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Minister and Viceroy, Paisano and Amigo: The Private Correspondence of the Marqués de la Ensenada and the Conde de Superunda, 1745–1749
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 November 2016
Extract
In the Archivo General de Indias in Seville there exists a remarkable sample of private correspondence between two of the most powerful figures of the Bourbon Age in Spanish American history. The principal writer is Zenón de Somodevilla y Bengoechea, marqués de la Ensenada and minister of Hacienda, War, and Indies and Marine since 1743, and subsequently holder of other posts that made him, in a contemporary opinion, “Secretary of Everything.” His correspondent is José Antonio Manso de Velasco, conde de Superunda and viceroy of Peru from 1745 to 1761, the longest serving and among the most influential of the Peruvian viceroys. The Seville correspondence consists mainly of just seven generally brief letters. The private character of these letters, however, along with the close relationship between the two men and the roles they occupied, makes them historically fascinating. Excerpts are published here for the first time, in both Spanish and English translation.
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References
1. Lynch, John, Bourbon Spain, 1700–1808 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1989), 160 Google Scholar. On Ensenada, see for example Stein, Stanley H. and Stein, Barbara H., Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000)Google Scholar, chapt. 8. The minister's leading modern scholar is José Luis Gómez Urdáñez, whose extensive oeuvre includes El proyecto reformista de Ensenada (Lleida: Milenio, 1996).
2. See de Velasco, José Antonio Manso, Relación y documentos de gobierno del Virrey del Perú, José Antonio Manso de Velasco, Conde de Superunda (1745–1761), Cebrián, Alfredo Moreno, ed. (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1983)Google Scholar.
3. These may be found in Seville at the Archivo General de Indias [hereafter AGI], Lima, legs. 642 and 643.
4. The orthography of the letters has been modernized and standardized in my edition below. Editor's note: For this reason, the British spelling has been preserved in the English translations presented here.
5. Pearce, Adrian J., The Origins of Bourbon Reform in Spanish South America, 1700–1763 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
6. Ibid., 145.
7. Ibid., 169.
8. The point here is that Superunda has sent reports making suggestions for changes in imperial policy and asking for the powers needed to implement them. Ensenada makes clear that the orders he is sending granting Superunda these powers will conceal the fact that the initiative actually originated with the viceroy.
9. For the fiscal matters discussed in this and the following paragraph, see ibid., 149–154.
10. Cebrián, Alfredo Moreno, El corregidor de indios y la economía peruana en el siglo XVIII (los repartos forzosos de mercancías) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, 1977), 295 Google Scholar.
11. Manso de Velasco, Relación, 348–349. Here he compares income from the alcabala at the Lima treasury for the periods 1740-44 and 1750–54.
12. Vizcarra, Catalina, “Bourbon Intervention in the Peruvian Tobacco Industry, 1752–1813,” Journal of Latin American Studies 39:3 (August 2007): 567–593 CrossRefGoogle Scholar, esp. 569.
13. Walker, Charles F., Shaky Colonialism: The 1746 Earthquake-Tsunami in Lima, Peru, and Its Long Aftermath (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 117–122 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14. Kenneth J. Andrien, “The Coming of Enlightened Reform in Bourbon Peru: Secularization of the Doctrinas de Indios, 1746–1773,” in Enlightened Reform in Southern Europe and its Atlantic Colonies, c. 1750–1830, Gabriel Paquette, ed. (Farnham, Surrey, UK: Ashgate, 2009), 183–202, esp. 196–199.
15. For New Spain, see Christoph Rosenmüller, “‘The Indians . . . Long for Change’: The Secularization of Regular Parishes in Mid Eighteenth-Century New Spain,” in Early Bourbon Spanish America: Politics and Society in a Forgotten Era (1700–1759), Francisco A. Eissa-Barroso and Ainara Vázquez Varela, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2013), 43–63.
16. See also Pearce, Adrian J., “Huancavelica 1700–1759: Administrative Reform of the Mercury Industry in Early Bourbon Peru,” Hispanic American Historical Review 79:4 (November 1999): 669–702 Google Scholar, esp. 697–698.
17. On this topic, see the striking essay by José Luis Gómez Urdáñez, “Víctimas ilustradas del despotismo: el conde de Superunda, culpable y reo, ante el conde de Aranda,” in La corte de los Borbones, crisis del modelo cortesano, J. Martínez Millán, C. Camarero, and M. Luzzi, eds. (Madrid: Polifemo, 2013), 1003–1033. I thank the anonymous reviewer of this article for drawing my attention to this essay, and even supplying a copy of it with his or her report.
18. Juan Santos Atahualpa, whose rebellion began in 1742, and would last until 1752.
19. Both Gibraltar and Mahón had been in British hands since the Treaty of Utrecht of 1713. The father-in-law mentioned is King João V of Portugal, father of Barbara of Braganza, wife of Fernando VI of Spain. Colônia do Sacramento is the Portuguese settlement established on the north shore of the River Plate in 1680.
20. Philip, son of Philip V and Elizabeth Farnese, was made first Duke of Parma by the Treaty of Aix-la-Chapelle of this year (1748).
21. Probably refers mainly to the great Lima earthquake of October 1746.
22. The lanza and the media annata were taxes levied on nobles in Spain and the colonies.
23. Francisco de Orozco, head of a small naval squadron that reached Peru from Spain in April 1748. References to the other two men are obscure.
24. See note 23.
25. Sebastián de Eslava, viceroy of New Granada from 1739 to 1749.
26. Pedro Antonio Barroeta y Ángel, with whom Superunda eventually developed an extremely tense relationship.
27. Diego de Hesles, Superunda´s viceregal secretary.