In this intensely researched study, Margarita Súarez reinvigorates the story of transatlantic commerce between Peru and Spain by giving center stage to the peruleros, the Lima-based merchants whose large-scale deals brought European goods to Peru in exchange for silver. These entrepreneurs were not puppets in the hands of Seville’s commercial interests; to the contrary, they became astute rivals of their Sevillan counterparts, making a variety of risky end-runs to enhance their profits and eliminate Spanish exactions and middlemen.
When these strategies succeeded, the payoff was great —mostly to a small handful of men, who set themselves up as pillars of Lima’s emerging creole aristocracy. But when they failed, the consequences could be equally spectacular. Suarez devotes much of her study to the case of Juan de la Cueva, a Seville-born, Lima-based merchant-banquero whose business failure was so massive that it delayed the departure of the annual fleet for Spain in 1635, halved the amount of revenue remitted that year, and worked its way into popular culture in Lima, where rhyming skits about “Joan de la Coba, coscoroba” circulated for centuries. Suarez concerns herself with Cuevas rise rather than his notorious fall. From notarial records, she documents his early career and the tactics he, his brothers, and their Corsican associates used to make their way through and around other merchants and the arbitrary, monopoly-minded Spanish state.
By emphasizing Cueva’s rise from factor to full-blown perulero, Súarez underscores her central point: Lima merchants were resourceful agents of their destiny, artful rivals and circumventers (rather than mere dependents) of Spanish merchant houses. Juan de la Cueva exercised his options very successfully. If the price in Portobelo wasn’t right, he did not hesitate to send to Spain for better bargains. And he ran unregistered silver past authorities as a regular practice. Súarez’ careful research at this notarial level makes it possible to begin to see “fraud” in historical perspective, although a fuller picture waits further research.
Why, then, did Cueva fail? A notable gap in this suggestive essay is the connection between the thriving merchant on the rise and the ruined, ridiculed banker of 1635. The story of Cueva, who occupies the liveliest pages of the book, raises many questions beyond those treated here—about what it meant to be a banquero in seventeenth-century Lima, for example, and the early makings of criollo power. Yet Súarez has done a wonderful job of animating a crucial historical figure, thereby raising excellent issues and questions about commerce that should stimulate research for years to come.
