Different authors have emphasized that, during the 17th century, smuggling in Hispanic America intertwined the various dimensions of the changing and conflicting balance between empires. David Freeman's book explores the dynamics of these interdependencies in Dutch trade evolution in the Río de la Plata, focusing on actors and their global networks. Its intrigue starts from the global and local context, then stops at the governors' role, to open in a mosaic of stories that give thickness to Albert Yansen's career. His fascinating path navigated in ambiguous legality between Amsterdam, Spain, France, and the community of Buenos Aires.

The author finely knots this complex intrigue in the interpretation of those stories: with the conditions created by the Peace of Münster (1648), “local, regional, and Atlantic interests aligned” (193) under the protective shadow of Governor Baygorri. After 1660, the emergence of Curaçao and changes in the succeeding governors and audiencia policy combined to reduce the Dutch presence. His argument rests mainly on “the governors’ political capacity to coordinate local, regional, and Atlantic interest” (6). Based on Spanish and Dutch sources, his narrative is elegant but questionable.

By the eighties, the literature had already studied the same actors, reconstructed the unauthorized trade movement in the Río de la Plata, and analyzed the crown agents' entrepreneurial activity. It exploited many of the same Dutch and Spanish sources, among others, the Escribanía de Cámara series. Freeman makes a more intensive use of this material, completing and correcting the information available. He thus restores a comprehensive vision of the networks that crossed imperial spaces on an Atlantic scale, without really analyzing their mechanisms by conversing with any of the relational or microhistorical approaches.

Actually, despite an exhaustive bibliography in footnotes and introduction, conversation or discussion with relevant literature is almost absent from the narrative. This affects its central arguments. Different studies had already shown how the local oligarchy in the Americas embedded smuggling in the construction of its autonomy. However, their analysis of corruption trailed behind the contradictions of Weber's conception of the early modern State, aporias that notions of the nineties, such as the ‘colonial consensus’ taken by the author, do not succeed in overcoming. Furthermore, the author does not integrate the studies that renewed our vision of institutional culture and political order, providing the tools to overcome such aporias.

Amadori's book Negociando la obediencia (2013) stands out among the unquoted works. It examines Olivares's plans to reform the American viceroyalties and shows the relevance of his failure to give a less Eurocentric meaning to 1648 in Spanish America. This failure outlined the constitutional framework for the autonomy of the colonial oligarchies in the following period. If he had integrated this contribution, Freeman would have noticed the capital importance of the Juntas de Real Hacienda. Like others before him, he points out Juntas’ ubiquity in the negotiations regarding unauthorized ships; however, he does not analyze their role as a self-ruling device in the negotiation and interpenetration between economic and political actors. Without this analysis, he cannot sustain his criticism of the notion of corruption by arguing about the capacity of the governors to create alternative legality, attributing to them a nonexistent way of verticality.

It is not arguable, for example, that, contrary to the author's claims, the Buenos Aires first audiencia not only failed to stop unauthorized trade, but that its members participated in it—and that the Consejo de Indias, therefore, dismantled the audiencia. Arguing in this way would keep the discussion within the framework of the Weberian model. The author simply misses the nature of the political and social order on which the Atlantic connections of the Río de la Plata rested—the complex integration of local merchants into a configuration of plural hierarchies, comprising the governor, the real hacienda courts, the cabildo court, and commercial justice—instituted long before the creation of the Consulate. Smuggling and networks navigated within the conflictive spaces of these plural hierarchies.