{
  "id": "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793",
  "type": "entity",
  "name": "Hipólito Unanue's Guía política, eclesiástica y militar del Vireynato del Perú para el año de 1793",
  "summary": "An annual directory of a South American viceroyalty, opening with a quantitative sketch of Peru measured from the Meridian of Cádiz, listing officials by name with their street addresses, and printing what each office cost. The same pages record that the corregidor system had degenerated into despotism, and that the kingdom's information had until then been a labyrinth. Five appeared, 1793 to 1797.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "science",
    "statistics",
    "administration",
    "peru",
    "books",
    "printing",
    "eighteenth-century",
    "enlightenment"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "unanue-observaciones-clima-de-lima"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mercurio-peruano-1791"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "alcedo-diccionario-geografico-1786"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "relaciones-geograficas-de-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "noticias-secretas-de-america"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "mita"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "protomedicato-de-las-indias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cosme-bueno"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "cosme-bueno-descripcion-de-las-provincias"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "jose-manuel-davalos"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "What was the Guía política, eclesiástica y militar del Virreinato del Perú?",
    "Did Spanish America publish statistical yearbooks in the eighteenth century?",
    "What did Hipólito Unanue write besides his work on the climate of Lima?",
    "What did the 1793 Guía say about corregidores and the repartimiento?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The work is an annual directory of a viceroyalty, and the modern edition used here reproduces the first of them in facsimile. Its 1985 title page reads \"HIPOLITO UNANUE, GUIA POLÍTICA, ECLESIASTICA Y MILITAR DEL VIRREYNATO DEL PERÚ, PARA EL AÑO DE 1793. Edición, prólogo y apéndices de JOSE DURAND\", with the imprint of the Oficina de Asuntos Culturales of COFIDE at Lima, 1985, and the note that the publication was recommended by the Academia Nacional de la Historia.",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.95
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Five Guías were issued, for the years 1793 to 1797, and this 1985 volume states that it prints the 1793 one complete in facsimile for the first time, together with the full statistical tables of the remaining four, assembled by the editor José Durand, a Peruvian researcher then teaching at the University of California, Berkeley. The publisher places the series alongside the Gaceta de Lima and the Mercurio Peruano as part of the same effort to describe the country to itself.",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "The Guía opens by measuring the country rather than praising it. Peru is given as 365 leagues north to south, from 3 degrees 35 minutes to 21 degrees 48 minutes of southern latitude, and 126 leagues east to west at its widest, between 63 degrees 56 minutes and 70 degrees 18 minutes of longitude, \"fixando por primer punto al Meridiano de Cadiz\"; the bay of Tumbez divides it from New Granada, the river Loa from the desert of Atacama and the kingdom of Chile, and the Cordillera of Vilcanota at 14 degrees from the viceroyalty of Buenos Aires.",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "Climate is given in instrument readings rather than adjectives. The same pages state that the terrain within those bounds is very unequal - sterile sands and small fertile valleys on the coast, very high cordilleras and deep ravines in the sierra - so that temperature varies greatly even at one latitude, and that in the habitable high places the liquid in the Réaumur thermometer falls to three degrees below zero and rises to nine.",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "A directory printed under viceregal patronage says in its own opening pages that the corregidor system had gone bad. It records that subaltern judges titled corregidores were established in the provinces, and that, having obtained the faculty of the repartimiento in later times, they \"encontraron una nueva vereda por donde elevar su autoridad á aquel punto que la hizo degenerar en despótica.\" The abuse is named in the crown's own almanac, not in a critic's pamphlet.",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c6",
      "text": "The Guía then sets out the reform in figures: in 1784 the system took a new form, the 77 corregimientos remaining to Peru after the earlier dismemberments were reduced to 7 intendancies comprising 51 partidos, each partido with a subdelegate of the intendant watched over by him as the intendants were watched by the superintendent general; and in 1787 the bishoprics of Huamanga and Cuzco were separated from the jurisdiction of the Audiencia of Lima on the erection of the new Audiencia of Cuzco.",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.9
    },
    {
      "id": "c7",
      "text": "The object of the work is stated as an analysis of a whole kingdom - to give an idea of the state of the political, ecclesiastical and military orders, and of everything connected with them, on entering the year 1793, because those three between them take in every class and condition of a kingdom. The passage also concedes what had been missing: only under the viceroy's protection \"ha podido empezarse á ordenar el laberinto de cosas en que hasta ahora hemos estado sumergidos.\"",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c8",
      "text": "The motive is on the page with the achievement. The same passage credits the enterprise to the efficacious influence of the sitting viceroy, \"el actual EXCMO. SR. FREY D. FRANCISCO GIL Y LEMOS, que felizmente lo rige\", calls the undertaking otherwise insuperable in Peru, and offers the design to the public under his auspices - so the book is a work of patronage as well as of description, and does not pretend otherwise.",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c9",
      "text": "The measurements are governed by a stated convention rather than left to the reader. The first of the Advertencias runs \"Todas las latitudes señaladas en esta Guia son meridionales: en las longitudes se toma por primer punto al Me[ridiano de Cádiz]\", so every coordinate in the volume is referred to one declared origin.",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.8
    },
    {
      "id": "c10",
      "text": "The body of the Guía is a public directory with addresses and costs. Page 3 lists the clerks of a government office by name, then the archivist, the amanuenses and the doorkeeper; gives the asesor general and the agente asesor with their streets and house numbers, \"calle de las Divorciadas número 1942\" and \"c. del Arzobispo n. 608\"; names the escribano mayor de gobierno and his oficial mayor; and closes with a note that the salaries and expenses of these offices and their employees come to \"17.792 pesos 2 reales.\"",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c11",
      "text": "The strongest claim made for the series is the modern editors' and is recorded here as theirs. The 1985 Presentación holds that the facsimile will let researchers verify an exceptional gathering of statistical information that had no antecedents in its time. That is a publisher's judgement in a commemorative edition, not a comparative study, and the volume offers no survey of contemporary European or American almanacs against which the claim could be tested.",
      "sources": [
        "unanue-guia-del-peru-1793-facsimile-lima-1985"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.6
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": false,
  "winning_edge": "Unanue is reached in English almost entirely through his medical writing on the climate of Lima, and the Guías are usually mentioned, if at all, as a line in a bibliography. Read as a book, the 1793 Guía turns out to be something more specific and more useful: an annual state directory of a South American viceroyalty that fixes every longitude on one declared meridian, gives its climate in Réaumur degrees, prints the officials of each office with the street and house number at which they can be found, and totals what the office costs. The same twelve prefatory pages that thank the viceroy also state that the corregidores had made their authority despotic and that the kingdom's information had been a labyrinth - which is why the credit and the cost here come from one source rather than from a defender and a critic. The tier is held at secondary on purpose: the pages quoted are facsimiles inside a 1985 Lima edition, and the 1793 sheets themselves were not opened.",
  "confidence": 0.8,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-10",
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    "name": "Hipólito Unanue's Guía política, eclesiástica y militar del Vireynato del Perú para el año de 1793",
    "description": "An annual directory of a South American viceroyalty, opening with a quantitative sketch of Peru measured from the Meridian of Cádiz, listing officials by name with their street addresses, and printing what each office cost. The same pages record that the corregidor system had degenerated into despotism, and that the kingdom's information had until then been a labyrinth. Five appeared, 1793 to 1797.",
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        "name": "Hipólito Unanue, Guía política, eclesiástica y militar del Vireynato del Perú para el año de 1793 - edición, prólogo y apéndices de José Durand",
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