Artesanos y manufactureros en Lima. FRANCISCO QUIROZ CHUECA: Lima: Banco Central de Reserva del Perú e Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 2008

This is a solid study of artisans and manufacturers in colonial Lima . The book is organized around what the author sees as pivotal moments in Lima ’s economic history: the sixteenth-century creation of an artisan group; the seventeenth-century apogee of local manufacturing; and the eighteenth-century economic crisis that produced a return to small scale workshops. Drawing widely on published studies and archival research as well as his own previous work on artisans, gremios, and indigenous urban labor, Quiroz demonstrates that it was not only artisans, laboring in small talleres and using the traditional three-tier system of master, journeyman, and apprentice, who produced goods in Lima . From the mid-sixteenth century on, Lima also contained an important industrial sector of large-scale producers whose workers produced cloth, soap, liquors and wine.