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Deconstructing Legitimacy: Viceroys, Merchants, and the Military in Late Colonial Peru

2009; Duke University Press; Volume: 89; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2009-015

1527-1900

Gabriella Chiaramonti,

Historical Studies on Spain

Historiography has paid little attention to the events that led to the overthrow of Viceroy Joaquín de la Pezuela. So far, it has been considered the consequence of a conspiracy led by General José de la Serna along with other peninsular-born officers dissatisfied with Pezuela’s conduct of the war against San Martin’s army. In Marks’s opinion, that conspiracy did not arise from a proper alliance between the rebel officers and a group of merchants belonging to the Consulado de Lima (the merchant’s guild), since the evidence for the existence of such a coalition is “indirect and circumstantial” (p. 319). In fact, the plot was the result of a convergence of interests between the military and the merchants, who also shared the same monarchist and liberal political ideas. Moreover, this event was the final outcome of a radical transformation in political culture that had been going on for the previous 40 years and had changed “the very idea of legitimate governance” (p. 1).The author starts from these premises and, with the help of a great number of sources, analyzes first the composition of the merchant elite active in Peru from 1779 to 1821. She goes on to examine the different phases of the conflict, which, starting from the enforcement of the Bourbon administrative and commercial reforms, set the Lima merchants against the last viceroys, causing multiple (and so far ignored) fractures within the very same Consulado.Marks accurately describes the protagonists (creole merchants, peninsulares recently arrived to Peru, the Real Compañía de Filipinas, and the Cinco Gremios Mayores de Madrid) and the ways the conflict grew and intertwined with the debates that concerned the government of Spain and its colonies during those frantic years, together with the notion of free trade. At first, the Lima merchants took advantage of the warlike situation in Europe, trying to sabotage or elude the reforms. When in 1818, Pezuela’s increasing difficulties in finding the resources he needed to defend the viceroyalty led him to propose the opening of the Callao harbor to foreign ships, the opposition to his commercial policies increased and finally exploded, giving way to a fierce “war of words” that took place in journals, memoranda, and petitions to the Crown.Merchants hostile to Pezuela’s measures tried to delegitimize his actions by accusations of ineptitude, disobedience to the Crown’s directives, excessive submission to foreign merchants, and complicity in smuggling. On the other side, the viceroy was increasingly unable to adopt (in spite of the creation of a number of consultative committees) the usual bargaining practices between political authorities and local elites, which for three centuries had allowed the Hispanic Monarchy to smooth conflicts and build up consensus and obedience.Marks, supported by plenty of sources, runs through the changes of attitude toward the viceroy’s authority. Nevertheless, it would be useful to a deeper understanding of the process to pay more attention to the decisive role played by the ideas that spread in both Spain and Hispanic America after 1808, ideas that are touched on only in the last pages. In those years, the debate focused on sovereignty, its location, its exercise, and the circumstances in which the pueblo was legitimately allowed to assume that same sovereignty. These issues, accurately studied by recent works starting with those by François-Xavier Guerra, were the ideological justification for practices, such as the creation of juntas and provisional governments, witnessed in Spain by General La Serna and Gaspar Rico, the most persistent of Pezuela’s opponents. From that experience grew the language that Rico “had given limeños with which to question the legitimacy of the viceroy and his ruling” (p. 8).Finally, it is only affirmed, and not properly argued, that with Pezuela’s overthrow, “Peru experienced an early form of Latin American praetorianism” and that La Serna and Rico’s actions were “a model of praetorian politics that persists to this day in the nation-state that emerged from the Peruvian revolution for independence” (p. 353).Some elements of the 1821 events, such as the search for a posteriori legitimation, the claim of popular support, and the “salvationist rhetoric” of the proclamations (p. 353), might, to some extent, bring them close to the pronunciamientos of the nineteenth-century caudillos (though surely not to the twentieth-century golpes de estado). Nevertheless, the situation and the characters of the protagonists (officers of a colonial army colliding with a viceroy, with an independence army at their doorstep) make any comparison difficult.At any rate, these observations do not diminish the value of a book that offers to scholars an original and documented contribution to the study of the political and cultural life of late colonial Peru, especially of the changes and conflicts existing within one of the most important institutions of that age, the Consulado de mercaderes of Lima.