This is an important book. P. Michael McKinley provides us with a reasoned analysis of the last decades of colonial Caracas in which he elaborates a controversial theme: these years represent the flowering of elite Caraqueño society, a time of “new assertiveness born of economic success, social preeminence and an awareness of political strength” (p. 2). In McKinley’s view, there was little reason why the elite of late eighteenth-century Caracas would have objected to its colonial condition. For example, there was no significant conflict between merchants and hacendados, who were in fact drawing closer to one another as the colonial period ended; from the late 1770s royal administrators for the most part served the interests of the local elite; and the general openness of Caracas society served to diffuse social and racial tensions, leaving the elite as true masters of their immediate domain. From this perspective, the events of 1810 appear to have been fundamentally irrational, and such a position is indeed the logical outcome of this book. The important debate which should be provoked by McKinley’s study becomes immediately evident in this provocative statement:
That the struggle in Caracas proceeded to become as violent and destructive as it did, is because key individuals, reacting to the political exigencies of the moment, cold-bloodedly chose the use of extreme violence to break the stability of the colonial order which for so many years previously had successfully accommodated disparate political and social elements (ibid.).
The argument essentially depends on several related conclusions about the hacendado elite. An impressive survey of some 800 wills allows McKinley to assert that there were very few wealthy individuals in late colonial Caracas, and that a substantial proportion of the population of the province was of a middling sort. For McKinley, social tensions were minimized because the generally open economy meant that wealth was more evenly distributed than it was in colonies such as New Spain or Peru, and because the population was widely dispersed in the Caracas province.
Also central to McKinley’s consensus perspective is the idea that merchants and planters shared a common view of society and race. Peninsular-born merchants merged easily with the resident elite, buying haciendas and marrying the women of foremost local families. The significance of this presumed harmony at the upper reaches of Caracas society is that, when the administrative talents of the Bourbon intendants are added to the mixture, a portrait of social peace and order is, for McKinley at any rate, the reality of late eighteenth-century Caracas: “And with the cooptation and cooperation of the local economic interests into and with the decision making process, imperial policy was ensured an acceptance inside Caracas which was probably highly unusual in the context of the tensions of the late colonial empire” (p. 111).
Despite the central argument of Pre-Revolutionary Caracas, it remains possible to presume a general crisis of the Caracas elite in the late eighteenth century. McKinley’s “cold-blooded . . . key individuals” were probably in fact the better part of a substantial number of long-established first families. If the interests of this group were served by Charles III’s intendants (and the section “Politics” seems to me to be the strongest part of the book), the very serious problem of their declining wealth and status has made little impression on McKinley. This is the more curious because he recognizes the process: “Quite simply, the old families which dominated the upper reaches of wealth in the province were in the process of witnessing the fragmentation of riches as an old generation died and their children divided their estates” (p. 82). That these families had successfully avoided such decline for five and six generations before the 1780s and 1790s would make their situation all the more critical when it occurred. Their sensitivity to the issue of the rising pardo class can be understood in this context. But McKinley does not see much tension of a racial or class sort, and he believes that what there was of this conflict in the late colonial period was most probably no different than at any other time. There are other points for disagreement: the suggested linkage between creole families and peninsular merchants, for example, important for establishing that there was consensus at the top of Caracas society, depends in the end on four marriages in 20 years between European merchants and daughters of “important and established hacendado families” (p. 89; n. 62). Yet it is because of these differences, in the debate that it will hopefully create, that this book is of major significance.
