In this painstakingly researched book Mónica Ricketts looks at some of the consequences of the disintegration of the Hispanic Monarchy in both Peru and Spain. The prism that she uses to view it is the rivalry between men of letters and military officers and the instability engendered by this rivalry. Her main sources are the materials written at the time by the lawyers, officials, military men, publicists and pamphleteers who dominated public discourse. She combines this with an analysis of legislation, official documents and private letters. In a recent review article, Ulrick Mücke noted that the new political history written on Latin America, of which this book is an example, tends to focus on ideas and imagination, thereby providing much less of an emphasis on social and economic interests (‘Political Modernity in Latin America: The Nineteenth Century’, Latin American Research Review, 52: 4 (2017), pp. 697–702). This is indeed the case here, as Ricketts concentrates on ideas, texts and public debate, putting to one side how this played out in political practices such as elections and military engagements, and the economic and social impacts of the events the author studies.

The book is divided into two sections. The first focuses on ‘Imperial Reform’ in the period between 1760 and 1808, and the second on ‘Imperial Turmoil’ between 1805 and 1830. The first chapter explores the Bourbon reforms and how change was introduced by the administration. The second concentrates on how the concept of merit was understood by military officers and men of letters, and how it led them to ‘challenge the traditional order, and threaten the stability of empire’ (p. 35). The implementation of the military reforms is studied in great detail in the third chapter, where it is presented as the most successful attempt to modernise and centralise the monarchy by creating, according to the author, a meritocratic institution. She then analyses the trajectory of men of letters in Chapter 4 and how they became political actors through the emergence of an ebullient public sphere.

The second section deals with the period of war and how liberalism was galvanised into action during the years of crisis. Between 1805 and 1814 ‘a new era of public political debate had begun in the Spanish world’, Ricketts tells us in Chapter 5, spurred by the freedom of the press (p. 124), in order to understand which she analyses the work of prominent liberals such as Blanco White as well as the debates at the Cádiz Cortes. The sixth chapter looks at roughly the same period (1806 to 1816) and how Peruvian Viceroy Abascal dealt with the ‘Problem of Letters in Peru’ (p. 141). Here she explores the military solution sought by the viceroy to deal with the Juntas that were set up in the territories bordering the viceroyalty of Peru and how the Viceroy tried to limit the application of the Cádiz Constitution. The final chapter studies confrontation between 1820 and 1830, and how the conflict between ‘pens, politics and swords’ resulted in ‘pervasive unrest’ (p. 171) in the aftermath of independence.

In her examination of the final years of the Hispanic Monarchy, Ricketts eschews the search for the ‘seeds of national identities’, concentrating instead on what she considers to be understudied themes: ‘Spanish liberalism and its concern for the military’ (p. 3). The book does not attempt ‘to explain why the Spanish Empire broke down, or why it led to independence and republicanism in Peru, but rather why this transition happened the way it did’ (p. 4). Ricketts is particularly interested in the tension brought by reform as it clashed with traditional institutions as well as with the established hierarchical order. In the case of the men of letters, they found limits to their desire for change in the church and the university, whilst the military men found limits in the rigid structure of the army. Reform, she tells us, was a double-edged sword as it undermined ‘the traditional social and political order upon which the viceroyalty and the monarchy were founded’ (p. 63). Ricketts finds that after the wars of independence ‘military officers were the leading actors […] and decided who should rule’ (p. 203). This was in spite of the fact that ‘men of letters and lawyers in particular thought their time to rule had finally come’ (p. 204). The questions that remain open are why the army was ultimately more successful than the lawyers in their quest for power and whether this was something that happened only in Peru or if indeed it was a feature of the whole region.

Ricketts offers a parallel view of the history of Peru and Spain so that their histories can be seen as connected. This is similar to work that has been carried out comparing Spain and Mexico, and the efforts to construct an Atlantic view of the transition years between colonial and republican experiences, which have flourished during the bicentennial celebrations. Ricketts’ desire, however, is to offer a corrective to a historiography that ‘has been dominated by the cases of Mexico and Rio de la Plata, which are very different and do not fit Peru’ (p. 5). Her ambition is to break ‘our dependency on inadequate frameworks’ and to honour ‘Peru's strange and fascinating history’ (p. 5). As such this book offers an interesting way of looking at the final years of the Hispanic Monarchy in Peru and Spain.