In this slim volume Venezuela’s distinguished economic historian Eduardo Arcila Farías presents a fifty-page analysis and an eighty-five-page reprinting of an “Historical and Political Dissertation on Peruvian Commerce” originally published in Lima’s Mercurio Peruano in 1791. He considers the “Dissertation to be conceptually the richest American economic exposition of the late colonial period and its author, José Baquíjano y Carrillo (1751-1817), to be Peru’s most illustrious exponent of the Enlightenment.
Arcila Farías emphasizes Baquíjano’s eclectic use of sources and concludes that he lacked originality and did not advance the economic thought of the age. Particularly notable is his demonstration that Baquíjano, far from closely following Melchor de Jovellanos as frequently asserted, actually opposed the celebrated Asturian in several important areas.
The author’s introduction is useful for students of late colonial thought and potential biographers of Baquíjano will profit from its perceptive analysis. With a facsimile edition of the Mercurio readily available, however, reprinting the “Dissertation” seems unnecessary.
