Ten Things You Did Not Know about José de Gálvez: A Reassessment of His Role as a Reformer of the Spanish Empire, 1765-1787

• In Event: Rebellious Subjects, Greedy Rivals, and a Precarious Empire: Bourbon Dilemmas in Spanish America

Abstract

At many points of their professional activities, historians of colonial Latin America have encountered José de Gálvez (1720-1787). This eighteenth-century Spanish royal functionary is certainly an unavoidable historical figure. Some of these scholars address him formally in their works as the central architect of the so-called Bourbon Reforms, while others consider him just another Spanish crown representative and even a mediocre one. After working on his biography for the last seven years, my research has enabled me to distinguish the ways in which Gálvez’s reformist activities were the product of previously established modernizing processes and patterns of governance as well as to assess the occasions in which he was able to fashion new state policies at the local, regional, and imperial levels. This paper offers a detailed picture of José de Gálvez as a reformer and portrays him against the background of a hotly-contested political arena, where rampant opposition to reform thrived in both Spain and Spanish America. The analytical questions behind this fresh historical rendering are: how did Gálvez and his cohort of Bourbon reformers initiate institutional change (that crucial moment when a functionary transforms a project in paper into actual policy implementation); how reformers organized and constructed tight networks of patronage that were political in essence; and what reformers thought they were going to achieve in terms of institutional change, but also in terms of personal gain. Ultimately, this paper addresses the timeless question about the relative weight of individual agency in global historical change.

Author

• Maria Barbara Zepeda Cortes, Lehigh University