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Who Should Rule? traces the ambitious imperial reform that empowered new and competing political actors in an era of intense imperial competition, war, and the breakdown of the Spanish empire. Through the deep analysis of Spain and Peru in the wider Atlantic context, it examines the challenges the lettered faced when they tried to build new social orders after years of war, which granted the military unprecedented power.
List of contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction .
- Part I: Imperial Reform: Contentious Consequences, 1760-1808
- Chapter 1.Towards a New Imperial Elite
- Chapter 2. Merit and its Subversive New Roles
- Chapter 3. The King's Most Loyal Subjects
- Chapter 4. From Men of Letters to Political Actors
- Part II: Imperial Turmoil: Conflicts Old and New, 1806-1830
- Chapter 5. Liberalism and War, 1808-1820
- Chapter 6. Abascal and the Problem of Letters in Peru, 1806-1816
- Chapter 7. Pens, Politics, and Swords: A Path to Pervasive Unrest, 1820-1830
- Epilogue
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Index
About the author
Mónica Ricketts is assistant professor of history at Temple University.
Summary
When Philip V prevailed over his rival Archduke Charles of Austria in 1713, the Spanish Bourbon dynasty faced a divided elite. As a result the dynasty attempted to create new power elite, based on a more professionalized, modern, and educated military officer corps (men of merit, honor, good training, and loyalty). At the same time, the Bourbons wanted to govern by relying on "men of letters," who were well educated in a modern, enlightened curriculum, men of talent, skill, and good training. Both the military and the men of letters were often drawn from the provincial elite, not the traditional aristocracy, and they would form the core of the centralized Bourbon state, which replaced the more decentralized "composite monarchy" of the Habsburg era. These groups emerged first in Spain and in later the empire to defend and govern the Spanish Atlantic world. In the turbulent years after the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, a struggle in Spain and America developed over who would rule.
Writers and lawyers would produce new legislation to radically transform the Spanish world. They would reform the educational system and propagate useful knowledge. Military officers would defend the monarchy in this new era of imperial competition. Additionally, they would govern. From the start, the rise of these political actors in the Spanish world was an uneven process. Military officers came to being as a new and somewhat solid corps. In contrast, the rise of men of letters confronted constant opposition. Rooted elites in both Spain and Peru resisted any attempts to curtail their power and prerogatives and undermined the reform of education and traditions. As a consequence, men of letters found limited spaces in which to exercise their new authority, but they aimed for more. A succession of wars and insurgencies in America fuelled the struggles for power between these two groups, paving the way for decades of unrest.
Mónica Ricketts emphasizes the continuities and connections between the Spanish worlds on both sides of the Atlantic and the ways in which liberal men of letters failed to create a new institutional order in which the military would be subjected to civilian rule.
Additional text
...an interesting, well-researched and clearly written book...Monica Ricketts's book should be welcomed for several reasons: for delving ´ into the Peruvian case from a political and intellectual (life) point of view during the transition from colony to independence, for a comparative perspective that takes into account the crucial events that took place in the metropolis from 1808 onwards (a perspective that was ignored for a long time by Latin American historians), and also for putting on the table of historiographic debate the highly complex relationship between the sword and the pen in the mundo hispanico during a time of reform, of revolution and of war that represents the birth of independent political life in Spanish America.
