The year 1700 brought the end of Habsburg rule in Spain and its empire and the accession to power of the Spanish Bourbon dynasty, which faced the challenge of both protecting the empire from its European rivals and making the colonies more profitable for the metropolis. How the Bourbon monarchs and their ministers dealt with those tasks has attracted extensive historical attention with scholars assessing the objectives and success of the so-called Bourbon reforms.

This is a welcome addition to the historiography, in part because Pearce surveys the first half century of Bourbon colonial rule, a relatively unstudied period compared to the later years ruled over by Charles III (1759–1788); and also because Pearce directs his attention chiefly towards South America, which has not received the scrutiny accorded to Spain, Mexico and the Caribbean with respect to the reform programme. In fact, Pearce makes a strong argument that historians’ emphasis on the later period has enticed them into ignoring significant changes that occurred during the reigns of Philip V (1700–1746) and Ferdinand VI (1746–1759).

Some of this has, of course, been traced before, most notably in the recent, outstanding work of Allan J. Kuethe and Kenneth J. Andrien, The Spanish Atlantic World in the Eighteenth Century: War and the Bourbon Reforms, 1713–1796. Silver, Trade, and War: Spain and America in the Making of Early Modern Europe, by Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, also offers valuable insights into the eighteenth-century reforms but contains very little about South America. Pearce, on the other hand, provides far more detail about changes that occurred in Spanish South America, and his book is ably informed by his previous work on Peru during the viceregency of the Marqués de Castelfuerte (1724–36), and particularly on Peruvian mining and commerce during the first half century of Bourbon rule.

Well after the War of Spanish Succession ended in 1713, the Spanish monarchy had surprisingly little control over the viceroyalty of Peru. Contraband trade flourished along the coasts; revenue from imperial taxes had dropped to a remarkably low level; the Habsburg fleet system supplied South American markets with European goods irregularly, if at all; creoles dominated the Lima high court; and a serious epidemic from 1718 to 1723 had cut the indigenous population in Lower and Upper Peru to only 600,000. Although Peru may have been the richest jewel in the imperial crown a century earlier, when Potosí's mines flooded the viceroyalty, Spain and China with silver, Peruvian decadence in the early 1700s made Spanish ministers focus their administrative energies on Mexico and the Caribbean.

That does not mean, however, that reform did not begin to transform Spanish South America. Julio Alberoni, the royal favourite who directed imperial affairs from 1715 to 1719, laid out policies that became the foundation for the reform programme that unfolded later in the century. He began to rebuild the Spanish navy to protect the commercial fleets and defend colonial ports, worked to resurrect trans-Atlantic commerce by reforming the decrepit fleet system, and tried to stimulate Spanish manufacturing to supply the overseas trade, all while centralising imperial administration. Although some scholars have tended to downplay Alberoni's importance to imperial reform, Pearce considers his contribution crucial to what came later. His most significant reform aimed at South America was the creation of the Viceroyalty of New Granada in 1717, with the goal of curbing contraband along the northern coast of the continent and providing administrative control for the region that was beyond the reach of the viceroy in far-away Lima.

Alberoni's protégé José de Patiño directed imperial policy for the decade and a half after 1720 and began by trying unsuccessfully to breathe new life into the fleet system. Although the proyecto para galeones, y flotas of 1720 failed to generate annual fleets to South America, it did reduce shipping costs by lower taxes and speeding dispatch of cargoes through the fiscal bureaucracy. The volume of trade grew, and in the long run this benefited Peru and the merchants supplying it. In the short term, however, the new viceroyalty failed to curb contraband and was abolished, but Patiño did set up a system of guarda-costas, costly naval vessels assigned to patrol the coast to root out smugglers.

One of Pearce's chief conclusions is that reforms during the early Bourbon period often occurred through the somewhat autonomous actions of Peruvian viceroys. He points particularly to the examples of José Armendáriz y Perurena, Marqués de Castelfuerte, and José Antonio Manso de Velásquez, Conde de Superunda (1745–61). Both were typical of the best Bourbon officials dispatched to the Indies: military officials who had distinguished themselves in service to the dynasty and were committed to the new policies. And both were given broad powers by the crown to tackle problems in Peru, whether it be curbing contraband and official corruption, exerting regalist control over ecclesiastical matters, or dealing with emergencies such as the great Lima earthquake of 1747. Before taking office, they were assured of ministerial support and trusted to pursue enlightened policies with considerable autonomy. Their administrations witnessed the end of the sale of corregimientos and judgeships on the Peruvian audiencias, increased preference given to peninsulars rather than creoles for appointments, and removal of regular clergy from indigenous doctrinas to be replaced by more politically compliant seculars. When assigned to govern the Huancavelica in 1757, Antonio de Ulloa, another military officer committed to reform, received similar freedom to resuscitate mercury production there, and he went so far as to abolish the royal fifth (quinto) on quicksilver to spur output.

Pearce's fine volume thus fills a void in the historical literature on the Bourbon reforms. He masterfully combines a broad, thoughtful, reading in the secondary literature to buttress his own research on the first half century of reform in Peru. Scholars interested in how the reforms affected Spanish South America prior to 1763 would be well served by starting with Pearce's study.