Reviewed by Stephen F. Laribee Eastern Illinois University

This book is a history of the Consulado de Lima, the mer-cantile regulatory body for Spanish South America. It follows the course of events (1593-1877) for this institution and makes references to numerous Peruvian documents and other sources. The author states that very little has been written about this exceptionally powerful Crown institution that controlled trade from the City of Kings. For that reason, the book contains an English, German and Spanish version of the text.

The Spanish government had made use of the consulado several centuries before introducing it to Peru. In time, “the new consulado in Lima was to dominate the trade of the viceroyalty of Peru in much the same way as the Seville consulado dominated that between Spain and the colonies” [p. 6]. This was because it was given royal jurisdiction for all of Spanish South America. The author includes a discussion of the role that the consulado played in terms of the Council of the Indies and the Casa de Contratacion that preceded it.

In addition to the history of the Consulado de Lima, Melzer describes the basic operation of the institution as a court and as a major financial contributor to the Crown. He also gives general background information on the Spanish empire while narrating how the consulado responded to various economic and political pressures. The Crown needed the Lima Consulado’s judicial power and the taxes it collected for them. It was the tax collecting function that gave the consulado its major source of power during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.

During the mid and late eighteenth century, changes oc-curred in the imperial bureaucracy that abolished the Casa de Contratacion and took away the power of the Council of the Indies. By the nineteenth century “the institution’s prime con-cern was the financing of the vice royal government against the encroachment of the forces for Independence” [p. 34].

With the Republic of Peru winning independence, its sur-vival was dependent on collecting taxes. To that end, a new constitution in 1828 reestablished the consulado in its full pre-independence institutional form, except for some changes in the court structure. The consulado continued to serve as “the financial palace guard for the kingdom of Peru” [p. 37] until 1887 when it was legislated out of existence.

The consulado’s existence was very important to the financing of the Crown and later to the Republic of Peru. Because detailed records of its collections have been maintained, it is now also important to historians. This information is valuable to researchers investigating the economic conditions that prevailed during this period and the trade that took place in South America and overseas.

Melzer is to be commended for his research on this little known, but important financial institution in the Spanish colo-nization of South America.