According to Bianca Premo, ‘this book is a history of childhood, as it was both lived and imagined, in colonial Lima’, entering ‘the social world children and youths inhabited’, while situating ‘that world in the political universe of Spanish rule’ (p. 2). Premo rightly identifies childhood and adolescence as crucial stages in the making of future subjects, and the role played by mothers, wet nurses, priests and many other colonial actors as central in transmitting practices broadly defined as a ‘colonial culture’ (p. 4). Minority of age for most of the period of this study (1650–1750) was set at 25, with the exception of Indians, who were considered to be perpetual legal minors. All minors were represented by elders before the Crown and Church authorities.

The book opens ‘with a broad overview of medieval laws and the development of colonial legal practices concerning minority and the governance of children’ (p. 15). The first chapter provides a short history of minority in Lima, followed by an examination of child rearing and adult authority between 1650 and 1750 (Chapter 2), the institutions for child-rearing (Chapter 3), youth and crime in the eighteenth century (Chapter 4), reform and enlightenment (Chapter 5), the new politics of the child in the late colonial period (Chapter 6), and new policies towards slave children in the late colonial courts (Chapter 7). Premo shows that under Bourbon rule larger segments of the urban population were criminalised. Orphans and rootless youths detained by colonial officials in earlier periods were now joined by poor and mendicant children who were placed with master artisans in ‘workshops, panaderías, and presidios’ (p. 114) as part of a civilising process intended to create productive members of society. In contrast, the unruly children of the elites were placed in monasteries (Chapter 2).

Premo documents the extent to which child-rearing in this period was often not the exclusive domain of an extended patriarchal family, as children could be cared for by a variety of non-blood relatives representing different corporate interests. While the author attempts to reframe the concept of patriarchy in a gentler light, rather than as ‘absolute male control over women’ (fn. 27, p. 266), its repeated use as a fit-all explanation of an ‘ideal-typical’ model of male household authority weighs heavily upon the analysis, perpetuating a top-down understanding of power relations in Lima at the time. Her argument, that the cultural project developed and exercised in Lima by the Spaniards was nothing more than a ‘hegemonic ploy’ (p. 92), further undercuts the agency of the subjects under study. In a similar manner, and in spite of the author's stated intentions to situate her work in the political universe of the times, her discussions are too often framed in the context of late twentieth-century notions of the individual, human rights, and parental responsibility (pp. 98–9, pp. 104–5, p. 284 fn. 82).

While the book is successful at charting the changing nature and scope of colonial power with respect to the rearing of children, it is rather less illuminating when it comes to developing the connections between local social and familial orders and the figure of the king. The title of this work is, in fact, misleading for the image of ‘the father king’ is not developed or analysed in the context either of the political theories or cultural mechanisms that made the monarch a powerful political force and a unifying paternal symbol in Peru. Instead, ‘the father king’ is simply evoked as a hollow trope.

The language and framework of ‘failure’ used to explain the workings of the colonial legal system and urban society which reproduces a too familiar bleak picture of colonial Lima (Chapter 3) is striking. In a rather surprising manner, the author argues on several occasions that the Siete Partidas failed to prescribe specific punishments for certain crimes committed, thus allowing everyone ‘to interpret legal codes according to [his or her] own social values and perceived needs’ (p. 112). Leaving aside the profound theoretical and practical chasm between the absent king and the present judge – here too often conflated as one and the same – the legal system was not as arbitrary as this author would have the reader believe, as Charles Cutter has shown. In short, Premo's arguments do not square with the cultural and philosophical underpinnings of the Spanish legal system of punishments and rewards, wherein a hierarchy of crimes stipulated a very strict order of punishments that, yes, were also based on the status and condition of the accused but which could not be arbitrary; in other words, the system of punishments could not violate the notion of the just punishment for the crime. If Premo's assumptions about ‘hegemony’ were correct, and judges could indeed do as they pleased ‘according to their social values and perceived needs’, why then did people of all conditions try to resolve their disputes in a court of law? The fact that the courts became a primary site for the resolution of all sorts of conflicts points to a system that, at the very least, appeared to be just in ways that escape Premo's analysis.

This book also attempts to be a history of social relations in the city of Lima. As such, it is one more example of a long historiographical tradition that has depicted the city of Lima adversely as a segregated and socially conservative space. The reader will find in these pages a colonial city inhabited by a rather homogeneous ‘elite’ in opposition to an equally homogeneous ‘plebe’. As has become commonplace, these groups with irreconcilable differences failed to come together as One. As such, the city stands here for a failed modernising project of nation-state homogenisation. Premo's book reproduces the older images of Alberto Flores Galindo's Aristocracia y Plebe, first published in 1984, while the newer historiography that has largely laid his Marxist reading of Lima to rest is conspicuously absent.