Crown and Religious Reform in Bourbon Peru, 1700-1825

Examines the complex and conflictive relationship between the Spanish Crown and the Roman Catholic Church in Peru over more than a century, analyzing the efforts of the Bourbon crown and religious reformers to transform the role of the Church in society.

Based primarily on the author’s years of archival research in Peru, Spain, and Italy, Andrien’s magisterial study provides the first direct examination of the Bourbon reform of the Church in late-colonial Peru, examining its ongoing tensions, conflicts, and conspiracies. The Crown and Religious Reform in Bourbon Peru, 1700–1825 moves chronologically from the accession of the first Bourbon king of Spain in 1700 to the dissolution of empire in the 1810s and 1820s. The author’s well-written, accessible narrative follows the earliest efforts at crown takeover of Church prerogatives (namely control of rural Indigenous parishes), the potentially explosive expulsion of the wealthy and powerful Jesuit Order in 1767, and finally the highly controversial seizure of clerical assets, including the recall of all private debt owed to Church organizations in the first decade of the 1800s.

Andrien shows how policies weakened the economic strength, social prestige, and political clout of the Roman Catholic Church, which had long provided moral and ethical leadership in the empire and served as a primary pillar of support for the Spanish monarchy. When Napoleon’s army invaded Spain in 1808 and forced the abdication of the Spanish King Charles IV and his son and heir, the monarchy and the Church (the two strongest institutions in the Spanish Atlantic World) were irreparably damaged. The fallout from these weakened institutions contributed to the movement for independence and a prolonged period of instability in Spain and Spanish America during much of the nineteenth century.