The records of the Bienes de Difuntos, the institution responsible for seeing that the property of Spaniards who died in the Indies leaving legacies to heirs or charitable foundations in Spain would be conveyed to them, are a rich source of information on the economic activities and assets of immigrants who died in Spanish America and how they wished to dispose of their property. Housed in the Contratación section of the Archivo de las Indias, these documents have been relatively little utilized by scholars of the period. Carlos Alberto González Sánchez provides some background on the development of this institution and analyzes the accounts of over four hundred individuals who died in the viceroyalty of Peru between 1556 and 1680, relying mainly on the secondary scholarly literature to provide the context for the information he compiles. Although an awareness of this documentation and its nature may be helpful to those interested in doing research on colonial Spanish America, in itself this book will probably be of limited utility to scholars and students of Peru. The discussion and conclusions shed little new light on the society and economy of colonial Peru and serve mainly to illustrate or underscore the information the author draws from other scholarly works. The limitations of the study to some extent reflect the limitations of the records themselves. While the information they contain can be extremely interesting when used in conjunction with other evidence on individuals or their activities, as a coherent body of documentation these records do not seem to yield particularly valuable insights, especially when they are analyzed as mechanically as they have been in this book. The author’s tabulations of such data as the number of difuntos by year or decade (tables on pp. 46-48) have no apparent significance. It comes as no surprise that single men formed the majority of this group, since they would be the ones most likely to die without heirs, nor is it surprising that priests and merchants were well represented (nearly half of those for whom a profession is known), since they would be those most likely to be single. In one chapter the author does deal with the important question of whether, and how much of, the difuntos’ money actually ended up in the hands of the designated heirs, but he fails to explain in any detail the various processes by which the difuntos’ legacies could be sidetracked, lost, or reduced. Here again he looks to secondary sources, rather than to the documents themselves, for explanations. This book not only illustrates the problems of basing a scholarly study on just one source, but also demonstrates the need to analyze documents imaginatively as well as rigorously.
Book Review|
May 01 1998
Dineros de ventura: la varia fortuna de la emigración a Indias (siglos XVI-XVII)
Dineros de ventura: la varia fortuna de la emigración a Indias (siglos XVI-XVII)
. Serie Geografía e Historia, no. 9
. By Sánchez, Carlos Alberto González, Sevilla
: Universidad de Sevilla
, 1995
. Maps. Figures. Appendixes. Bibliography
. 277
pp. Paper
.Hispanic American Historical Review (1998) 78 (2): 340–341.
Citation
Ida Altman; Dineros de ventura: la varia fortuna de la emigración a Indias (siglos XVI-XVII). Hispanic American Historical Review 1 May 1998; 78 (2): 340–341. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00182168-78.2.340
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