Just as conservative historians writing in many parts of Spanish America in the turbulent post-independence era looked back with nostalgia to the late-Bourbon period as a golden age of prosperity, order, social stability and respect for the Church, so the Bourbon reformers of the 1760s and 1770s tended to depict the unreformed fiscal, administrative, judicial and military structures of Spanish America prior to the reign of Charles III (1759–1788) in terms of fraud, inefficiency, incompetence, and corruption. Broadly speaking, twentieth-century scholars have followed this somewhat uncritical – perhaps a better adjective would be hypercritical – line of argument. Indeed, they have tended to consolidate it by emphasizing the continuities rather than the contrasts between the late-Hapsburg period of the second half of the seventeenth century and the early-Bourbon era of the first half of the eighteenth century, depicting the century or so as a whole prior to 1759 in terms of financial and administrative decadence, social and racial injustice, and the inability or unwillingness of colonial officials and their subjects to defend Spanish America from both the economic intrusions and the armed depredations of other nations hostile to Spain.

A conventional and influential point of historiographical departure for many scholars seeking evidence to sustain their negative depiction of the unreformed state of government in the viceroyalty of Peru before the despatch in 1776 of the visitador general, José Antonio de Areche, to reorganize its government and finances, is the oft-cited report on political corruption and maladministration completed in 1749 for the Marqués de Ensenada by the young Spanish naval officers, Jorge Juan and Antonio de Ulloa, the work known to posterity as the Noticias secretas de América. To some extent it might be argued that their geographical focus during the 10 years (1735–1744) that Juan and Ulloa spent in the Indies – the kingdom of Quito – was peripheral to the viceroyalty of Peru and, in a strict sense, no longer part of it from 1739 as a consequence of the crown's decision to incorporate the region into the newly-established viceroyalty of New Granada. However, it also has to be borne in mind that both men spent considerable periods of time in the viceroyalty of Peru proper in the period 1740–1743, and again in 1744 prior to their departure in October of that year for Europe.