Grandeur et misère de l'office

In Grandeur et misère, historian Michel Bertrand employs a prosopographical approach to analyze the careers and place in colonial society of 290 oficiales reales and contadores named from 1660 to 1780 to 13 treasury offices and the Tribunal de Cuentas of New Spain.Utilizing extensive archival research in Spain and Mexico, Bertrand has identified 171 Peninsulares, 51 Mexicans, and 5 other Creoles among the 290 officials. Purchasers accounted for 82 percent of the 119 appointees of identified place of birth from 1660 to 1715, the period of greatest sales of appointments to financial offices. Seventy-three percent of the purchasers were peninsulares in contrast to only 22 percent of the ministers who bought appointments to the Audiencia of Mexico during the same years. This peninsular domination of financial positions continued when the Crown ceased selling appointments.As for the American audiencias, young men short on professional qualifications particularly benefited from the sale of appointments. The dramatic decline in sales after 1715 (only 15 of 108 appointments) resulted in a “new professionalism” visible in appointees that, as a group, were older, better qualified, and marginally more often from Spain than those named from 1660 to 1715. Lacking a ladder of promotion similar to that for the audiencias, however, meant that most financial officials in New Spain remained in a single location and quickly became rooted there.Bertrand demonstrates the generally modest social origins of the officials and then documents the frequency with which they married into families of higher social and economic status. At the same time, he emphasizes that royal officials serving in provincial treasuries primarily married into prominent local families. Seen from a broader perspective, they normally married into the viceroyalty’s “secondary elites.” Their incorporation in established family networks, of course, served all participants. Friendships and business relationships, including the need for bondsmen, also bound officials to local economic activities. Conflicts that arose tended to be between rival networks instead of between royal and local officials.In order to ascertain the wealth of financial officials in Mexico City, Guanajuato, and Zacatecas, Bertrand examined notarial records for wills and inventories, dowries, and grooms’ wedding gifts to brides (arras). He found very few wealthy financial officials; most had net wealth of less than 10,000 pesos, and many had a negative net worth. Their generally limited economic circumstances corroborated the officials’ presence in secondary elites.Bertrand’s examination confirms that officials’ local social and economic ties were far more important than their creole or peninsular origins. The end of sales of appointment and, after 1720, the emphasis on professional qualifications resulted in different backgrounds of men who became financial officials, but failed, despite various visitas, including the well-known one by José de Gálvez, to transform the financial bureaucracy. For royal officials of modest social background, their positions offered a means to upward social mobility, although actual success required both an advantageous marriage and long tenure in office. Local elites routinely incorporated and coopted the officials into networks of family, friendship, and patronage, and used them to represent their interests. The “backbone” of colonial society, these networks remained in place despite all efforts at reform.Grandeur et misère richly documents common characteristics of the Crown’s financial officials in New Spain, reasons that attempts to reform the financial bureaucracy repeatedly failed, and the centrality of networks including financial officials in Mexican society from 1660 to 1780. All students of colonial society and administration will benefit from this superb study. A similar volume for Peru would be a welcome complement

Art · Economic history · Humanities · Political science · Politics · Promotion (chess) · Treasury · Historical Studies in Latin America · Historical Studies on Spain · History · Latin American history and culture · Law