By the second half of the eighteenth century the viceroyalty of Peru had undoubtedly lost its primacy in Spain's overseas empire to the more prosperous and populous viceroyalty of New Spain. By the last third of the century – that is in the years that followed the conclusion of the Seven Years War in 1763, when the crown gradually evolved an imperial reform programme that would reach Peru in the period 1777–1785 – influential voices within the viceroyalty, led by the officers of the consulado, began to suggest that Peru had been pushed even further down the imperial ladder, behind Cuba and the Río de la Plata, as the increasing preoccupation of the metropolis with improved security in the Caribbean and the South Atlantic, coupled with the quest for economic and fiscal growth in hitherto peripheral regions in America, induced the crown to implement commercial and administrative reorganization that seemed to threaten the vestiges of Peru's traditional prestige and authority. The accuracy of this negative assessment of the impact upon Peru of key elements of the Bourbon programme of imperial reform will be discussed in particular detail in chapter 3. However, it is relevant to bear it in mind in the present chapter, which describes and evaluates the structures of political, military and religious organization in the viceroyalty in the post-1750 period, in view of the overriding importance in these areas of activity of the broad structures and policy initiatives imposed upon Peru from Madrid.

As has already been mentioned in the introduction to this study, one of the fundamental questions currently being debated by historians of Spanish America in the Bourbon period is how to interpret Spanish colonial policy in the second half of the eighteenth century in terms of not only its aims and implementation but also its consequences.