Crisis and Decline is a study of seventeenth-century Peru in the context of the Spanish imperial system. That linkage is both a theme and a method, for Andrien has used the Lima treasury records—poring over thousands of folio pages to verify account totals and categories—to chart the “political and financial relationship between the metropolis and the colony” (p. 213).
He divides his examination of that relationship into three sections: the economy or tax base, the administration of revenue collection, and the politics of the viceroyalty which, during this age of crisis and reform in Spain, turned largely on matters of taxation. With each of his themes, he makes a sweep through the century always linking developments in the colony to initiatives from the metropolis. In the first section, Andrien sees the economy becoming diverse, regionalized, complementary, and therefore less colonial, as silver production declined. Such an economy was more difficult to tax because it was complex, dispersed, and built up of smaller units. Treasury officials who had to collect from such a base were inadequately supervised and audited, poorly trained, and most importantly, tied to their locale more than to Lima or Madrid.
The second and third sections deal with the theory and practice of colonial administration. A central thesis here is that treasury officials were a “key link between colonial elites and the crown” (p. 103). Because they had to balance conflicting demands from each, they were the crucial element in “maintaining a workable political balance of power that preserved imperial unity” (p. 199). That balance shifted against the metropolis in 1633 when the crown, in a move that “contributed directly to a steady erosion of royal authority” (p. 121), put treasury appointments up for sale. What followed was the appointment of unqualified candidates, the rise of corruption, and a bureaucracy tied more deeply than ever to Peruvian rather than imperial concerns. The inevitable result was poor administrative performance. By 1664, the tribunal of accounts had a backlog of 400 unaudited accounts from subordinate treasuries, some of which had not even been received; even from such major revenue-producing cajas as Potosí, Cuzco, and Huancavelica accounts “remained unfinished for twenty years” (p6. 172).
In the third section, politics, Andrien continues earlier themes except that larger, more powerful players (viceroys, oidores, visitadores, and such) take the stage. Arbitrismo, the reforms applied by vigorous, puritanical officials from Spain, met Peruvian resistance. The politics consisted of metropolitan measures to root out corruption and collect more revenue (for Conde Duque de Olivares’s Unión de Armas, for example) from the kingdom versus tenacious efforts by colonials to keep capital in Peru, needed more than ever, the author argues, to fund new enterprises.
Crisis and Decline links up most readily with works that view the colonies from the perspective of the imperial system and ethos, for example works by John Lynch, Lawrence A. Clayton, and J. I. Israel. Thus, the title refers to the seventeenth-century crisis and decline of Spain and also to its effect on Peru in the form of predatory and ill-conceived policies. Andrien chooses not to link his study directly to the debate over the seventeenth-century depression except to note that before the earthquakes of 1687 there is “no evidence of a sustained depression or even that elites lived less well . . .” (p. 200). And yet, he also points to “the ominous decline of the silver industry by the 1620s[,] . . . core of the colonial economy . . . [where] failure . . . could have disastrous consequences” (pp. 136—137). But consequences for whom? And with what effect on treasury receipts as well as other enterprises? A more precise assessment is needed here, with or without the notion of a depression, to establish the connection between the “transition from a largely export-oriented economy to a more integrated series of regional economies” (p. 200). In all fairness, Andrien’s view is from Lima and his principal focus is the “financial decline of the viceregal treasury” (p. 166). In the end, the primacy of the former and the solution to the latter depended on efficient administration—neither of which was necessarily related to the well-being of the viceroyalty as a whole. The more we learn about the seventeenth century, the more it looks like a seething cauldron rather than a quiet backwater. Andrien has written a balanced and remarkably meaty book that has much to teach us about the age.
