In this lively account, Charles Walker describes the political and social struggles to rebuild and remake Lima after the city and its neighboring port were destroyed by an earthquake and tsunami on October 28, 1746. He uses the disaster as a window onto the inner life of the colonial city and argues that the barrage of reforms the Spanish viceroy attempted to implement in its aftermath were a dress rehearsal for the later Bourbon Reforms.
The book opens with the disaster, using the journeys of several witnesses across the devastated city to introduce the social world, major actors, and key themes of the study. Chapter 2 turns to the imagination of disaster, situating the city’s physical destruction in 1746 within a history of visions and premonitions of divine wrath that had begun with earlier quakes and greatly intensified in the decade after this one. Chapters 3 and 4 return to...
