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Afro-Catholic festivals in the Americas. Performance, representation, and the making of Black Atlantic tradition

during ship inspections led to detailed instructions in 1613 and the creation of another position for overseeing measurements in 1620. In places, he shows that the officials of the Casa did not always scrupulously follow royal orders, as with their repeated failure to maintain records of the contents of the locked chests of the royal treasury up to the mid-seventeenth century, when still another official was put in place to supervise these account books. Fernández López’s incorporation of numerous examples from various time periods in much of the book—as well as in the documentary appendix—provides a concrete illustration of how the Casa’s documentary output was constructed and brings these records to life. Since the Casa is potentially such a broad topic, connected as it was to so many aspects of overseas communication, it is tempting to fault the author for not touching on any number of areas, but his intent with this already substantial work is more descriptive than broadly analytical. His occasional reliance on the ordinances of the Casa and laws of the 1681 Recopilación de Indias to illustrate customary practice is a bit of a methodological issue, though this is tempered by his frequent inclusion of José de Veitia Linaje’s 1672 Norte de la Contratación, which does comment on actual procedures. His focus on the most common kinds of documents produced by the Casa means that readers will not find consideration of, for example, the Casa’s role in inspecting and approving slave ships and other vessels sailing outside the annual fleets, or the union with Portugal (when some ships were inspected in Lisbon). Yet these choices also give Fernández López more space to carefully examine the processes underlying the Casa’s archival records, which can easily be applied to understanding other related kinds of sources. An index would certainly have improved the book’s usefulness, however. Although this is a very different kind of study than Michel Betrand’s 1999 Grandeur et misère de l’office, on the seventeenthand eighteenth-century treasury of New Spain, Fernández López’s detailed examination of the Casa’s documentary output is valuable for scholars working directly with archival sources or seeking to understand the Casa’s functions from the Crown’s perspective. Perhaps wisely, he does not seek to engage with a prohibitively broad range of secondary works, but rather concentrates on guiding readers through a variety of records produced by an institution responsible for implementing royal policies on imperial trade. I might have wished for more discussion of the Casa’s effectiveness in actually controlling commerce with the Indies—something hinted at in the conclusion—but Fernández López envisions this volume as a foundational step in better understanding the role of the Casa in governing Spain’s overseas empire, and his study will likely become a standard reference work on the topic.