Taxing Difference in Peru and New Spain (16th-19th Century)

The question of who would pay tribute loomed large in the Spanish Empire for hundreds of years. Authorities used taxpayer statuses to classify and extract resources from free people, especially in regions with dense Indigenous populations. Families with African ancestors also paid a price for their freedom in the form of a tribute tax. Taxing Difference in Peru and New Spain (16th–19th Century): Fiscal Petitions Negotiating Social Differences and Belonging is a rare study of colonial categorization and tribute in the two viceroyalties. Sarah Albiez-Wieck offers a comparative view of self-fashioning and belonging through petitions, many from archives in Cajamarca and Michoacán as well as Trujillo. The author examines the goals of petitioners to change their official status alongside those of the monarchy to maintain a flexible, yet coherent, tax regime. Albiez-Wieck finds the most striking differences between tributary statuses in New Spain and Peru among people classified as indios or as migrants of some official type. The sources narrate the journeys of everyday people, many of whom lived between statuses and communities. Other migrants inherited the status from parents or ancestors. One of the book's main contentions is that fiscal “categorization,” to use the author's preferred term, was negotiated and established through colonial procedures. Like other forms of colonial classification, these statuses were the subject of intense, unresolved debates among bureaucrats and ordinary people. According to Albiez-Wieck, it was ancestry, rather than appearance or place, that drove the arguments in petitions from Cajamarca and Michoacán. To support these analyses, Taxing Difference combines strong methodological and historiographical grounding with a unique selection of archival sources.Albiez-Wieck joins other scholars who are creating interdisciplinary approaches to draw out elusive aspects of self-fashioning, networks, and family dynamics. In particular, the author focuses on belonging and translocality, while acknowledging that the petitions tend to reveal more about the places where migrants ended up. Family histories and strategic familial narratives emerge within slights and allegations against the petitioners. Officials accused a natural son of conveniently “adopting himself a forastero father” to shift his status and belonging (p. 172). Another father was supposedly “wandering around as a vagabond abandoning his wife and children” who had journeyed with him far from home (p. 199). Terms present in the documents, in particular calidad, guide this work. The author finds greater enforcement of tributary status among Afro-descendants in Michoacán, where tribute had a mutually reinforcing relationship with ideas of impurity and calidad. However, Albiez-Wieck notes that racialization was a halting process in both Michoacán and Cajamarca.The contents of Taxing Difference are organized into chapters with descriptive subheadings. A lengthy introduction spells out methodological considerations while connecting the book to many historiographies. The first chapter grounds the tribute regimes and societies of Cajamarca and Michoacán in their Indigenous contexts. The second chapter surveys tribute in New Spain and Peru, using centuries of legislation and a robust secondary literature. Chapter 3 examines petitions to adjust tributary status and, in doing so, underscores the importance of ancestry in determining fiscal categorization. In chapter 4, the author shows the effects of fiscal status on migrants’ belonging and charts the journeys documented in petitions. The chapter about “‘mixed’ ancestry” includes women petitioners, mestizos, and Afro-descendants, revealing an emphasis on “purity of blood” in New Spain. The final chapter treats the relationships between newer taxes and established colonial categorizations in the nineteenth century, which showed greater continuity in Peru. The book's conclusion reminds the reader that petitions and migration offered people some means to negotiate their position within an oppressive tax regime. The exhaustive bibliography (nearly 80 pages in length), figures, and maps are useful. The references show the author's sustained connections with scholars around the world.Taxing Difference is heavy reading. The author tackles early modern terms of social difference that could leave bureaucrats then (and scholars now) scratching their heads. The book employs technical language to explain complex cases. Little is omitted from the scope of the book. This entails certain sacrifices in other areas. Readers may miss conclusions to the chapters, for example. The author has provided extensive data and references that are sure to fuel future studies.The contributions to scholarship on colonial categorization and adscription make Taxing Difference a worthwhile book. Specialists will rely on its analyses, archival references, and generous bibliography. More broadly, the book invites scholars to use fiscal status to interpret lived experiences and official expressions of belonging in Spanish America

Art · Development economics · Economics · Late 19th century · Negotiation · Period (music) · Political science · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Law