Deconstructing Legitimacy
Viceroys, Merchants, and the Military in Late Colonial Peru
416 pages | 4 illustrations/3 maps | 6 x 9 | 2007
Cloth edition is not available
ISBN 978-0-271-03210-8 | paper: $35.00 sh
Winner of a 2008 Choice Outstanding Academic Title
"In broad terms the arguments and conclusions presented in this stimulating book build upon and extend, rather than contradict, those of previous commentators on Peru's transition to independence, but they do so with an unprecedented level of detail and incisive analysis, making a major contribution to the historiography of late colonial Peru. This book deserves to be read by all students of the Bourbon reforms and Spanish American independence."—John Fisher, American Historical Review
"This book, based on decades of meticulous research, is a major contribution to the burgeoning literature on the late colonial period, a period whose intellectual vitality is now being recognized after many decades of neglect."—G. B. Paquette, The Americas
"In a thoughtful and perceptive study, independent historian Marks... reveals that, rather than acting independently, the military officers who executed the coup also represented a significant group of wholesale merchants in Lima. Based primarily on extensive research in archival materials in Spain and Peru, this clearly written and argued work is the most important English-language study of Peruvian independence to appear in nearly 30 years."—M. A. Burkholder, University of Missouri--St. Louis
"Now and then one encounters a book based on such extensive research that it immediately accords its author substantial authority. This is such a book."—Timothy E. Anna, Colonial Latin American Historical Review
"This is an impeccably researched and articulately written inquiry into the collapse of royal authority in Lima at the time of independence. Not only does the book yield a bounty of fresh insights and interpretations into these tumultuous events, but it also identifies actions by the rebels that set an important precedent in Peruvian politics and reverberated in the political culture for years to come." —Peter F. Klaren, George Washington University
The overthrow of Viceroy Joaquín de la Pezuela on 29 January 1821 has not received much attention from historians, who have tended to view it as a simple military uprising. Yet in this careful study of the episode, based on deep archival research, Patricia Marks reveals it to be a pivotal event in the emerging commercial conflict between free-traders and protectionists that retarded the establishment of a stable national state in post-independence Peru. The overthrow of the viceroy thereby may be seen as an early manifestation of Latin American praetorianism, in which a particular sector of the civilian population, unable to prevail politically and unwilling to compromise, pressures army officers to act in order to save the state.
Patricia H. Marks is an independent scholar who received her doctorate in history from Princeton in 2003.