Benemeritos, aristocratas y empresarios: Identidades y estructuras sociales de las capas altas urbanas en America hispanica (review)
In introducing the volume, Christian Buschges outlines the editors' interest in the methodologies previously employed in studying the upper strata and in the application of a comparative approach that would enrich such investigation. He identifies a three-stage evolution of the relevant historiography. The first, associated with Richard Konetzke, drew upon legal and institutional definitions that created a social hierarchy based on race or ethnicity. The second, following D. A. Brading, used social-economic criteria for identifying often imprecisely defined colonial "elites." The third and most recent, variously called "history of mentality," "historical anthropology," and the "new cultural history," emphasizes qualitative rather than quantitative evidence. Buschges underscores the limitations of collective biography, a form of analysis that, as its practitioners also recognize, examines only a part rather than the whole of a specific urban "elite." He correctly stresses the centrality of family and groups of families within the upper strata.