We do not have many histories of corruption, and for good reason. The term, freighted with judgment, begs the question of whose standards we use to gauge it. And sources are an obvious problem: how to write the history of practices and profits that were deliberately kept off the books? In this remarkable study, Alfredo Moreno Cebrían and Núria Sala i Vila attempt the seemingly impossible. They trace the fortunes of two eighteenth-century viceroys of Peru, only one of whom, the Marqués de Castelldosrius (1707 – 10), went down in history as corrupt and profligate. (The other, the Marqués of Castelfuerte [1724 – 36], is still considered a paragon of probity.) The authors bring the zeal of investigative reporters to their task of following the money. They also give readers a detailed look at the social networks so crucial to governance and profit on both sides of the Atlantic.
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