This book traces the transition from religious to state rule on the Guaraní Indian missions of South America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. While scholarship on mission Indians often portrays them as passive recipients of Spanish agendas, this work compensates for the lack of the “indigenous voice” in the corresponding documentation by using social and economic data to explore how the Guaraní shaped life on the missions, then resisted, but ultimately succumbed to, the Spanish Crown's efforts to alter the communal societies the Indians and the Jesuits had created.

Established in the early seventeenth century, the thirty Jesuit missions for the Guaraní covered much of the southern half of South America. At their peak in 1732, each was home to almost five thousand Indians. Although the missions were first and foremost religious establishments, Sarreal's data-driven approach stresses the Indians' work, production, and political engagement to highlight just how much they managed their own lives on the missions. Working collectively under loose Jesuit supervision, they produced tobacco, textiles, yerba maté, cattle and hides, and also mission goods for trade. The resulting profits supported the mission communities and allowed for a communal lifestyle in which the Guaraní could receive material benefits and social protection, yet work only as much as absolutely necessary (and often less than they were bidden). However, as Sarreal points out, such an arrangement was only possible because of the extensive subsidies the Jesuit order funneled toward the mission economies.

Upon the expulsion of the Order from Spanish territories in 1767—which specialists in the period may wish to see covered with more depth than it is here—secular officials envisioned changes and reforms that were in line with general Bourbon policies toward indigenous peoples in the late colonial period. Broadly, they sought to dismantle the communal lifestyle by forcing the natives to work and trade outside of the mission, enriching themselves and the regional economy in the process. Of course, when the Jesuits were expelled they took their subsidies with them. Yet, the missions themselves remained, some until the independence period, and a great many of the Indians chose to stay. However, the mission's economies endured drastic changes that resulted not only in their fiscal insolvency, but also in large-scale indigenous flight. In a fashion, the secularizing reforms could be viewed as so effective that they made the missions themselves obsolete.

The author's research for this book was extensive and she draws on a wide array of documentary sources. The writing is lucid and presents a compelling case study of mission economies. However, the work might have benefitted from a firmer grounding in the context of late-colonial Indian policy, religious and otherwise. The place of natives in the late Spanish Empire was rapidly changing, and Sarreal demonstrates how the Guaraní lived this experience. Still, her conclusions would have been enriched by more consistent consideration of how the day-to-day changes in the Indians' lives intersected with larger religious and secular reform agendas for native peoples in the Bourbon period.

Overall, Sarreal's study is an important addition to the small but growing body of literature on the Jesuit missions in the Río de la Plata, and it is an especially useful companion to Barbara Ganson's ethnohistorical take in The Guaraní under Spanish Rule in the Río de la Plata (Stanford University Press, 2003). Sarreal's painstaking research demonstrates how the Guaraní had a heretofore unknown degree of economic and political responsibility for their own lives on the missions. The book stands as a model of how socioeconomic data can be used to study groups who lived in the colonial mission environment.