This initial title in the Instituto de Historia’s new series makes no attempt to chronicle historical events hut presents a lucid analysis of governmental, demographic, social, economic, religious, and cultural structure. Each of the two Philippine Spains is treated separately and in approximately the same number of pages, with due attention to their multiple interaction upon each other. Miranda stresses the impress upon both kingdoms of the grey, complex, introverted personality of El Solitario del Escorial, a typically contemporary amalgam of absolutist and bourgeois mentalities, who subjected all interests, including the religious, to the purposes of his national bureaucratic state and in some ways curiously anticipated the rationalist despotism of the Enlightenment. In the peninsular section are reviewed the huge problems created by determination to maintain Spanish hegemony in Europe and by severe internal strains arising in part from the inflationary effects of the Zacatecas, Guanajuato, and San Luis Potosí silver rushes.
Across the Atlantic the ‘sombra de Felipe II’ imposed upon the relatively spontaneous New Spain of Cortés and Nuño de Guzmán the institutional patterns that would endure as long as the colonial period itself. Here Miranda emphasizes the growth of bureaucratic centralism, wholesale Indian subjection to the demands of the new silver economy, the triumph of latifundismo and stockraising, and the ever more intense subjection to metropolitan mercantilist objectives. Viceregal absolutism, it is true, tended to be somewhat limited by the Audiencia of México, the visitadores, the remoteness of the expanding northern frontier, and the inherent conditions of a heterogeneous colonial society; yet by the end of the century New Spain was thoroughly Philippine in institutional structure. Miranda sees this effect also in the Church, where the supersession of the religious orders by the secular hierarchy entailed defeat in the struggle to Christianize the Indian psychically as well as formally.
As a succinct interpretation designed for the intelligent layman, this is a successful performance which will not lack interest for the seiscentista specialist as well. While Miranda provides no bibliography, as might seem desirable, it is evident that he draws with discrimination upon recent scholarship in the field and, for New Spain, incorporates the results of his own well-known researches.
