In this complex book, Josep M. Barnardas has illuminated a large and murky area of Spanish American history. There can be few aspects of life in sixteenth century Charcas that he does not touch on: preconquest ethnohistory, Incaic influence on the aboriginal Indians of the region, Spanish settlement, the effect on settlement and on political development of the civil wars of Peru, geography, agriculture, mining, encomienda, mita, commerce, the foundation of the Audiencia of Charcas, political relations between Charcas and Lima, and much more. The book is an attempt at total history. The author has researched his archives extensively, especially the remarkably rich Charcas section of the Archivo General de Indias. He expresses regret at not having been able to use archives in Spanish America. Material from them would certainly have strengthened some thin sections of the book. The few figures he presents for prices and population, for example, stand in forlorn isolation, and mean little. With access to local archives he would not have had to rely so heavily, either, on James Lockhart’s work for cumulative information about early Spanish social types in his area. When the European archives do present him with detailed information, he demonstrates a notable analytical skill. His exegesis, for example, of a 1550 información about mita mine laborers in Potosí will be a revelation even to those familiar with mita documents (pp. 266-271).
It would be wrong, however, to give the impression that Barnardas intends primarily to gather and present facts. Indeed, one would normally expect more hard data in a text of 553 pages. Not the least of the author’s intellectual virtues is that although a Spaniard (a Catalan Jesuit, to be admitted) he has broken completely away from the commonplace style of Spanish historical writing about American history: a reliance on the ability of the facts to speak for themselves. He is totally sure that facts do not speak for themselves, and that the historian, being unable to rid his mind of preconceptions about history and causality in it, must at least be as aware as possible of those preconceptions. So, at his most basic level, Barnardas is out to destroy some of the more inane received generalizations about the Spanish conquest of America (that, for example, it was undertaken principally to save the souls of the Indians); and at a higher one, to enounce and resolve as best he can general epistemological questions about the study of history. Those who, like this reviewer, are the happier the closer they are to their documents, should not be deflected by these theoretical inquiries. They are presented logically and without dogmatism. It is instructive to see a gifted and practicing investigator wrestling with them.
Concerned as he is with these problems of attaining a knowledge of history, Barnardas does not pretend to give conclusions about his findings. Indeed, any writer would have difficulty in presenting firm conclusions if he embarked on a work such as this, which sets out not only to define society in sixteenth-century Charcas, but also to show how it developed over some four decades after the initial settlement. (The book considerably overruns 1565, the terminal date announced in the title.) The undertaking is in its nature open-ended. The author describes the work, too modestly, as a platform from which further research can be started. There is a definite thesis in the book, however, if no conclusions. Barnardas declares himself an indigenista at the start. The development of social, economic, and political aspects of life in Charcas (which are themselves shown to be totally fused together into one constantly changing reality) is consistently related to a double-organizing principle: Spanish appropriation of the surplus product of the Indian population, and the dissolution of Indian society as a result of the Spaniards’ coming. The themes arc not new. The novelty of the book lies, first, in their presentation as historical events to be studied without moralizing; and, second, in the intensiveness and intelligence with which they are examined. Here is a rarity in Latin American historiography: a work impressive as evidence of labor, not in the archive, but in the mind.
