A considerable body of literature exists on the municipalities of colonial Spanish America, but most of it has been concentrated either on the immediate post-conquest years or on the last decades of the empire, both periods of intense political activity in town government. Moore has endeavored to fill a serious gap. In an earlier book he described the operation of town government in the viceroyalty of Peru in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In the present work he traces its eighteenth-century development in a more restricted geographical area, that of the audiencia of Lima. The chronological division is, in this connection, an awkward one. It is difficult to demonstrate that government or general conditions in the Indies under Philip V were significantly different from those under Charles II. Moore does his best, and in the process exaggerates the ability and energy of the two first Bourbon kings and the effectiveness of their (undoubtedly able) ministers. A more plausible break in continuity is to be found in the humiliations of the Seven Years’ War and in the subsequent determination of Charles III’s ministers to tighten the whole administration of the empire through a standing army, a disciplined civil service, and a rational system of trade and finance.
The most interesting chapters in the book are those which describe the relations between the town governments and the civil service, with its corps d’élite of intendants. It is a story of frustration, of local resistance—not always passive—to centralized reform, and above all of governmental penury. Most cabildos could not govern effectively because their propios were inadequate, and because they lacked power to raise local taxes. On the other hand, they would not, because, being self-perpetuating oligarchies of place-owners, they could not be held to account. The crown would not authorize them to raise taxes, because it did not trust them. Yet it could not reform them, because it had not the money to compensate their members for the loss of their proprietary places. “Judged by the canons of nineteenth-century liberalism and democracy,” Moore concludes, “the cabildo was woefully lacking” (p. 243). No doubt; but why should it be judged by those canons? As an institution, it was representative of its time; and on the whole it did its job. In the later eighteenth century, viceroys and intendants succeeded in prodding many cabildos into constructive activity. Many of the eighteenth-century towns of the Indies were architecturally splendid, well laid out, and (if Humboldt is to be believed) reasonably well run. Moore does not explain these accomplishments.
His book contains a great deal of miscellaneous detail about eighteenth-century cabildos, much of it interesting and new. There are a number of inaccuracies, especially in the translations of technical or legal terms, and a sprinkling of typographical errors. It is misleading to translate examinadores de oficios as “examiners of officials,” villas de órdenes militares as “towns under military orders” (p. 12). A more general and more serious criticism is that the political constitutions and the legal rights of town councils are here studied in isolation from the general life of the towns and their citizens. The privileges of regidores have little meaning unless we know, in some detail, what kinds of citizens became regidores. For better understanding of the life of the Indies we need more studies not merely of town governments, but of towns.
