Colonial Habits: Convents and the Spiritual Economy of Cuzco, Peru. By Kathryn Burns. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999. Pp. xi, 307. $49.95, cloth; $17.95, paper

Eric Van Young

The Journal of Economic History, 2001, vol. 61, issue 3, 836-837

Abstract: When liberal politicians attacked the entrenched power and wealth of the Catholic Church—especially of monastic establishments and endowed chaplaincies—in many areas of Latin America beginning in the middle decades of the nineteenth century, they were playing out a drama that had already begun in Catholic Europe considerably earlier. In greater or lesser degree, in Peru, Mexico, and other countries these statesmen adduced as justification for the expropriation the idea that the supposedly “dead hand” of the Church had prevented the free circulation of wealth and therefore retarded economic development, a viewpoint that has long survived as conventional wisdom in the economic historiography of Latin America. As historians' research over the last two or three decades has shown, however, in a prebanking age the capital-owning institutions of the Church—and particularly its great urban convents—served a vital function in accumulating and investing capital which often supported productive forms of enterprise, especially in the countryside, in economies that were still overwhelmingly agricultural. This did not mean that conventual life itself was not primarily a religious expression, nor that surpluses generated in the secular economy were not expended in unprofitable ways, but rather that cultural practices and expectations intertwined in a complex double helix with economic life, each influencing the other. Kathryn Burns's informative and beautifully written book on the history of three convents (one founded in 1573, the other two at the beginning and end of the following century) in Cuzco, the former Inca capital in the Peruvian highlands, fits this revisionist trend well. Burns provides the most detailed and theoretically informed treatment yet of the relationship between ecclesiastical investment, the institutional and intimate life of the lending convents, and the local elites of the region, who sent their daughters to the convents, endowed the institutions with funds, and took loans from them at interest. All were bound together in what she calls a “spiritual economy.”

Date: 2001
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