, reveals his intellectual universe and shows that he came already bearing big ideas. The succeeding chapters detail various of his reforms, including information-gathering missions, town resettlement projects, vast educational plans aimed at children and youth, a “radical” plan for enlivening a Cajamarca silver mine with cooperation from the miners’ gild, and, finally, the collection of botanical treasures and illustrations for a massive, nine-volume compendium on the human, animal, and botanical riches of the region called ‘Trujillo del Peru’—what Berquist Soulé calls a “paper museum.”

Ultimately, Martínez Compañón was a contradictory figure, and the projects he promoted were too. His ideas about the native populations often stressed equality and Indians’ great potential, yet his take on “equality” remained structured by long-standing colonial prejudices. Berquist Soulé provides numerous examples of equivocations, quoting, for example, one letter from Martínez Compañón to the king in which he proclaimed “the Indians are very equal, or very little different from the other men of their calidad” (p. 101). His defense of native people and use of native knowledge was always in service of promoting greater wealth for the Spanish state and greater conformity with the moral and cultural dictates of Catholicism. But his plans were not without local support. Native communities showed enthusiasm for various schooling and town resettlement programs, and he enlisted them to contribute to his compendium, Trujillo del Perú. Though this project fit within the wider Western enthusiasm for encyclopedias and scientific missions, the bishop chose to use Quechua and Spanish rather than Latin to categorize his specimens, a move that reveals his commitment to native knowledge.

Many of his programs were unsuccessful. In fact, one could almost say that the failures, such as new town settlements, advanced secondary schools, and the utopian mine, reveal more of the dynamic history than do the successes, such as the establishment of primary schools. They show an interplay between Martínez-Compañón’s vision and the reality of life in the region and, subsequently, allow the author to connect intellectual and scientific history to social and political history in meaningful ways. Many of the most ambitious programs foundered not because of native resistance but because of bureaucratic blockages, though it is not always clear why potential Spanish or creole allies stood in the way of the Bishop’s utopian fantasies. Sometimes it might be a viceroy who harbored greater doubts about natives’ potential than did Martínez Campañón, or a city councilman who got cold feet about the bishop’s plan to reform and refinance a silver mine and provide...