The earthquake-tsunami that struck Lima and Callao in 1746 was among the most destructive natural disasters in the history of colonial Latin America. The tsunami obliterated Callao, and fewer than 4 per cent of its population survived. Lima lost several thousand residents to the earthquake and the subsequent epidemics. The two cities' combined mortality rate exceeded that of the earthquake that destroyed Lisbon in 1755. While severe earthquakes had struck Lima before, the extensive destruction of property put colonial government, headed by newly arrived viceroy José Manso de Velasco, to the test. At the same time, the destruction provided Manso de Velasco with an opportunity to promote reconstruction and reforms that, if implemented, would transform the baroque city into a municipality that conformed to contemporary European standards.
Balancing social and political history, Charles Walker examines the disaster of 1746 and the disputes that rebuilding Lima engendered from a variety of perspectives that highlight what he terms the ‘fault lines’ in eighteenth-century Peru. The result identifies the limits of mid-century ‘Bourbon absolutism’ in Peru and foreshadows the conflicts that accompanied the well-known reforms introduced into the empire after the return of Havana by the British in 1763.
Once Viceroy Manso de Velasco (soon to be entitled the Conde de Superunda) had surveyed the damage and ensured supplies of food and water, he turned to Lima's reconstruction. He accepted the belief that the city's devastation resulted from the pretentious architecture and luxurious lifestyle of citizens who failed to heed God's earlier warnings. Consequently, he and others concluded that divine retribution would occur again if the capital's inhabitants did not reform their ways. Manso de Velasco thus proposed changes that would reduce the ostentatious display of wealth by the city's leading families, as well as the Church's excesses (as seen in its buildings and celebrations, and the behaviour of certain clerics). In short, he sought to apply enlightened despotism as a cure for the baroque practices of the city, beseeching his patron, the powerful minister Marquis of Ensenada, for support, though with limited success.
Manso de Velasco's reconstruction plan included building wider streets, replacing stone structures with wattle and daub, providing more public spaces that residents could use for refuge during another earthquake, erecting one-storey buildings and removing the walls around the city to reduce the population's density. Lima's elite and many clerics were horrified at the suggestion that they should be forced to live at the same level as the rest of the population and proved successful in retaining their two-storey houses despite strong public support for less elevated buildings. Nonetheless, subsequent construction increased neoclassical architecture at the expense of earlier styles, and new buildings tended to be lower than the ones they replaced.
Conflict over rebuilding inevitably involved the Church, for the diocese and religious orders owned or enjoyed income from almost 90 per cent of the housing in Lima. The viceroy and other reformers wanted to strengthen the state's control over the Church, prevent the construction of new convents for the religious, reduce the ‘excess numbers’ of women in the convents, oversee the behaviour of clerics and force the lower classes to behave. Building on earlier legislation that prohibited convents or monasteries with fewer than eight members, Manso de Velasco strongly urged the king to remove regular clergy from rural parishes as an important measure to end Peru's economic stagnation and decline in religious devotion. Although almost all of the religious houses were rebuilt, the crown did support the replacement of regular clergy with seculars in rural parishes. The viceroy also enjoyed limited success in reducing the principal and interest owed to ecclesiastical creditors.
Most of Lima's residents believed that the 1746 earthquake presaged further disaster if the city did not change its ways. Sumptuary legislation and other efforts to control women's dress were long-standing in the capital, but the earthquake strengthened the critics' case. Women who wore what detractors considered to be seductive clothing became the foremost target of efforts to purify dress in a city widely known for its libertinage. The continued presence of tapadas, women who wore a shawl that covered one eye and precluded the identification of the wearer, indicated a lamentable disguise of social status. Moreover, the ease with which mulattas could emulate the dress of elite women suggested to critics, especially vocal members of the clergy, a most regrettable absence of social distance. Despite such attacks, women continued to wear clothing that one clerical observer in the 1780s described as ‘the most indecent ever seen’ (p. 155).
Aside from a brief epilogue, Walker concludes his study with a chapter focused on the Lima and Huarochirí rebellions of 1750. Noting that Manso de Velasco linked post-earthquake looting and crime to blacks and castas, the author makes the important point that the earthquake and its destruction served to weaken both ‘the symbols and seeming strength of Spanish rule’. Thus they encouraged non-whites to rise against those of European descent in two rebellions that, though unsuccessful, emphasised the fragility of Peru's social fabric.
Shaky Colonialism rests on a solid and extensive foundation of archival research complemented by an outstanding array of published primary materials and secondary materials. While Walker's description and analysis of the earthquake-tsunami of 1746 and the subsequent efforts to reconstruct Lima present a fascinating story, his book is particularly important for its careful delineation of the capital's society and the reforming efforts of Viceroy Manso de Velasco to impose the ideals of enlightened despotism well before the fall of Havana. Thus the book supports the growing appreciation that, as Robert J. Ferry demonstrated in The Colonial Elite of Early Caracas (1989), Bourbon reforms antedated ‘the Bourbon Reforms’ initiated during the reign of Charles III. Shaky Colonialism is an excellent study that every student of eighteenth-century Spanish America and the history of Peru should read.
