At the core of this history of legal culture and imperial reform in eighteenth-century Mexico is the jurist Francisco Xavier de Gamboa (1717–94), the first American-born regent, or chief justice, of the Real Audiencia of Mexico. Christopher Albi sets out to show how Gamboa's commitment to legal principles of autonomy, due process, and local custom allowed him to rise above partisan politics and his class interests to articulate informed positions on policy, mining, government, and the law. At stake no less is the perception of Mexico's legal system as corrupt or sclerotic. Albi stresses that eighteenth-century legal institutions were robust, worked reasonably well, and had influential defenders, Gamboa among them.Chapters move chronologically, beginning with Gamboa's childhood in Guadalajara, his Jesuit education, his legal formation and writings and his experience as a private litigator in Mexico City, and the network of Basque merchants and officials who advised him and shaped his ideas about the importance of local autonomy and custom in royal sovereignty. These notions informed Gamboa's treatment of Mexican mining in his most famous work, the 1761 Comentarios a las ordenanzas de minas, whose ambition helped convince members of the Council of the Indies to appoint Gamboa to Mexico's royal court. Albi's discussions of the favored status of the Basque community and Gamboa's legal work on its behalf raise fascinating questions about Atlantic identities (class, professional, regional, ethnic) in the making of careers, knowledge, and policy.The remaining chapters treat Gamboa's tenure as audiencia judge beginning in 1764, on the criminal and then the more prestigious civil bench. Mexico was awash in administrative and fiscal reforms with the arrival of visitor general José de Gálvez. Alongside moves to fortify executive authority, the audiencia's control over the administration of criminal justice and revenue collection slipped. Ever a defender of the high court's prerogatives, Gamboa resisted. When Gálvez pushed to establish a tribunal for miners, Gamboa opposed it with prescient warnings of the harms of a mining guild operating outside the jurisdiction of audiencia judges. He paid for his opposition with periods of exile to northern Spain and Santo Domingo. With Gamboa's return to Mexico City, in 1788, he worked closely with the viceroy, the conde de Revillagigedo. The famous Bourbon reformer, according to Albi, largely shared Gamboa's views on criminal justice reform, the Mining Tribunal, and the flaws of the intendancy system, which was filled with Gálvez's allies and relatives.Based on close readings of Gamboa's writings and a deep immersion in civil, Roman, and Iberian legal traditions and commentaries, Albi convincingly argues that the creole judge both inspired reform and tempered it. At issue was the ascendancy of a new principle of legal interpretation in the Atlantic, in which the letter of the law was privileged over local custom or the ius commune. It was embraced by peninsular reformers especially, who discounted the privileges claimed by Spain's American subjects and viewed legal pluralism with suspicion. Defending the “old order,” Gamboa followed seventeenth-century jurist Juan Solórzano Pereyra, who supported regional accommodation and insisted that the Indies could never be shoehorned into an Iberian model.Scholars have painted Gamboa as a pawn of Mexico City's consulado merchants and a staunch defender of class interests. Albi instead celebrates his vision for an independent judiciary and the situated knowledge he championed as lawyer and royal judge. Gamboa advocated for specific virtues of the law as he understood it: the right to due process of criminals, the privileges of a professional legal class to adjudicate, and the superiority of firsthand knowledge of the place in which law was applied. The last is well illustrated in the partido, the practice of allowing mine workers to smuggle out bits of ore for sale. Reformers did not see, as Gamboa did, how it benefited small miners who lacked cash for wages, or how sales of ore to refiners fueled regional economies. Bourbon reform was tempered by a moderate faction, with Gamboa carrying the banner, whose ideas were not out of step but often sensible and merit the serious treatment Albi gives them.Of course, neither approach was absolutely right, or better. Local custom can support, conceal, and reproduce inequalities as well as the state's imperialist legal framework, which recalls questions of identity in the Spanish Atlantic and the enduring influence of regional and ethnic ties. Albi lingers on Gamboa's early years to show the dense web of patronage, friendship, and kinship that bound him to a Basque community. Basque merchants helped Gamboa obtain his audiencia seat, advised him at different life stages, and presumably expected that he would not threaten their interests. More might have been said about these social commitments and how they informed one another.As it is, Gamboa's World covers an array of topics in clear prose as it wends through the realms in which Gamboa was involved over his life: the rehabilitation of schools for children, the formation of a bakers' guild, the Acordada's oppressive policing of criminals, the patio process and mine drainage, reform projects in Santo Domingo, Mexico's first lottery, the origins of Gamboa's Basque lay brotherhood, and more. Not all are essential, but the colorful details make for enjoyable reading and will engage students and specialists alike.
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Apr 22, 2024
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