The aim of this book is to provide a thorough examination of the structure, political evolution, and social base of the Royal Mining Tribunal of Lima. Building on the fine work of John Fisher on mining in Bourbon Peru, the author has examined a wide range of laws, fiscal accounts, and the official documentation of this institution, in order to present a thorough picture of the structure and functioning of the tribunal. Because of this meticulous research, Molina Martínez has written an admirably detailed institutional history, which provides material useful to legal, social, and economic historians of the Bourbon period.
The establishment of the Royal Mining Tribunal of Lima in 1787 transferred important legal and fiscal powers over that industry to the viceregal silver miners. The new mining code, for example, established provincial and regional commissions to handle judicial disputes, lobby for needed reforms, and resolve local grievances. The central tribunal in Lima was to serve as a political force for securing mining reforms in the viceroyalty and, by 1797, as the appeals court for all legal disputes involving the industry. Furthermore, the crown gave the tribunal mining tax revenues for the establishment of banks to make loans, exchange silver, and sell mercury, which would have freed miners from the domination of local merchants. Finally, the crown entrusted the tribunal with founding a mining college to disseminate the latest technological advances to this vital industry.
According to Molina Martínez, the effectiveness of the Royal Mining Tribunal was handicapped from the outset, as successive viceroys began to intervene in the elections and other affairs of the tribunal, effectively limiting its ability to handle mining problems independently. Such meddling and the limited financial resources available to the Tribunal also curtailed its efforts to establish banks to sell mercury and loan miners money for needed technological innovations or expensive capital improvements. Moreover, the merchant community, which had dominated the profitable Peruvian silver exchanges, managed to lobby the viceroy successfully to end the tribunal’s experiment with establishing local banks to perform those functions. Even the tribunal’s efforts at founding a mining college fell victim to a shortage of funds and the institution’s political weakness. Only in judicial administration did it experience any real successes, but these were insufficient to give the miners the political clout, social respectability, and economic power that they sought.
The strength of this book lies in its detailed and informative discussion of the legal and political evolution of the Royal Mining Tribunal. Molina Martínez is very effective, for example, in explaining how the political and fiscal weaknesses of the tribunal doomed its efforts to establish special banks and a technical college for miners. He is less successful, however, in placing the silver miners and their tribunal in the wider socioeconomic context of Bourbon Peru. Given the institutional weakness of the tribunal and its inability to alter basic economic policy in the viceroyalty, this failure to broaden the range of the study limits the book’s overall impact. The author’s discussion of the social role of silver miners, for example, is suggestive but brief. Furthermore, although he discusses the financial records of the tribunal, he does not examine royal treasury accounts, which could have given him information on the fiscal and economic role of the mining industry in Peru. Despite these flaws, however, El Real Tribunal de Minería de Lima helps fill an important gap in the historiography of Bourbon Peru, and provides a wealth of useful information to scholars interested in the period.
