The modest size and format of this collection of essays may obscure its considerable value and importance. Most of the essays were originally presented at a conference on “The State in Colonial Latin America” at the University of Delaware and focus on that theme. In general, the quality of the contributions is high. The Marxist viewpoint from which some of these essays are written casts a clarifying new light on the interplay of political, economic, and social factors in the history of colonial Latin America.

Karen Spalding’s informative introduction notes the recent revival of scholarly interest in what was once disparagingly called “traditional history”—the study of the political and legal institutions of colonial Latin America. This revival reflects a new awareness of the crucial importance of political elements in the economic and social life of the colonies, illustrated by the large role of such local colonial officials as the corregidor and the parish priest in regional production and distribution. This awareness has led scholars to reconsider the nature and role of the state in colonial Latin America. Rejecting the neo-classical liberal conception of the state as the impartial regulator of relations in society, Spalding and like-minded scholars accept the Marxist view of the state as the set of formal and informal mechanisms and relationships that function to maintain the dominance of one class of the society over the rest and ensure its continued appropriation of the surplus generated by the majority.” But the state in colonial Latin America functioned at a vast distance from the metropolis and had to deal with populations whose cultural and historical backgrounds were very different from those of Europe; hence the need to develop new models of the colonial states of the Americas, “in which the European realities are one part of the total system, and class relationships and conditions in the Americas are the other.” One paradox that such models must help to explain is the remarkable willingness of colonial elites to maintain their ties with Spain and Portugal during three centuries of colonial rule, despite the absence of a strong Spanish and Portuguese military presence in the colonies until the late eighteenth century.

To one or another degree, the essays in this collection supply the same answer: the colonial state bought the support of local elites by assuring them access to goods and labor, by admitting them into the bureaucracy, and by providing them with a variety of other subsidies and favors. The stress, then, is not the customary emphasis on the conflicts that led to independence but on the common interests of the state and local elites that made possible the remarkable longevity of the Spanish and Portuguese empires in America. The thesis is not particularly original; what lends value to these essays is the conceptual clarity, well-chosen evidence, and cogency with which the authors argue their case.

Individual essays that I found of particular interest included: that on colonial Central America, by Murdo MacLeod, which makes a provocative revisionist point (the composiciones and indultos whereby the crown forbade past transgressions in return for payments of money were not, as we have been accustomed to think, proof of weakness or “the desperate thrashing about for cash of a bankrupt primitive state,” but a deliberate policy of buying support from the upper classes); “Colonial Brazil: The Role of the State in a Slave Social Formation,” by Stuart Schwartz; and “The Limits of Colonial Absolutism: The State in Eighteenth Century Mexico,” by John Coatsworth. With a wealth of data, John TePaske’s study of the fiscal structure of Upper Peru shows that “if the labor of the Indians in the mines had been responsible for the development and sustenance of the empire in South America in the seventeenth century, the exploitation of the Indian by Spanish tax collectors provided the monies needed in the eighteenth century for continuation of the imperial endeavor.”

My only serious quarrel is with some conclusions reached by Herbert Klein in his essay on the state and the labor market in rural Bolivia. Klein notes that although the state played a decisive role in forcing Indians into the rural labor market through its taxing system, it made no effort to coerce them onto the estates of the Spaniards. He concludes that the yanaconas, or resident laborers, on those estates could leave them of their own free will; this freedom, he optimistically adds, guaranteed that “a minimum of generally acceptable standards and justice had to be acknowledged by the hacendados.” Where Klein sees a “free market mechanism” in operation I am inclined to see a rural labor system strongly tinged with feudal or semifeudal relations.