Mónica Ricketts is an assistant professor of Latin American history at Temple University. She co-edited Jorge Basadre, el hombre, su obra y su tiempo and Familia y vida cotidiana en América Latina, and edited Lima. Paseos por la ciudad y su historia.

"...Ricketts's book...re-center[s] the history of ideas (and the actions they spurred)." -- Jesse Zarley, Saint Joseph's College, Latin American Research Review

"A fascinating account of the many roles of intellectuals including the political position of men of letters in both Spain and the viceroyalty of Peru ... Ricketts ... shows that the struggle between men of letters and officers intensified after independence, with the definition of merit playing a key role. The violence of the period, both in Spain and in Spanish America is emphasized. An excellent work on the nature of self-styled elites ... it deserves much praise." -- Jeremy Black, European Studies Journal

"Who Should Rule? is impressively broad in both its temporal and geographic scope. Ricketts's approach grants equitable attention to both Spain and Peru, while tracing connections and interactions of peoples and processes between the two regionsâ.The book is exhaustively researched, reflecting intense archival investigations on both sides of the Atlanticâ.Ricketts usefully complicates our understandings of the Bourbon Reforms and makes a valuable contribution to our comprehension of elite politics." -- James E. Sanders, American Historical Review

"Ricketts's analysis provides a nuanced depiction of Spanish (and Spanish American) liberalism that goes beyond constitutionalism and emphasizes parallel developments in Peru and Spain. It explains educational transformations, chronicles new public discourse, and depicts the rise of new political actors, all with a refreshingly transatlantic lens. Specialists and students of the Spanish Empire and its legacies will find their interest piqued by the book's many instructive individual examples." -- Barry M. Robinson, H-Net

"This is a pioneering and sweeping study of the origins of modern politics in Peru and Spain. The long eighteenth century saw the birth of new actors and new struggles over status and influence across the Spanish Empire, culminating in fratricide in the 1820s. Mónica Ricketts looks especially at the rise of the military and the rise of lettered classes as two competing and conjoined agents in the making of empire and liberalism. Surveying a vast array of new sources, she recounts a remarkable story of how elites got made and unmade in the age of revolutions."--Jeremy Adelman, Princeton University

"In this deeply-researched and insightful book, Ricketts develops exciting new ways of understanding the late eighteenth-century crisis of the Spanish Atlantic Monarchy. Blending political, intellectual, military, and cultural history, this book deserves a prominent place on the shelves of all students of the Age of Atlantic Revolutions."--Gabriel Paquette, The Johns Hopkins University

"This meticulously-researched book traces the emerging political role of 'men of letters' (who were educated in a modern, enlightened curriculum) and more professionally-trained military men in Spain and Peru from 1760 to 1830. It presents valuable new insights into the politics of the eighteenth-century Bourbon Reforms and the later dissolution of Spain's Atlantic Empire in the early nineteenth century. Who Should Rule? is a major contribution to the fields of Latin American and Atlantic History."--Kenneth J. Andrien, Southern Methodist University

"...an interesting, well-researched and clearly written book...Monica Ricketts's book should be welcomed for several reasons: for delving ´into the Peruvian case from a political and intellectual (life) point of view during the transition from colony to independence, for a comparative perspective that takes into account the crucial events that took place in the metropolis from 1808 onwards (a perspective that was ignored for a long time by Latin American historians), and also for putting on the table of historiographic debate the highly complex relationship between the sword and the pen in the mundo hispanico during a time of reform, of revolution and of war that represents the birth of independent political life in Spanish America." -- Roberto Brena, El Colegio de Mexico, History: The Journal of the Historical Association