Historia general de América Latina. vol. 3, parts 1 and 2, Consolidación del orden colonial

The Historia general de América Latina, which will eventually include nine volumes, was conceived and commissioned by UNESCO in 1980 under the direction of a scientific committee presided over by Venezuelan historian Germán Carrera Damas. Some 240 historians from Latin America, North America, and Europe were invited to participate in this project, which has been subject to a continuing series of organizational and funding problems. Large collective publishing efforts like this one involving many authors of different nationalities all share problems inherent in the nature of such projects. Editorial control is difficult, essay quality and size is often uneven, progress toward completion moves only at the pace of the slowest contributor, and during the time between conception and completion, new research appears and historical approaches and styles change. The two substantial tomes reviewed here comprise parts 1 and 2 of volume 3 and are dedicated to the mature colonial period. They have now appeared some 20 years after the project’s inception, and they do suffer from some of the general problems of such large collaborative works. Nevertheless, under the direction of Alfredo Castillero Calvo and Allan Kuethe, vol. 3, Consolidación del orden colonial, contains a number of outstanding scholarly contributions that summarize the state of the field and should make these volumes necessary reading in graduate programs and essential books in the libraries of colonial specialists.The volume has been organized thematically into 35 chapters of varying length. Most of the chapters dedicated to Spanish America concentrate on the Habsburg period, but some extend well into the eighteenth century. Some chapters are footnoted, others are not. Clearly, authors differed in what they perceived as their objective: some offer brief overviews, while others present the results of extensive research. There is a general bibliography provided for the volume as a whole. A positive note is the excellent integration of maps, plans, views, and diagrams, many of them drawn from the AGI in Seville. The editors should also be congratulated for their conscious effort to include work on Brazil and make it available to a Spanish-reading audience. This was done primarily by commissioning parallel chapters on Spanish America and Brazil on a number of themes, such as institutional organization, food production, the colonial commercial system, the Catholic Church, and manufacturing. Sometimes this pairing works well, as in the case of Pilar Gonzalbo and Maria Odila da Silva Dias, whose respective chapters on subaltern whites and freed persons in New Spain and Brazil allow for interesting comparisons. The parallel between Spanish America and Brazil, however, is sometimes more apparent than real. For example, John “Fritz” Schwaller’s excellent summary chapter on the church in Spanish America (2:543 – 74) is three times longer than Dauril Alden’s useful but brief review of the church in Brazil (2:575 – 82). The same can be said of the discrepancy between Virgilio Noya Pinto’s rapid discussion of the Portuguese colonial commercial system in Brazil (1:125 – 32) and the much longer and richer essay on Spanish American colonial commerce (1:75 – 124). Not all themes receive this parallel treatment, so that chapters such as C. Maclachlan’s on the ideology of empire, J. Hardoy and M. Gutman’s on urbanization, or E. Tejada Davis’s on architecture find no Brazilian counterparts. The truth is that few scholars are able to deal with the historiography of both Spanish America and Brazil, and integration of Spanish and Portuguese America into thematic chapters has not been attempted. Thus, these volumes accurately reflect the current state of the study of Latin America, which continues to be divided into two linguistically separated enclaves.The organization of this volume emphasizes political and religious institutions, aspects of social history such as immigration and mestizaje, and economic activities such as commerce and manufacturing. The editors made a conscious effort to broaden the scope to include chapters on urbanization, transportation, fortifications, and art and architecture. It is really Homo farber that is the center of analysis here, with a strong materialist orientation that reflects both the origin of the project’s conceptualization and the themes and approaches that predominated in the field when it began. No separate chapters are devoted to gender, the history of the family, demography, cultural hybridities, ethnohistory, or other themes of more recent preoccupation. Overall, what is most lacking and where we most notice the effect of 20 years of gestation is the absence cultural themes — mentalities, ritual, display, reading habits, sexuality — that presently compose much of contemporary historiography and which are generally not treated in this volume. This gives the volume the feel of a project somewhat overtaken by events.It would be unfair, however, to concentrate on the absences when there are excellent chapters that cover a broad range of topics on colonial Latin America. While some chapters are little more than reviews of the secondary literature, the best essays are those written by scholars who have long been engaged in primary research on the general theme of their chapter and who have written a synthetic essay aimed at an informed if more general readership. Some of these are exceptionally well done. Magnus Mörner contributes a fine, succinct essay on European immigration (2:416 – 27) that draws on the quantitative estimates of Peter Boyd-Bowman but enlivens them with a judicious use of personal correspondence drawn from the cartas de Indias. Herbert Klein gives a broad overview of African slaves (2:507 – 31) and provides a concise bibliographical discussion. Editor and Panamanian historian Alfredo Castillero Calvo also provides two excellent essays. His chapter on the carrera de Indias and on its trade fairs (1:75 – 124) presents a clear discussion of the system and its general difficulties, while also offering a perceptive analysis of contraband and its effects. He provides fascinating details on the trade fairs of Portobelo and Vera Cruz–Jalapa, such as the costs and problems of overland transportation that make clear the crucial role played by muleteers in the functioning of the system. The focus here is not so much the old question of how much silver was reaching Spain (as vital as that question is) but rather the local effects of the carrera and the policy of trade monopoly on America. Castillero Calvo also contributes an overlapping essay (1:339 – 406) on the nature of commerce and transportation in America, with useful observations about the Pacific Coast trade, the building of roads and bridges, and the peculiarities of the cross-isthmus movement of goods. Taken along with Murdo Macleod’s classic essay on the internal economy of Spanish America in the Cambridge History of Latin America (2:219 – 64), Castillero’s chapters now provide an excellent overview of the functioning of the commercial system within the Americas.This volume also contains a number of notable essays on aspects of colonial history that were not covered in detail in the Cambridge History of Latin America. I found, for example, Marina Alfonso Mola and Carlos Martínez Shaw’s excellent discussion on shipbuilding and shipyards in the Americas (1:279 – 303) full of insights, especially on the rise of an American shipbuilding industry in the seventeenth century and the predominant role of the Havana shipyards in that process. Another essay of surprising vitality and scope is that of Spanish historian Juan Marchena Fernández, who draws on his own research and familiarity with primary sources to write a substantial chapter on the defense of the empire (2:615 – 68), which begins with the situado (government subsidy) and the problems of financing defense and then describes the wide-scale changes in military organization and composition after 1762, in which the creolization of defense was a central element. This chapter is enhanced by informative maps, graphs, and contemporary illustrations. One of the most ambitious chapters is Horst Pietschmann’s suggestive essay (2:669 – 92) on the exercise and conflicts of power in Spanish America. He seeks to find a balance between an older juridical-administrative historiography of the state (often from a metropolitan peninsular perspective) and a newer historiography that emphasized social and economic issues from an American or local viewpoint. His examination of the struggle between central and local power proposes a three-stage process, moving from a collaborative effort in the age of capitulaciones to increasing state authority after 1580, and then an age of conflict between bureaucracies and creole societies. This led, by the eighteenth century, to the formation of protostates under an increasingly self-conscious creole elite. Pietschmann presents here a useful model for understanding a broad range of social and political conflict throughout the colonial period.As is to be expected, there are imperfections, redundancies, and omissions. The bibliography does not cite the work of Serge Gruzinski, nor is much of the “new historical philology” of James Lockhart and his students. But in its attempt to bring together an international group of scholars (among whom nationality did not seem to be a primary consideration in their selection) and in its presentation of a variety of thematic essays — some of them of particular excellence — this volume of the Historia general de América Latina should be recognized as an important contribution to colonial history and a logical starting point for readers who wish to get a sense of this field as it stood at the close of the twentieth century

Colonialism · Humanities · Political science · Historical Studies in Latin America · History and Politics in Latin America · Latin American history and culture · Law · Philosophy