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Reviews of Books
lence, and brutality explain much of the past. Spaniards themselves recognized that they shared certain
universals with their Indian subjects, which in turn led
to a particular type of separation and interaction
between the two worlds. This focus is particularly
useful in contributing to the recent efforts to bridge
the gap between the biological and social realms of the
Latin American experience.
Alves has written a book that will be read and
discussed for a long time. Disagreements will probably
arise over his methods and interpretations, but there is
no doubt that he has added a new perspective on Latin
American history, and he has done so with an intellectual energy that introduces the reader to a wide range
of interesting ideas.
JOHN C. SUPER
West Virginia University
GISELA VON WOBESER. EI credito eclesiastico en La
Nueva Espana: SigLo XVIII. Mexico City: Universidad
Nacional Aut6noma de Mexico. 1994. Pp. 275.
In no other country in the western hemisphere has the
spiritual work and economic burden of the Catholic
Church been felt more profoundly than in Mexico.
This can be seen in the remarkable effort of evangelization carried forth by the mendicant clergy in the
sixteenth century, through the glittering baroque culture of the later colonial years, to the present widespread devotion to the Virgin of Guadalupe, the only
Marian appearance in the hemisphere officially recognized by the Vatican. If thinner on the ground than in
ancien regime Europe, the formidable presence of the
colonial church was still apparent .in a dozen ponderous cathedrals and more than 1,000 parishes, some as
impressive as the great baroque jewels of Santa Prisca
in Taxco or La Valenciana in Guanajuato. The secularized shells of imposing hospitals, coLegios, convents,
and orphanages recall that what we now call "health,
education, and welfare" were all once firmly in the
hands of the clergy. These physical remains further
remind us that although the Spanish colonial state
made every effort to extract wealth from its overseas
subjects, it invested in only the sparest public works or
services. The church, in contrast, created thousands of
jobs for masons, carpenters, and glass makers in vast
construction projects, not to mention the maintenance
of an opulent high clergy and, by the end of the
eighteenth century, a rapidly expanding clerical proletariat as well. All this, of course, required revenue, and
in the course of three centuries, the various agencies of
the church developed a vast system to appropriate
colonial wealth that reached into the furthest corners
of what is now Mexico.
A substantial body of recent research has endeavored to assess the importance of the church in the
Mexican economy, looking not only at its role in
appropriating revenue but also at its role as a source,
in the pre-banking centuries, of capital or credit.
Perhaps the most important modern student of church
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
lending has been Gisela von Wobeser. Her first monograph helped make clear the crushing burden of debt
on Mexican rural properties, and in a series of fundamental articles and two more books, von Wobeser has
deepened' our understanding of the complex interaction of the church with the entrepreneurial classes in
the Mexican economy. In the present work, the product of a massive cooperative research effort, von
Wobeser shows that the various agencies of the
church-regular orders, Inquisition, religious brotherhoods, cathedral chapters-all lent money and, by the
later eighteenth century, lent it primarily to merchants,
now on the basis of co-signed notes rather than the
earlier insistence on mortgage guarantees from landowners. A fifty-four page appendix sets out the details
of these transactions; indeed, the book presents as rich
a statistical picture of church lending in the eighteenth
century as we are ever likely to get.
Just how the church acquired its wealth and
whether, in the end, its function of providing capital to
merchants, miners, and property owners outweighed
its capacity for absorbing colonial revenue for economically unproductive ends remains hard to say. Let us
remember that the ecclesiastical tithe raked ten percent off the top of most agricultural output, while
clerical fees for the sacraments, which fell particularly
heavy on the poorer classes, provided steady income.
Although nineteenth-century liberal critics condemned the church for "owning" at least half the real
estate of colonial Mexico, a figure repeated in all
textbooks to the present day, recent archival research
has sharply reduced that figure. On the other hand, the
volume of capital controlled by the church now seems
much more important, in one estimate running to over
44,000,000 pesos by the late eighteenth century.
It has never been clear, primarily because the documents themselves are ambiguous, whether that figure
largely represents loans (or credit) from the church
employed to lubricate the accelerating late colonial
economy or the volume of donations and bequests that
guaranteed, through liens on property and income, the
annuities for pious works, masses for the dead, and
support for sons and daughters in monasteries and
convents. Von Wobeser finesses this question by abandoning her earlier distinction between loans iprestamas) and liens tgrdvamenesy by holding that "donations," or the common practice of a cash-starved
landowner to place an encumbrance on his property,
are "virtual loans" (pp. 25-26), even though the landowner never, of course, in such cases received actual
money. In von Wobeser's discussion, both transactions
show up statistically as "loans," a misleading term for
the modern reader, who generally hears in that word a
transfer of (potentially, at least) productive capital. In
a certain sense, one can see the transaction as credit,
since the church accepted the landowner's obligation
to pay the annuity rather than insist that he carry, say,
the entire dowry in silver pesos to the convent door.
I understand von Wobeser's desire to simplify a
tangled problem, yet, her discussion, to my mind,
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1998
Latin America and the Caribbean
exaggerates the role of the church's "banking" function when in fact, as she shows, a large part of church
"investment" involved no lending at all but rather the
receipt of annuities, which drained off capital from the
property-owning classes. Perhaps we need a new vocabulary or a different understanding of the cultural
meaning of "investment" or "credit" in an epoch when
the primary aim of the colonial church was not to lend
money at interest but, rather, to channel the revenue
of a vast ecclesiastical economy into clerical and
spiritual pursuits. Von Wobeser has given us an indefatigably researched, deeply informed, and thoughtfully presented work that addresses an important part
of that larger question.
A. J. BAUER
University of California,
Davis
SILKE HENSEL. Die Entstehung des Foderalismus in
Mexiko: Die politische Elite Oaxacas zwischen Stadt,
Region und Staat, 1786-1835. (Studien zur modernen
Geschichte, number 49.) Stuttgart: Franz Steiner.
1997. Pp. 493. DM 168.
Silke Hensel's book is yet another contribution to our
understanding of regional history in Mexico. It provides a detailed and thorough illustration of the many
federalist strands in the province of Oaxaca in the
crucial transition period between 1736 and 1835, the
year in which a centralist constitution was implanted.
The period chosen is the "long" independence period,
that is, it begins before and goes beyond the actual
years of the wars of independence. This choice allows
Hensel to demonstrate that federalist tendencies in
Oaxaca were built in the final decades of the eighteenth century and were not a consequence of the
military struggles following the Hidalgo rebellion; they
resulted from the economic, social, and political development in Antequera, in which the big merchants in
Oaxaca were key players.
To demonstrate the long-term construction of federalist tendencies, Hensel first presents us with a
picture of the region (chapter one); describes the
political evolution in Oaxaca, especially in the crucial
years between 1808 and 1835 (chapter two); and then
moves on to reveal the institutional changes and role
of Oaxaca's elite in these processes between 1812 and
1825 (chapters three and four). Building on the detailed information provided in the first four chapters,
she then describes and interprets how a regional
consciousness and assertiveness developed (chapter
five). This final chapter synthesizes previous developments and provides an interpretation of the peculiarities of the political process in Oaxaca.
The book contributes to regional studies in Mexico,
but it is also a contribution to a particular kind of
regional studies. Hensel chose to view the regional
history of Oaxaca through the development and changing composition of institutions, especially the ayuntamientos (cabildos) and the diputaciones pro vin ciales.
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1363
This perspective, Hensel argues, comes from a rereading of a Germany-based Verfassungsgeschichte, which
in addition to prosopography helps her illustrate the
changing texture and structure of these institutions. A
series of dissertations based on this outlook are coming to fruition now in Germany. Jochen Meissner's
Eine ELite im Umbruch: Der Stadtrad von Mexiko
zwischen koLoniaLer Ordnung und unabhiinighem Stadt
(1993) presents us with a similar outlook for Mexico
City. This line of research follows an already "classic"
tradition of colonial Latin American history in Germany.
The region of Oaxaca is a territorially defined region
equivalent to its colonial administrative boundaries, in
contrast to an economic-network defined region. The
state of Oaxaca was ninety percent Indian, and the
provincial elites-Spaniards and creoles-lived in
Oaxaca's capital city. Since Indians had been able to
assert their rights to the land, accumulation among the
elite was based on commerce, the export of cochineal
to Spain and the selling of cheap cloth in Mexico's
northern provinces. Both items were produced in
Oaxaca, and cochineal was almost exclusively produced in this region. Production and export of cloth
and cochineal supported Oaxaca's economic boom
toward the end of the eighteenth century. The mercantile transactions were nucleated in Antequera, with
its approximately 19,000 inhabitants, and merchants
gained access to cochineal production in Indian hands
through the repartimiento system, based on an alliance
between merchants and local low-level colonial state
bureaucrats. Thus, the elite's interests were tightly knit
into the region.
Beginning in 1786, the Bourbon reforms attacked
entrenched mercantile interests: repartimientos were
forbidden, and secularization of church property diminished available capital; superimposing the intendente on lower-level bureaucrats meant a disruption of
the earlier merchants-bureaucrats alliance, both in
terms of political hierarchies and because the intendente replaced many of the former bureaucrats with
Spaniards.
As the powerful Oaxacan merchants saw their earnings and prerogatives dwindle, they reacted through
political and institutional channels. This struggle was
driven and reinforced by developments since 1808.
Napoleon's invasion of Spain and the subsequent
establishment of the Cortes de Cadiz triggered discussions on sovereignty and legitimacy. Nucleated in the
ayuntamiento, Oaxaca's elite debated and forwarded
its antagonisms with Mexico City and Madrid while
simultaneously building up support networks in other
regions, coordinating actions and decisions with other
regions, intensifying its grip on Oaxaca's rural hinterland, and creating a discourse of conflict and diversity
denial. In 1810, Oaxaca requested the establishment of
its own consulado. It was a capital city-based move that
sought autonomy to control the internal affairs of the
region. The presence of the intendente in Antequera
reinforced the centrality of the capital city. To docu-
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1998