Böcker av Susan Migden Socolow

In this work Susan Socolow examines bureaucrats in early modern society by concentrating on those of Buenos Aires under the Bourbon reforms in the late colonial bureaucracy, Socolow studies the individuals who held positions in the colonial civil service¿their recruitment, aspirations, job tenure, professional advancement, and economic position.The late eighteenth century was a critical time for the southernmost regions of Latin America, for in this period they became a separate political entity, the Viceroyalty of the Rio de la Plata. Socolow's work, part of a continuing study of the political, economic, and social elites of the emerging city of Buenos Aires, here considers the bureaucracy put into place by the Bourbon reforms. The author examines the professional and personal circumstances of all bureaucrats, from the high-ranking heads of agencies to the more lowly clerks, contrasting their expectations and their actual experiences. She pays particular attention to their recruitment, promotion, salary, and retirement, as well as their marriage and kinship relationships in the local society.

By the end of the eighteenth century, Buenos Aires was one of the major commercial entrepots of the Spanish American empire. Chief among the beneficiaries of the new prosperity of the area were the wholesale merchants, a group of men who came to control the commerce of the entire Viceroyalty of Rio de la Plata. This study, a contribution to the fields of social history and group biography, looks at the formation of the merchant group, and at the social patterns which assured the merchants' primacy in the economic and social life of the colony. Origin, education, recruitment, group perpetuation and social mobility are treated in depth. The role of women and marriage in recruiting individual merchants into mercantile families and clans is a central issue. Professor Socolow also looks at the merchants' roles in commerce and society, lay religious institutions and local government. A biography of one merchant, Gaspar de Santa Coloma, provides a case study of the multiple roles of a porteno merchant.