Christoph Rosenmüller, ed. Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2017. 240 pp. $65.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8263-5825-7.
Reviewed by Álvaro Caso Bello (Johns Hopkins University)
Published on H-LatAm (April, 2018)
Commissioned by Casey M. Lurtz (Johns Hopkins University)
Historians have tended to see the problem of corruption in the early modern Iberian Empires from certain well-established points of view. One is that specific corrupt practices, especially the sale of public office, led to the decay of effective administration in the Spanish Empire. A revenue-thirsty crown put public offices up for sale, and they ended up in the hands of the highest bidders instead of the most competent imperial administrators. In turn, these men hardly were the keepers of royal mandates, or of the common weal as envisioned by the crown. Instead, they held office to achieve personal, frequently pecuniary, gains. This vision of venality as a corrupting factor is related to a tendency to see the Spanish Empire as, at least on the level of aspiration, both bureaucratic and state oriented. Seldom could a genuinely bureaucratic state succeed if it were made up of relatives (parientes) and friends (amigos).
A second interpretation, dovetailing with some of these previous arguments, advanced that corruption was not the proper descriptor for venality or deviant conduct on the part of the officialdom. These scholars assert that it is anachronistic to label as corrupt a series of normalized practices in early modern Europe, including favoritism, patronage, nepotism, and the purchase of office. This literature also came to complement arguments that saw the lack of compliance of royal orders, or even the collusion of royal appointees with illegal practices such as contraband, as part of the built-in flexibility of the Spanish imperial polity. It was this plasticity, according to such authors as John Leddy Phelan or John Lynch, that enabled the Spanish Empire to exist, function, and endure. Obeying without complying, looking the other way in the face of a powerful vecino’s felony, taking a cut out of a contraband scheme, or accepting gifts from litigants were part of the culture of compromise in which royal appointees in the Americas participated. This second school of historians envisaged the Spanish hold on the Americas as more dependent on complex networks of social relations that included royal appointees and officeholders, rather than relying on the operations of a state bureaucracy that was somehow external to colonial societies.
The nine high-quality essays edited by Christoph Rosenmüller in Corruption in the Iberian Empires appear more indebted to this second line of interpretation, yet, at the same time, some of them strive to cut loose from a certain skepticism regarding the law and official policy goals as little else than empty and ineffectual statements. A case in point for this is Rosenmüller’s introduction, which addresses the complexity of the term “corruption” and the practices associated with it while defending the existence of shared notions of corruption in the Spanish colonial empire. Such notions were far from static, Rosenmüller says. If in the earlier periods, especially in the seventeenth century, “corruption (corruptela) ... typically meant that judges had violated justice by obtaining their posts inappropriately, accepting bribes, forging documents, or extorting the public,” there would be a later, more expansive, use of the term “corruption” in the eighteenth century (p. 4). Far from confined to the judicial arena, Rosenmüller argues, in the 1700s “the idea of corruption expanded ... to all branches of governance” (p. 6).
Diverse regarding geographic coverage and encompassing the sixteenth into the late eighteenth century, the essays collected in the volume also show the breadth of cases that historians can characterize as corruption. The studies included in the volume are set in a variety of places: from the port of Cavite in the Spanish Philippines to the tambos (road inns) of the Andean Altiplano, and from Acapulco in Mexico to the Río de la Plata. Such breadth of scope makes the work comprehensive, though it would be desirable to have more than one chapter devoted to the Portuguese in this collection on Iberian Empires.
Some uniting threads do hold the volume together. First, all of the studies in the book are histories of crime and punishment—or, sometimes, lack of the latter. Second, the cast of characters under suspicion, accusation, or prosecution, as well as those judging such charges, are in most cases royal appointees of some sort. Third, the officialdom suspected and/or accused became so by way of perceived deviations from the expected conduct as holders of a royal appointment—even if merely confirmed, or granted vicariously by another royal officer. Accusations ranged from forging the title of a royal appointment; embezzling the royal fifth in the process of coinage; meddling in local elections; accepting gifts from litigants and favoring gift givers in rulings; accumulating riches; and engaging in malfeasance, recurrent tax evasion, or the ever-present contraband. This terminological variety leads to a fourth shared point: not unlike present-day corruption accusations, seldom did an early modern statement of the offense include the term “corruption.”
A fifth underlying argument is that while misconduct was widespread, the handling of each case depended on a variety of contingencies. Not the least of these circumstances, as Francisco A. Eissa-Barrosso writes in his essay, was the crown’s willingness to accept accusations, judge, and most importantly, punish. Eissa-Barroso argues that “punishing royal officials implied” an admission of fallibility on the part of the king who had not been able to “select the appropriate people in the first place” (p. 137). Along the same lines, Marc Eagle’s chapter highlights how the Council of Indies betrayed little uniformity in its punishments with regard to the accusations visitadores (special inspectors) made against judges of the audiencia (high court) of Santo Domingo. The variety in the sentencing is one way in which to see metropolitan magistrates’ shifting perceptions of the “several different ways to disappoint the king’s expectations” (p. 91).
The crown’s attention toward the investigation of misconduct was not always a given. In some cases, such as the one explored in Kris Lane’s essay, a variety of circumstances drew interest to a specific place. That is what happened in Potosí in the late 1640s, when the crown’s need for strong coin, lower yields from the silver mines, and reports on the bad quality of the coin minted in Potosí merited the appointment of a visitador. It was only upon the visita conducted by a zealous inspector who relied on the testimonies of slaves working at the mint that it became clear that a conspiracy was underway to debase the coin and defraud the royal treasury. In other cases, it was not necessary that a myriad of international, natural, and local situations converged to draw the crown’s attention. As Jeremy Mumford shows in his chapter, a forgery-prone officer opened himself to an accusation of counterfeiting royal documents by expressing a desire to exercise a commission as a visitador. Mumford argues that it was the presumably fake officer’s commitment to the imperial project that ultimately made him vulnerable to be charged with an offense.
The essays of Rosenmüller and Frances L. Ramos, both focusing on New Spain, show how the arrival of new and zealous royal appointees could bring new layers of argument to existent local conflict. Rosenmüller explores how the inspection of the high court of Mexico in the early eighteenth century motivated men convicted by the ruling of an oídor (high court judge) to accuse him of receiving gifts from the opposing party to overturn a previous acquittal. The inspector sided with the men who accused the judge of receiving gifts in exchange for overturning the original absolution and ordered the magistrate to step down from the bench. While the convicted men were in league with the judge who initially absolved them, they managed to get a new day in court by the presence of a visitador. Ramos’s essay on Puebla in the 1720s shows the strategies deployed by the local church and civil oligarchies to resist taxation. In the wake of the rise of the Bourbons, the crown appointed a new alcalde mayor (governor) to oversee revenue collection and justice administration. In the course of wanting to root out the misdeeds of clergymen who defrauded the royal treasury by tax evasion on their mercantile activities, the zealous administrator made powerful enemies in Puebla.
The lack of consistency in the enforcement of expected conduct of the officialdom aids in creating divergent opinions on the role of official misconduct—and about corruption writ large—in the overseas Iberian Empires. Catherine T. Goode’s essay argues that, if there were such a thing as corruption, it was effectively “institutionalized” and interdependent with the “administrative power.” To make her case, Goode points at the figure of the “merchant-bureaucrat.” She argues that while the law prohibited officials from being merchants where they held their office, this ban was hardly enforced. Instead, the “merchant-bureaucrat” was enshrined: “Rather than practicing simple corruption, a concept that defines the practices as extragovernmental, the colonial bureaucracy functioned through unwritten contracts that connected bureaucrats at local and regional levels of government to the global economy. Fraud, illegal trade, and contraband were part of unwritten contracts: bureaucrats defy the letter of the law for personal gain while maintaining the overall stability of the colonial bureaucracy for the benefit of the crown” (p. 190). Officers looking the other way was not a matter noticeable only in commerce. William F. Connell’s chapter offers a portrait of how the high court of Mexico neglected the accusations against the abusive governors of the Indian town of San Juan Tenochtitlan. If not neglectful, the high court had been outmaneuvered by the members of the Aguilar family, who alternated in office as governors of San Juan. Fabrício Prado’s essay, the only one focusing on the Luso-Brazilian world, takes a similar stance in terms of portraying officers wittingly ignoring misdeeds. The lack of action against a governor of Colônia do Sacramento involved in contraband showed how the Portuguese crown was willing to take a rain check on the enforcement of the law “to maintain authority and commerce” (p. 209). To further prove this point, Prado notes how this same governor eventually became the Count of Bovadela.
If some of the essays contribute to an image of the Iberian crowns as suspiciously unwilling to act against abusive officers, Eissa-Barroso’s chapter paints a different picture. Coinciding with the dynastic change and anxieties about Spanish decline, Eissa-Barroso argues that King Philip V and his closest circle became increasingly concerned with the personal quality and merits of those appointed to the highest offices in the Americas. Eissa-Barroso sees this move in part as a consequence of the continuous reports about the misdeeds of viceroys and other high appointees in the Americas. Identifying the Spanish decline with a problem in the imperial personnel led, in time, to the ushering in of a new type of high-ranking officer—one who encapsulated a new nobility of merit and military or professional service.
Next to these impulses toward a personnel-centric approach to reform that would uproot reprehensible conducts, the sheer quantity of general and particular inspections, end-of-mandate residencias (reviews), the recusals of lower-tier judges, and accusations against royal appointees of all walks of life point to the somewhat introspective character of Spanish rule. For a polity unconcerned with the conduct of its officers, the Spanish crown took many pains to recurrently examine what its representatives and appointees did in the Indies.
The book, then, succeeds in giving an idea of the range of conducts that could raise suspicions and mobilize accusations against officers in the colonial Iberian Empires. In addition to noting the legal and institutional mechanisms that could be mobilized against appointees, the authors give readers a sense of the ways social environments could shape, and even determine, such accusations. Furthermore, the editor and authors provide relevant analytical perspectives on the uses of the term “corruption” in colonial Latin American history. An untouched point regarding the literature on corruption remains the “legacy” question. Much of the literature that applies the term to practices in the colonial period does so in the search for an origin point in analyses of later official misconduct. Without explicitly touching on the origins-inheritance problem, this volume can serve as a guide to some of the pitfalls of locating clear-cut origins of later corrupt practices in the colonial period.
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Citation:
Álvaro Caso Bello. Review of Rosenmüller, Christoph, ed., Corruption in the Iberian Empires: Greed, Custom, and Colonial Networks.
H-LatAm, H-Net Reviews.
April, 2018.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=50598
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