In Quito, poverty was a constant refrain in the official testimonies and private complaints, which I have seen, from at least the early eighteenth century onwards. A flood of documentation contrasted past splendours and present misery. Quito hosted a substantial population of the economically deprived, but there was also a sense in which the very city itself was the embodiment of ‘poverty’, real or imaginary. This makes Quito, I think, the ideal setting for Cynthia Milton's welcome exploration of what poverty meant in late colonial Spanish America.
Milton outlines the three lines of inquiry which have shaped her investigation. Firstly, she defines poverty as a social construction, measured against factors such as socio-racial status and gender, and not by narrowly economic criteria. In later chapters, this will be the basis of an ongoing distinction between the ‘social poor’ and the ‘economic poor’. Next, she explores the principles of reciprocal rights and obligations, defined as ‘poverty compacts’, and manifested in areas like poor relief. These compacts varied according to the social groups involved and are seen as supportive of colonial rule, while their erosion would come to undermine it. Finally, there is the ability of the poor themselves to shape poverty compacts. Underlying these three strands is the concept of poverty, which is seen as a protean concept changing in time, and across distinct social-economic, racial and gender boundaries.
A series of closely interlocking essays clarify and illuminate these issues. In Part 1, Milton outlines the myriad ways in which the urban poor struggled to get by, in a discussion which is interspersed by lively case studies. Petty theft is highlighted as one of an ‘arsenal of survival strategies’ which also included begging, migration and pawning. Mutual assistance came through families, neighbourhoods and other networks of social relations. Part 2, on the ‘social poor’, makes notable use of a fascinating and hitherto neglected series of petitions in which supplicants sought the status of ‘solemn poor’, or pobre de solemnidad. This status permitted a waiving, or reduction, of legal fees, and was the creole equivalent of the protection afforded to Indians by the Protector de los Naturales. Even a landowner in straitened circumstances could lay claim to it. Moral criteria came into play: poverty was an accident of fortune, while honour was a distinguishing feature of the worthy poor. Honour was similarly one of the cards which ‘deserving’ widows used in their petitions to the Crown for pensions. Part 3 switches to the ‘economic poor’, with a discussion of juvenile welfare and measures to protect foundlings. An analysis of the poorhouse shows the state beginning to assume an active and interventionist role in poor relief.
In part four, on ‘the blurring of social compacts’, Milton returns to the theme of widows and the solemn poor under the reformist Bourbon monarchy. Instead of petitioning directly to the monarch by invoking notions of widowhood and obligation, widows entered a system of group welfare with bureaucratic assistance. This was symptomatic of a broader shift from traditional charity to state-led assistance. Similarly, Milton detects changing patterns in the poverty petitions which increased dramatically in the 1780s and 1790s. In a harsher economic and fiscal climate, a broader range of petitioners gained access to a status which had previously been reserved for the respectable poor. The social poor – merchants, artisans and the like – now lost out. According to Milton, ‘the change in the pobreza de solemnidad process was profound: it reduced the definition of being poor to one of raw economics rather than one of unmet expectations’ (p. 243).
In her wide-ranging and thought-provoking book, Milton demonstrates that poverty had many dimensions. However, I am not convinced by the discussion of the ‘social poor’, defined as ‘a group of people whose lives did not match their expectations’ (p. 6). This category included people like Luis de Arévalo, who owned several businesses, or Tomás Losada Quiñones, who owned a hacienda. The key discussion of this question in Chapter 3 is based entirely on the internal evidence of the poverty petitions. But this type of material does not help us to detect on-off cyclical changes of economic activity within a demonetarised economy. I think we need notarial evidence, in the form of ongoing commercial transactions and most especially testaments, to show us whether we may actually be dealing with one-off circumstantial strategies in otherwise quite normal quiteño lives. In a variety of contexts, everybody pleaded poverty in eighteenth century Quito, from landowners who had their land mortgaged by censos, to the cabildo when bridges needed to be repaired. Even Carondelet was later to feel he deserved better than the Presidency of this imperial backwater. I suspect that ‘social poverty’, as defined by frustrated expectations, was practically universal in Quito. In one sense, this leitmotif fully confirms Milton's argument that poverty did indeed have many different meanings, but it also weakens the concept of ‘social poor’ as an instrument for social analysis.
The Many Meanings of Poverty is clearly a major contribution to the historiography of colonial Ecuador, which after years of neglect has attracted innovative work in areas such as gender, law and demography. However, at the point at which historians began to turn their attention to Quito, the traditional notary-based study of a city's economic activities which had been used in other cases was already going out of fashion. That still unwritten book would have been helpful. So, too, would one on the church as a social institution (including confraternities), because I am not sure that the processes described here can be understood in purely secular terms.
There are not many slips, but I would like to mention one detail: the 1781 population figure of 64,966 refers to the corregimiento and not the city of Quito (p. 295), while the much higher 1782 figure is based, in my view, on a defective census compilation.
