Noticias secretas de America (Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa; printed London, 1826)

The confidential report two Spanish naval officers wrote for the crown on what they had seen in Peru and Quito, and which the crown kept unpublished until a British editor printed it in London in 1826. It is the empire auditing itself: named mechanisms of extortion, the gap between the law and what happened in the provinces, and the authors' insistence that the crown's own tribute would have been a light burden if it had been the only one.