Few scholars in the United States currently study intendants. Marie-Pierre Lacoste's analysis of the intendants is therefore timely. Her contribution is part of a renaissance of studies on the mid- and upper-level ministers, even in English-speaking historiography. For example, María Bárbara Zepeda Cortés is reinterpreting José de Gálvez, Francisco Eissa-Barroso shows the early militarization of important coastal governments, and for Miguel Costa the nonaristocratic Count of Villar governed sixteenth-century Peru effectively as viceroy. In France, the prosopography of imperial actors embedded in their social networks—including peninsular intendants, financial officials, and plantation elites—is an important scholarly trend. As part of this trend, Lacoste presents sophisticated serial biographies of 236 intendants of larger New Spain, which she defines as the viceroyalty including New Galicia as well as Guatemala, Louisiana, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines. Lacoste discusses each intendant and succinctly interprets patterns. Her work combines classical genealogy of individuals and their...
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