The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of
Atlantic Capitalism (review)
Murdo J. MacLeod
Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Volume 38, Number 1, Summer 2007,
pp. 161-162 (Review)
Published by The MIT Press
For additional information about this article
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/216868
Accessed 16 Jun 2017 13:44 GMT
R E V IE WS
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Whether concerning innovative devices to pump water out of ships,
metallurgical processes to extract metals from ores, or diving instruments
to ªsh oysters loaded with pearls, the procedure was always the same:
Experience trumped textual authority. Bureaucrats, settlers, and merchants routinely developed the means to gather, and reºect on, the novelties of the New World. The occasional original report expected from
pilots and conquistadors soon gave way to an institutionalized circulation of information through questionnaires, which were centralized and
processed by specialists (royal cosmographers, historians, and natural historians) hired by the Crown to winnow the grain from the chaff.
Barrera-Osorio ends this provocative study by showing that this culture
of experience ultimately had an impact on scholars. José de Acosta, for
example, came to challenge the textual authority of Aristotelian meteorology, and Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo found Pliny’s natural history
wanting.
Barrera-Osorio’s is a short, richly documented study, mostly based
on archival research at the Archivo de Indias. To the traditional narrative
of the scientiªc revolution, he offers an alternative plot that has remained muted for too long. Would historians of science listen to
Barrera-Osorio’s soft-spoken yet forceful voice? Probably not. They
most likely will need the shouts of a crowd, but this book is a ªne ªrst
wake-up call.
Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra
University of Texas, Austin
The Colonial Spanish-American City: Urban Life in the Age of Atlantic Capitalism. By Jay Kinsbrunner (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2005)
198 pp. $40.00 cloth $18.95 paper
The author states as his main theme that the Spanish colonial city
“evolved during the age of Atlantic capitalism and was itself a circumstance of that capitalism” (xi). He advances well beyond this goal, however, offering a detailed class and caste analysis, overt and implicit comparisons with Western European cities, and various assertions about
urban class structure. Included are repeated statements that what he
terms a “lower-middle class” was common and often a large component
of the urban population. The author, however, also falls short of some of
these aims in important ways.
The book ranges widely, covering such topics as what constitutes a
Spanish colonial city; the pre-Columbian city; the politics and institutions of urban government; the city architecture, layout, and space; the
urban economy, with particular emphasis on petty trade and artisanal
production; the ofªcial, as opposed to the actual, caste and class structure; the nuclear family and its alternatives; and the many forms of social
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MURDO J. MACLEOD
interaction. In general, the book is a condensed and useful synthesis of
previous studies, plus suggestions of questions for future research.
Yet, the author’s contention that the urban function “derived from
the western European commercial enterprise of the early modern period” remains unproven (130). Speciªcally, nearly all his evidence comes
from the period 1780 to 1825, when new technologies in mining, bureaucracy, urban management, and, above all, navigation had begun to
transform Spanish-American structures. The Hapsburg society of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was much more local, isolated, and
traditional. Kinsbrunner’s identiªcation of the trade and other exchanges
found in many European cities long before the onset of capitalism as
“capitalistic” strips the word of deªnable meaning. Moreover, since his
analysis is predominantly local, primarily within the cities themselves,
the importance of the great ºeets and the silver cargoes, of smuggling,
and of the “Columbian exchange”—surely the bearers of incipient capitalism—receive little attention.
Kinsbrunner is decidedly optimistic about these colonial cities.
To him, they were places of opportunity, dialogue, and, to some extent,
social mobility. Although he admits to their “downside”—destitution,
ªlth, congestion, high crime, and the mistreatment of domestics,
women, and children—on balance he nevertheless praises them. He
barely mentions that murder, dearth, disease, and mortality were probably so much worse there than in the countryside that, were it not for inmigration, many of these colonial cities would eventually have declined,
or even vanished, as happened in early modern Europe. Another unfortunate omission is the book’s failure to incorporate the work on urban
Guadalajara by Anderson and his school, and the lengthy debate over
caste versus class that engaged such leading scholars as Chance, Taylor,
McCaa, Schwartz, and Seed.1 Hence, although this book is a compact
and useful synthesis of some of the leading studies of the Spanish colonial
city, its main theses ªnd only questionable support in the evidence and
the analysis.
Murdo J. MacLeod
University of Florida
1 See Rodney Anderson, Guadalajara a la consumación de la Independencia: Estudio de su
población según los padrones de 1821–1822 (Madrid, 1983); idem, “Race and Social Stratiªcation:
A Comparison of Working-Class Spaniards, Indians, and Castas in Guadalajara, Mexico on
1821,” Hispanic American Historical Review, LXVIII (1988), 209–243; John K. Chance and William B. Taylor, “Estate and Class in a Colonial City: Oaxaca in 1792,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History, XIX ( July 1977), 454–487; Robert McCaa, Stuart B. Schwartz, and Arturo
Grubessich, “Race and Class in Colonial Latin America: A Critique,” Comparative Studies in
Society and History, XXI (1979), 421–433; Chance and Taylor, “Estate and Class: A Reply,”
ibid., 434–442; Patricia Seed, “The Social Dimensions of Race: Mexico City, 1753.” Hispanic
American Historical Review, LXII (1982), 569–606.