While historians have given considerable attention to Latin American elites, the nobility has not received its proper share. It is generally accepted that the policy of the Spanish crown hindered the establishment of a powerful nobility. The initial equality of the conquerors, who considered themselves hidalgos, was replaced by a more complex social reality during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The creole elite began to define high social prestige in terms of noble status and to transform the older Spanish concept. The main objective of the work of Christian Büschges is to study this American nobility as a social concept and as a social group. In this respect, Büschges avoids the study of the elite—a social group that cannot be reduced to a special estate, class, or profession and that originates precisely during this period.
Büschges begins with a general overview of the economic setting and the criteria for social stratification in the Audiencia de Quito. He discusses the concept of nobility in opposition to the “plebs,” who were defined by reference to their ethnicity. Then he proceeds to describe the legal side of the Quito nobility (titles, privileges, and so on) and its social position (origin and heritage, high positions in colonial institutions, economic activities, presentation).
A third section describes the origins, positions, economic bases, and familial networks of the high nobility (nobleza titular) of the Audiencia de Quito at the end of the colonial period and their political posture during the independence movement. Büschges draws from narrative material as well as census and parish records and legal documents. He finds that the nobility of Quito at the end of the colonial period consisted mainly of families that traced their origin to the first conquerors. This lineage was one of the main criteria for nobility and the nucleus of a genuinely American concept of nobility.
Within this group, Büschges detects a differentiation based on wealth (mainly landholding, but also commerce) and the concomitant lifestyle. High positions in the administration, church, and military also had become a necessary requirement for nobility. This stratification, however, also allowed the integration of new members into the group via wealth, high position, and acceptance by established families. New criteria, such as individual achievement and expertise, remained unimportant even after the Bourbon reforms; Büschges sees the social and political importance of some noble families continuing through independence and the early republican years. Many of these noble families then turned into “notable” families of the republic.
Precisely because of this development, however, Büschges’s reduction of the object of his study to the nobility—instead of the “notability”—will not convince all readers. The discussion of “race-calidad-estate” and “class” certainly remains open; and the more microstudies we read, the more sophisticated the picture becomes. In this respect, the often-neglected picture of the nobility deserves just the sort of treatment Büschges brings to it. His study provides new insights into the nobility’s role in colonial societies, and revision of some overly general concepts. It also raises new questions, such as the relationship between the assumed hidalguía of all Spaniards in the New World and the concept of nobility and its position in the sociedad de castas. Büschges could have strengthened his arguments by developing this problem further. In any case, Büschges has produced a fine work of social research, which offers new insights into the social complexity of colonial Latin America.
