4
Impending Crises
Fuentes, Pardo, and Cisneros, 1854-1868

Liberal Scenes

The mid 1850s to early 1860s in Peru became the decade of triumphant export liberalism for the elites—and of deepening despair for popular Lima. In time this combustible mixture, and the first burning doubts about the future of guano, would kindle a new generation of critical policy thinkers. The new projects coming out of Lima—above all, railways across the Andes and fiscal rationing of guano—would color the remainder of the export age.

By the late 1850s the affluent classes of Lima had much to celebrate in their newfound commercial order. Between 1852 and 1857 guano exports jumped from $4.3 to $12.5 million annually before settling in the $20 million range of the 1860s. The ready availability of ever larger merchant advances and London credits made Peru, in effect, the richest regime of South America. Rarely had a change from rags to riches occurred so swiftly. Under the Gibbs contract alone the Peruvian state garnered over $57 million in profits between 1849 and 1861, inaugurating Peru's heady afluencia fiscal . Budgets, built overwhelmingly on guano (three-quarters of funds), also tripled to $20 million levels by 1860.^[1] With their public fortune officials laid foundations of a modern bu-

[1] Hunt, "Growth and Guano," tables 6, 8—Peru's profit on guano was a high 65 percent; Basadre, Historia, vols. 2-3, coins period as "La afluencia fiscal."

reaucracy and constructed the codes and constitutions suitable for the capital's rising capitalist norms.

Although little of this prosperity yet filtered out of Lima, there it revolutionized the life-styles of Peru's directing classes. Public works and private prebends remade the city into a livable and fashionable metropolis, with stately museums, parks, plazas, academies, boulevards, mansions, and theaters, not to mention the latest in potable water systems and Italian opera. Imports—everything from workaday textiles to lavish accessories and vintage French wines—officially reached the $15 million mark, and perhaps much more, by decade's end. Peru's leading merchants, now relishing their close ties with foreign houses, watched commercial revenues soar nearly threefold above those of the mid 1840s. More blatant gifts to the fortunate few—the outright transfer in the early 1850s of more than $20 million for their internal debt consolidation—more than made up for the prior travails it supposedly paid for. By 1860 Lima's commercial classes had recast themselves into a veritable national plutocracy, branching into newly capitalized banks, urban real estate, coastal plantations, and international trading companies.^[2] By 1862 business confidence had so swelled that Peruvians, the celebrated "hijos del país" group, took direct management of the guano trade itself from foreign firms, a move to fulfill even grander entrepreneurial aspirations. Although political conflicts continued to smolder (the civil war of 1854 between Echnique and Castilla, struggles over the modernizing 1857 constitution, rumblings from the ignored provinces), the strong arm of President Castilla dominated the age, allowing no rerun of the caudillo anarchy of the past. All could grasp that his order and progress marched in tandem. Stability enabled Peru's awakening intellectuals and regularized congresses to conceive, discuss, and move toward a more durable and national future. Such material and political successes pointedly validated Peru's opening to the world—on which all this progress hinged.

The other side of the guano coin was its distressing social effects on Lima's working masses. (Outside the coastal-capital region, export capitalism still sparked little perceptible change.) Urban social distances widened dramatically in the 1850s. A boom-led inflation erupted in the mid 1850s (price levels rose nearly 70 percent by 1865), pushing down real wages of urban folk by one quarter during the first half of export

[2] For elite portraits, see Quiroz, Deuda defraudada, chs. 5-7; Gootenberg, "Artisans and Merchants," ch. 2, commercial growth figures.

prosperity. Price hikes seemed strongest in staple foodstuffs, stirring popular passions. Among other verifiable developments, small service occupations actually receded in the 1850s, a surprising shift brought on as large firms enveloped much of the city's traditional street-corner retail sector. Facing now a true deluge of low-cost imports, skilled craftsmen fared little better; the number of workshops stagnated throughout the 1850s, and their revenues barely returned to stable 1830 levels. Lima was becoming a city dominated by a hundred or so large merchant firms assuming more than half the city's business earnings. Over half of these leading shops and warehouses belonged to Europeans. Entire old-style guilds, catering to vanishing Limeño tastes, disappeared. An alarming 17 percent or more of Lima's male workers stood permanently idled by the end of the decade.^[3]

Pessimistic popular groups also suffered more intangible political losses. By the early 1850s politicians were handily ignoring their wants in Lima's reviving elitist political forums. Estrangements became mutual as weakened older guild leaders withdrew from the business of politics. No new spokesmen or ideas emerged to protect and project their interests (though, as seen in the next chapter, some would after the mid 1860s). Instead, signs of desperation intensified. In 1851 Luddite workers, in evening raids, took to sabotaging foundations for Lima's first railway line; in 1855, following the liberal revolt against the disgraced president Echenique, popular crowds sacked the shops and mansions of "consolidados"—the wealthiest and most visible members of the guano elite. Rampages against foreigners began to accompany every change of regime.^[4]

Shortly before Christmas 1858 frustrations came to a head. Agitated by duty-free imports granted for city construction projects (run by Lima's renowned millionaire Gonzales Candamo), the carpenters' guild took to the streets after being turned away in their peaceful protest march on the congress.A ragamuffin army of craftsmen, unemployed laborers, vagrants, and political radicals joined forces, sending Lima and

[3] Gootenberg, "Artisans and Merchants," chs. 2-3, based on patentes registers; native unemployment, calculated from Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 630, reached as high as 28.5 percent. On inflation, see Paul Gootenberg, "Carneros y Chuño: Price Levels in Nineteenth-Century Peru," HAHR 70 (1990): 1-56, esp. social analysis, 38-42.

[4] Quiroz, Deuda defraudada, ch. 5; Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión, 96-101, and passim. The visible popular politics of the 1850s was explicitly inward "mutual aid": e.g., "Unos artesanos," Comercio, 29 Nov. 1851. For one popular antiforeign rampage, see José Dean, Cuestión saqueo de 6 de noviembre de 1865 en el Callao ante la opinión pública (Lima, pam., 1866); none of thirty firms sacked was Peruvian.

Callao into three furious days of popular riots. Artisan snipers appeared in the main squares; a dozen casualties fell; destitute looters sacked the best of French boutiques. Enraged carpenters ended up by burning to the ground the new train to suburban Chorrillos, Lima's cherished symbol of elite progress. General Castilla, personally leading his crack cavalry and artillery against marauding artisans, was able to break the rebellion, following up with severe repressive reprisals.^[5] This mayhem was popular desperation enshrined, though officials talked instead of foreign conspiracies and "subversives." For months Lima's press went on about the "horror" and meaning of the events.

After the riots, responses to the artisans epitomized official Peru's unbending faith in export liberalism. The guilds had not asked for much, a few modest and "patriotic" measures to relieve unemployment. "Civilized governments," ran their formal petition, "are engaged in fomenting national industry, the basis of a state's wealth . . . and if such protection is born from the pressing necessity to inspire work habits and better society, it is so very imperative in societies where occupations remain limited for the men who form the social majority."^[6] In a studied response to the guilds the congress conceded that artisans seemed "incapable of sustaining a true contest with free competition" and feel rightly gripped by "black terror about their future." But any return to protection was simply out of the question: "Economic Science has proven its errors." Sheltered industries wither as "contagious parasitic plants"; only full exposure to "liberty" produces hearty employment—though "it requires great efforts and sharp sufferings to bear its fruits." "The days when duties made an instrument of industrial promotion are lost in the annals of the centuries, never to reappear. . . . In Peru's guano fields lie more than enough means to spur labor and development—without recourse to taxes condemned by civilization and its conscience."^[7] As if science weren't enough, the deputies kept invoking a free-trader God at

[5] On still understudied uprising, see Gootenberg, "Artisans and Merchants," 1-10; Francisco Quiroz Chueca, La protesta de los artesanos: Lima-Callao, 1858 (Lima, 1988), a document collection; Cecilia Méndez, "Importaciones de lujo y clases populares: Un motín limeño," Cielo abierto 29 (1984); or coverage in Comercio, Dec. 1858-Feb. 1859.

[6] Artesanos, 5, 7; based on petition of tailor Juan Guevara—among requests were control of contraband, a school of arts, lower food costs, and a few craft prohibitions.

[7] Cámara de Diputados, Dictamen sobre las representaciones de gremios, 2, 5, 8, 15-18, 23 (quote); in its amalgam of Catholic predeterminism, naturalism, and free trade, the commission claims that the "Legislador del Universo" even created contraband to keep his flock from "aberraciones" such as tariffs (p. 11); see Myrdal, Political Element of Economics, ch. 2, on teleological strain of liberalism.

the helm; how He would transmute guano into honorable work was left up to faith. Meanwhile, congress promised some cheaper foodstuffs, a technical school, industrial prizes—and charitable "courses in the liberal economic teachings." The backlash of the 1840s lived on.

Liberal spokesmen such as José Silva Santisteban redoubled their efforts to "complete the pacification with healthy political economy." But Silva Santisteban also sought to dramatize the depth of challenge to Peru's power groups. "For the first time, the peaceful populations of Lima and Callao have become a struggling scene, mixed with blood and destruction; for the first time the popular rage has exploded in the Peruvian capital; for the first time, the masses have risen in the name of work and protection of national industry."^[8] Limeños knew enough about European events to understand the specters suggested, and denunciations of "communists" and "anarchists" began to supplement customary attacks on prtectionists. Although Silva Santisteban also marshals a lucid economic logic for liberal orthodoxy (focused on relative cost factors and monopoly distortions), his tract was blatantly punitive to dissenters—as if free trade were the final solution to the artisan problem. In such bristling defenses of free trade, Limeños absorbed calls to stick without quarter to the liberalism of guano. Besides—insisted all—Peru could never be a "manufacturing nation."

Yet even the doctrinaire minister of finance Juan José Salcedo had to concede that something was awry in the business of guano. In his 1860 ministerial report he confesses, "I judge as highest priority trying to open new spheres of activity for the people of Lima," all the while detailing their afflictions of unemployment, rising living costs, usury, and the uneven concentration of commercial wealth.^[9] Just as remarkable is his simultaneous rejection of any hint of change in official thinking and policy:

It is commonly felt that for a country to be rich it needs to produce

[8] Silva Santisteban, Breve reflexiones sobre los sucesos con la importación, 5-6, passim; his sixty-three-page tract is anything but "brief"; Alberto Regal, Historia de los ferrocarriles de Lima (Lima, 1965), 96, shows Silva as no innocent, having been the judge distributing Chorrillos lands. Trazegnies, Idea de derecho, 100-117, analyzes Silva's sophisticated work in legal theory (state action to forge liberal norms), which fits repressive economics; see response "Los artesanos: Folleto del Sr. Silva Santisteban," La Zamacueca Política (Lima), 29 Jan.-12 Feb. 1859; the official text of 1870s, P. Rodríguez, Elementos de economía, ch. 1, still conflated protection and "communism."

[9] Juan José Salcedo, Memoria que presenta al congreso de 1860 el ministro de hacienda y comercio (Lima, pam., 1860), 18, 31-34.

everything; and with such pinings, they imagine that a cheapness of consumption can enervate a people. With this goal, they try to acclimate what nature does not spontaneously harbor, and try to give a fictitious existence to forced industry—thereby weakening a nation's truly productive forces.

In the state of development now achieved by changing world commerce, the country that can economically—with just one production—obtain and supply all the rest of its needs is in the best position. Better than if it tried to produce them, using prohibitions, millions of workers, limitless capitals.^[10]

Salcedo's official faith in a singular product, his yearning for a "nation of consumers," his fixation on the "fictitious," his terror of contraband above all social ills—these remained the era's conventional wisdom in a peculiarly Peruvian translation of the classical theory of trade. Its incessant trivializing of diversification and protective thought silenced sympathetic voices. In 1859 only the oddly crapulent revolutionist writers of Lima's Zamacueca Política dared to embrace any artisan ideas, and they soon paid Castilla's repressive price.^[11] Peru's protectionist holdouts had been pushed to the bottom and fringes of respectable society. Any skeptics would have to overcome such political anxieties, associations, and absolutes.

Once the heady optimism of the 1850s wore thin, however, a more palatable line of elite questioning emerged: what would happen if that one miraculous product ran out, or if it inspired Peru's expansive treasury to wild excess? Everything would go. By 1860 such jitters could already be felt. The liberal publicist José Casimiro Ulloa, noting Peru's deepening trade imbalances and government's mounting recourse to merchant advances, warned that "guano exports on the present scale can persist only for some fifteen years. Then impends the crisis—if in the meantime, Peru has not vastly diversified its economy and augmented its production and export of other goods."^[12] Less than two years after Salcedo, the next finance chief, José Gálvez, officially broke s ome bad news: with recent swings in guano prices Peru was technically bankrupt. He sought still larger loans. In 1864, during Peru's costly war with Spain (in which Spain briefly captured the guano islands), deficits and loan

[10] Salcedo, Memoria de hacienda de 1860, 9-10, 32; note concept of "fictitious"; contraband, a major theme, was put at 30 percent of import value.

[11] For Zamacueca Política writers and revival of artisan legitimacy in 1860s, see ch. 5, below.

[12] J. C. Ulloa, "La hacienda pública," La Revista de Lima 8 (15 Jan. 1860); conditions covered in Pike, Modern History, 111-13; for relevant fiscal reports, Dancuart, Anales de hacienda, vol. 7; Basadre, Historia 3:1058, finds an even earlier warning (by Elías) in 1854.

burdens became more than technicalities. The first stage of Peru's crisis had arrived, sparking a decade of frantic diversification schemes.

This chapter explores the evolving critical-liberal thought of three outstanding intellectuals and statesmen of the 1850s and 1860s—Manuel Anastasio Fuentes, Manuel Pardo y Lavalle, and Luis Benjamín Cisneros. It pursues their discontents with guano and the paths taken as each worked his way out of the blinders of sacrosanct economic theory. Fuentes was moved by concerted study of Lima's social realities; Pardo, by the callings of a larger Peru; Cisneros, by the urgencies of firming the state's fiscal moorings. These concerns echoed in a regional decentralist movement, conjured up around national communications and a new liberal scientism of engineers, that drove the frenetic railway construction of the late 1860s. Diversification was back on the agenda—or so each would argue.

Manuel A. Fuentes: Social Realities

The Lima of the 1850s and 1860s was the compact world nurturing the outlooks of Peru's fledgling plutocrats—apart from de rigueur Parisian excursions and schooling. Not all could ignore signs of crisis, felt in daily brushes with riches and penury, ferment and despair. But better-off Limeños also absorbed a formal intellectual portrait of their rapidly changing capital. The key figure in these urban social studies was Manuel Anastasio Fuentes, Lima's remarkably prolific and versatile census taker, journalist, medical and legal expert, social commentator, administrator, satirist, historian, and folklorist. Fuentes's studies of midcentury Lima remain the starting point for all historians of the age. At the time they constructed the self-perceptions of the country's literate classes.

An audience thirsting for works such as Fuentes's was growing in size and sophistication in the guano age. As cosmopolitan port and capital, Lima had always boasted a vibrant literary and political scene. Lima hosted Peru's recognizable civil society—with several thousand well-read lawyers, teachers, literati, doctors, clerics, officials, artists, and motley other professionals and public employees. By the late 1850s at least fourteen thousand men met the literacy and property requisites to serve as political electors; some eight thousand citizens met the even stricter criteria for holding public office. Educated women mixed in innovative literary circles and charitable societies. Even before guano affluence,

observers were struck by the city's lively press (four or five major dailies, propagating the latest in international, commercial, and political news); its informal political and literary gatherings (tertulias ); its colegios and universities (the rival San Carlos and Guadalupe Academies, or San Marcos University, the oldest continuous institution in the Americas); and myriad political clubs and motley pamphleteers. The complexity and range of elite culture expanded markedly after 1850. State offices, immigration and travel, libraries, science institutes, theater, a Club Nacional, literary monthlies, and private societies spread to suit every taste and need. In 1858 Lima employed 744 public school teachers alone, enjoyed 419 self-described "artists," and drew some 21,000 foreigners from around the globe, representing over a fifth of the city's inhabitants.^[13] By the 1870s civil politics had become formalized in major lobbies (such as a Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura), professional guilds, immigrant societies, workers' and women's circles, and the galvanizing party politics of civilismo. An English-style jockey club catered to oligarchic amusements, competing with the customary watering holes of Chorrillos; Eiffel visited to draw up new monuments. Yet, however multifaceted Lima's intellectual milieu, much of its reference and style lay abroad. Thinkers were apt to have more feel for European trends than for those at home—much less for the exotic Andean land beyond. The impact of a Fuentes, along with the popular national costumbrista writers, was to shift consciousness inward.^[14] The social discovery of Lima (and later, expanding visions of Peru) was also a step to new forms of national economic thought.

Inspired by the French statistical school, Fuentes embarked between 1858 and 1878 on a series of painstakingly researched studies of Lima society and life-styles of the guano age. In 1858 Fuentes published his first and greatest tome, the 774-page Estadística general de Lima, based on extensive personal surveys of population, occupation, business, commerce, government, institutions, architecture, customs—or just about anything anyone wanted to know about the Peruvian capital. Updated

[13] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 620-24, passim; Radiguet, Lima y sociedad peruana; Basadre, Historia, vols. 3-5, for fine overviews of intellectual and cultural developments; Yeager, "Women and Intellectual Life," for inside view.

[14] Maida Isabel Watson, El cuadro de costumbres en el Perú decimonónico (Lima, 1979). To sense the vitality of Lima's intellectual weight and variety, compare to lesser intellectual capitals: Héctor Lindo-Fuentes, Weak Foundations: The Economy of El Salvador in the Nineteenth Century, 1821-1898 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1990), 1, insightfully suggests limited horizons of a nation starting with a "professional" class of four lawyers, four doctors, twelve surgeons, and seven druggists; cf. Véliz, Centralist Tradition, ch. 10, for possible deleterious impact of overdeveloped urban-intellectual culture.

versions followed in 1862, 1866, and 1869, and lavishly illustrated French and English editions, as well as numerous neighborhood street guides and official almanacs.^[15] A prominent journalist since the 1840s, Fuentes gathered his political-satirical prose in 1863 as the three-volume Aletazos del murciélago, from his newspaper of the same ironic title ("The Flappings of the Bat"). In it Fuentes codified the everyday life of Lima's folk in the costumbrista genre later exemplified by Ricardo Palma's classic Tradiciones peruanas . (At the time, Palma was a youthful writer with the Revista de Lima; he also conspired with the ornery radicals of the Zamacueca Política .) Fuentes pioneered in blending the genre with the people of the street.^[16]

One of Peru's premier scientific historians, Fuentes collected and published documents that underscored historic republican change. Fuentes also translated and edited key works of French political economy (such as those by the social-sciency Pradier-Foderé, who came to Lima as an adviser), dabbled in legal theory, and in 1877 was charged with producing Peru's official economics textbook—presumably to finish the pacification work that Silva Santisteban could never quite complete. In the mid 1870s Fuentes organized Pardo's new faculty of Political Science and Administration, directed Peru's first scientific national census (1876), and put together seven volumes of results and spin-off studies, such as his own scholarly monograph on Lima's "floating population" (vagrants). Aside from such literary and scientific pursuits, Fuentes was a bona fide member of Peru's economic plutocracy. He was, for example, a founder (and then "chief consultant") to the 1862 La Providencia bank, the first of the oligarchic finance institutions that were to shape the latter half of the guano age.^[17] Fuentes was not just in touch with Peruvian reality—he was its major student and propagator.

[15] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima (1858); a nonexhaustive list of analogous works includes Guía histórico-descriptiva, administrativa, judicial y de domicilios de Lima (Lima, 1860); Lima: Apuntes históricos, descriptivos, estadísticos y de costumbres (Paris, 1866-1867); Lima, or Sketches of the Capital of Peru, Historical, Statistical, Administrative (Paris, 1867; rpt. 1925); Guía industrial y mercantil de Lima y el Callao (Lima, 1869); and various guides of late 1870s, when Fuentes headed department of statistics.

[16] M. A. Fuentes, Aletazos del murciélago: Colección de artículos publicados en varios periódicos (Paris, 1866), 3 vols. Watson, Cuadro de costumbres, ch. 8, "M. A. Fuentes: el Cuadro como reflejo del pensamiento científico"; Trazegnies, Idea de derecho, 130-35, 221-25; Basadre, Historia 3:1362-76.

[17] Carlos Milla Batres, ed., Diccionario histórico y biográfico del Perú: Siglos xv-xx (Barcelona, 1986) 5:91-92; Camprubí, Historia de bancos, 39. Perú, Dirección de Estadística, Resumen del censo general de habitantes del Perú hecho en 1876 (Lima, 1878), 7 vols; Manuel Fuentes, Estadística del movimiento de la poblacion de la provincia de Lima en un periódo de cinco años y en el año de 1877 (Lima, 1878).

Known for his traditional elitism (even monarchism) in political thought, Fuentes reveals throughout his obra an acute sensitivity to social dilemmas and a skeptical slant on official variants of liberal progress. Above all Fuentes would graphically, even didactically, convey the emerging "social question" of liberalism to his readers—its manifest impact on the shape and people of Lima. The 1858 Estadística general de Lima exemplified these concerns. As it went about quantifying and sketching recent transformations of Limeño life and economy, it never brushed over the underside of guano prosperity.

Spurred by its commercial windfall, Lima had burgeoned from a sluggish postindependence town of some 55,000 to an overcrowded city of 94,195 inhabitants by 1857, more than a third of them solid white citizens. Initial census chapters of the Estadística de Lima, posed in the objective form of exhaustive occupational surveys, soon began focusing on urban dilemmas and above all on Lima's chronic underclass "vagrancy." Fuentes identifies more than 5,500 Limeños—one-fifth of adult males—"without profession." This number exceeded the 4,152 men gainfully employed in all commercial pursuits. As Fuentes warns, "Nobody can deny, however great their patriotism, that Lima is among the world's cities hosting the largest proportions of vagrants and corrupted men." No doubt such corruption loomed greatest among the city's 10,000 blacks and 13,000 mestizos. Adopting the tone of scientific moralist, he moves on to dissect the peculiar vices of Lima's mass idleness—gambling, begging, drunkenness, crime, social diseases, prostitution. Somehow Fuentes identifies 640 full-time prostitutes, 316 "perpetual drunks," and 490 chronic beggars—of whom "439 seem rather healthy in appearance."^[18] Closer analyses of hospital, court, charity, and prison populations illustrate the challenges facing the city's civic elite. Even the vaunted diversion of guano funds to Lima's huge control-conscious model penitentiary (with its panopticon-style workshops) cannot attenuate these lurking dangers.

Further into his work, Fuentes scrutinizes the city's remaining artisan workshops, exposing such social difficulties as poor nutrition, substandard housing, and rising rents. Lima still employed 10,497 "artesanos y obreros"—if true, this was Lima's largest occupational category after the elites' personal army of domestic servants, cooks, and maids. Artisans

[18] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, pt. 1, Población y censo; 164-68, 209-11, 609-11, 660 (quotes, 74, 608); Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión, chs. 3-4, an analysis of urban social relations based on Fuentes's surveys; cf. Himmelfarb, Idea of Poverty, for core perceptions.

were scattered among the city's 1,093 formally recognized master workshops, with the largest numbers in tailoring (193 shops), shoemaking (192 shops), and woodworking (153). Fuentes found disproportionately few apprentices here (480 overall), a sure sign of contracting prospects for work. Obviously, all such numbers need to be carefully treated by historians with so many "artisans," for example, shifting in and out of building trades and other services.^[19] Here strong criticisms rang out against the new practice of contracting foreign workers and businessmen to perform urban services, amid so many native unemployed. A telling anecdote concerns the repaving of city streets in 1847, which imported not only workers but even the more prestigious European stones. After absorbing these portraits of enforced idleness, could liberals still cling to alleged "lack of arms" (labor shortage) as the central explanation for the country's hobbled development? But the elitist Fuentes was equally wary, at times openly contemptuous, of the artisans themselves: labor and discipline must "moralize" a sluggish people. He assails guild market restrictions, the crude work habits of Peruvian craftsmen, and productive energies lost on objects of luxury.^[20] All in all, the Estadística de Lima might have augured the disturbances erupting the year it appeared.

Fuentes's Estadística de Lima devotes a full chapter to Lima's "industria fabril y manufacturera." Only one of the 1840s industrial projects survived through 1858; yet Fuentes significantly pauses in studied descriptions of each factory's plan, plant, and sad saga. It is as if he was mulling over the frustrated modernization of his city and one foreclosed solution to its social malaise. Fuentes takes readers on a tour of the abandoned Tres Amigos plant and of Sarratea's barely consummated silk works. He admiringly dubs them "the industrial factories that began to root in our soil with such happy results—under the protection of our independent government."^[21] The paper mill (which alone made it

[19] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, "Cuadro de las profesiones de todos los habitantes de la capital," 621-22; 702; "Cuadro de las personas empleadas en las fábricas y talleres de la capital," 724-25. Fuentes's sources (mainly tax registers) and methods often remain vague; for distinct set of tax-based calculations (and broad problems thereof), see Gootenberg, "Artisans and Merchants," app. 1; for general critique, Rory Miller, "The Population Problem of Late Nineteenth-Century Lima" (paper presented to the International Congress of Americanists, Amsterdam, 1988).

[20] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 74, 621-22, 655, 673-79, 679-705, 724; see Fuentes, Guía histórico-descriptiva (1860), ch. 3, for even greater detail on artisan pursuits.

[21] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 719-24; quote, 720; Fuentes is fullest of contemporary factory histories, with some (like Sarratea's story) from personal communication.

through "every sort of obstacle") wins praise for providing work to scores of paupers, who scrounge for raw material in the city's discarded rags.

How does Fuentes account for Lima's imposing monuments of industrial failure? Fuentes seemingly downplays stock class slogans: those framing the factory debacle as proof of Peru's natural "incapacity" for modern industry or listing the inevitable and innumerable obstacles at work. Instead, Fuentes reminds Peruvians of grave "humiliations" suffered by the entrepreneurs from the state: "These establishments needed strong capital, but would offer at the start certain losses and had to sustain the stiff competition of European manufactures. They needed strong and resolute protection by the government, to start producing those advantages the country should have enjoyed from them."^[22] The paper mill, adds Fuentes, managed to pick up the pieces only by ignoring the "disincentives" and "disillusions" of erratic officials, hanging on without protection. In keeping alive positive memories of industrialism, Fuentes pointedly recalled the withdrawal of government support the decade before.

The Estadítica de Lima is also an exegesis of commerce. Limeños learn that the city consumed more than $7.8 million in every conceivable type of foreign imports, up $1.8 million in only a few years. Pages of descriptions and statistics of varied marketplaces and products reveal the cornucopia of Lima's new consumption habits. By 1858 more than half of the top 264 merchants in the consulado were Europeans. Fuentes laments what was already becoming a local developmental cliché: "The scarcity or, better put, total dearth of factories has made it necessary to import almost everything needed for a comfortable life." Further on Fuentes labels the "sultanic despotism" of resident foreigners, who sense no "social obligations" to Peru, save their "own interests," depriving locals in city contracts and commercial speculations.^[23] Such misgivings about overseas influence seem in line with studies of Fuentes's more literary works, which reveal a profound criollo ambivalence about rising foreign cultural sway and protonationalist middle-class morals—drawn to show that Peruvians can and should advance on their own.

Similar motifs sound throughout Fuentes's later publications of the 1860s—amounting to a drawn-out critique of social ills of Peru's liberal-

[22] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 699, 720-23.

[23] Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, 665-66, "Industria mercantil," 705-15; Watson, Cuadro de costumbres, 127-28, 134, for literary analysis of criollo nationalism.

ism of excess. With his scientistic realism Fuentes remains closely attuned to the condition of artisans, their new mutual aid societies, their modest productive advances and their plight with overseas competition, as illustrated, for example, throughout his 1860 Guía histórico-descriptiva administrativa, judicial y de domicilios de Lima . In fact, Fuentes was involved, if marginally, with artisan causes. As early as 1850 he published a report on elections (during the guilds' last meaningful mobilizations) critical of exclusion and exploitation of popular—that is, darkskinned—electors; in 1858, in the aftermath of the artisan riots, his signature graced the guilds' protectionist petition to congress.^[24] The Aletazos del murciélago brims with uncompromising barbs of venal high politics, particularly manipulation of the masses, and many a challenge to liberal icons, albeit conservatively inspired. For example, liberal writers from José Simeón Tejeda (1852) to Silva Santisteban (1859) customarily attacked guild pleas for tariff protection by denouncing in turn guild monopoly and privileges. This was a disingenuous posture since by 1850 guild market restrictions existed only on paper at best. In raising "freedom of industry" as the most hallowed slogan of Peruvian laissez-faire, liberals could blame artisans for their own plight.^[25] Fuentes turns empty slogans and liberal-protectionist polemics on their head, for example, in the satirical verse "La libertad de industria":

Poor Industry! In Peru there is no industry
And why are there no industriosos ?
Because we lack industriosos
     And furthermore why not?
'Cause the government doesn't protect it.^[26]

Fuentes was by no means a romantic, unlettered, or even consistent antiliberal. His knowledge and translations of, and his devotion to, Continental political economy bear this out. He was, for example, an architect of Peru's modernizing commercial codes; his 1877 school text, Catecismo de economía política, is based on the thought of Jean Gustave

[24] Fuentes, Guía histórico-descriptiva, ch. 3, "Artesanos y obreros," passim; M. A. Fuentes, Relación sucinta de los principales hechos ocurridos en algunos pueblos del Perú, con motivo de la ingerencia de los funcionarios políticos en la renovación de los colegios electorales (Lima, pam., 1850); Artesanos, 2: guilds (and their opponents of 1859) already refer to Fuentes for vital statistics.

[25] José Simeón Tejeda, Emancipación de la industria (Arequipa, pam., 1852); Silva Santisteban, Breves reflexiones sobre los sucesos con la importación, 11, 21-25 (from Fuentes figures); for analysis of "freedom of industry," see Gootenberg, "Guilty Guilds?"

[26] Fuentes, Aletazos del murciélago 1:160.

Courcelle-Senueil, one of the most radical French free-traders of the century (and the region's earliest maligned "foreign adviser"). His was to Fuentes "a science that, today more than ever, should be propagated in Peru." Yet in 1879, amid the full-blown export crisis, Fuentes, in his survey Movimiento de la poblacion, could suggest a concerted state job-creation program to head off urban unrest, a conclusion verging on the most interventionist critiques of the time.^[27] In short, Fuentes, fully cognizant of liberal imperatives, developed and spread a studied ambivalence to theoretical systems from a firsthand feel for their consequences. Not just widely consumed, Fuentes was literally the social constructor of Limeño reality.

Don Manuel Pardo: Railroads to Industry

If Fuentes seems a mere intellectual skeptic with no personal following, the same could never be said about Don Manuel Pardo (or Luis Benjamín Cisneros, to follow). Pardo was the most active, influential, and frequently cited figure of Peru's emerging 1860s civil elite. If Fuentes divulged the real Lima, Pardo revealed a greater Peru—an imagined patria to be consummated by railways, markets, and industries.

The career and legacy of Manuel Pardo y Lavalle are well known.^[28] Born in 1834 into a venerable political and literary family, Europeanbred Pardo epitomized Peru's new self-made millionaires of the 1860s in his personal transmutation from youthful aristocrat to capitalist spirit. Rapidly rising as an importer and financier (founder of the 1862 Banco del Perú and pioneer of commercial insurance in La Paternal), Pardo soon became the nation's pivotal native guano merchant. As the assertive

[27] Manuel Fuentes, Catecismo de economía política (Lima, 1877), intro.: state had ordered economics taught even in all grade schools; cf. disciple Masías, Curso de economía (1860); Fuentes, Movimiento de la poblacion, prologue. Albert O. Hirschman, "A Prototypical Economic Adviser: Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil," in Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society and Other Recent Essays (New York, 1986), 183-86; see "Sociedad de economía política," Comercio, 16 May, 14 June 1856—where Peruvian policies debated by these radical Parisian economists.

[28] For extensive (procivilist) biographies, see, e.g., Jacinto López, Manuel Pardo (Lima, 1947), containing Pardo's major writings; Evaristo San Cristóval, Manuel Pardo y Lavalle: Su vida y su obra (Lima, 1945); Alejandro Revoredo, "La obra nacionalista y democrática del partido civil," in Centenario de Manuel Pardo, 1834-1934 (Lima, 1931), 79-127.

president of the National Company of Guano in the 1860s, Pardo organized the "hijos del país" network that supplanted foreign contractors in 1862 and underwrote the treasury over the next decade. Needless to say, the Pardos represented one of the country's wealthiest and wideranging economic clans. Of greater import, Pardo blazed the bourgeois trail of translating Peru's elite interests into political action.^[29] An eclectic thinker and prolific writer, Pardo helped found the seminal 1860-1862 Revista de Lima; from there he served as both guiding light and moving force that in the next decade carried into power the nation's plutocracy as embodied in the Partido Civil, the liberal civilian party that would shape modern Peru over the next half century. In this regard, Pardo exemplified the "new generation" liberals of the 1860s, reacting against the Castillan caudillos' perceived spoliation of Peru's export riches in transfers, debt, and militarism—even though these strongmen had arguably raised Pardo's business class in the first place.

By the mid 1860s Pardo had taken his place as the country's outstanding political figure. In 1866, with other celebrated national liberals, he jumped into heady collaboration with the short-lived Prado reform dictatorship. As its energetic finance minister, Pardo launched the "guano into railroads" scheme and other reforms originally spelled out in the Revista de Lima —before resigning in disgust at congressional blocks to his (and Cisneros's) attempted fiscal overhaul. In the late 1860s Pardo took charge of revitalizing Lima's highbrow paternal welfare agency, the Beneficencia Pública de Lima, and instituting deeper approaches to the city's seething distress, such as popular education and housing drives. From 1869 to 1872 Pardo served as Lima's immensely popular mayor, approaching the new ferment of working classes as an opportunity to widen his network and concerns. All the while he threw himself into organizing his civil business allies against the Balta-Piérola military regime—which in 1869, under Finance Minister Nicolás de Piérola, had traded in national guano contracts (controlled by men like Pardo) for the overseas management and finance of Dreyfus.

After building from scratch Peru's first modern political party and launching an unheard-of nationwide campaign, Pardo's Partido Civil sailed to victory in 1872. With the aid of informal people's militias Pardo put down a bloody, last-minute coup attempt, becoming Peru's first civilian president. Lima's liberal elites had at last assumed power, with

[29] Basadre, Historia, vol. 5, esp. 2167-70; and MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," the most recent and sophisticated (intellectual-political) biography.

Manuel Pardo their reformist spokesman and symbol. Over the next four years the party moved to implement its program for bolstering civilian institutions, rationalizing the state, educating the masses, and decentralizing administration—all part of the attempt to construct the envisaged civic culture of Pardo's "practical republic." These were trying times for anyone in power, given relentless military and conservative roadblocks to reform and the unrelenting crisis of guano. In the late 1870s Pardo returned to politics as senate chief in a personal effort to heal the country's then-shattering conflicts. In 1878 an assassin's bullet elevated Pardo into the eternal martyr of Peruvian liberalism.^[30]

As the object of hagiographic coverage since then, Pardo's career and achievements, though not his moving ideas, are well documented. The new generation of structural and dependency historians of Peru, if fixed on outcomes more than ideas, has provided critical correctives. Pardo, still towering as the century's decisive figure, stands out as the "organic intellectual" of the nascent ruling class. His, their, project was a Peruvian desarrollo hacia afuera , articulated in the name of a modernizing coastal elite. Pardo's hallmark contribution was his conception of the railroads, which would be thrown across the Andes in response to the impending exhaustion of guano and would bring into play a new generation of marketable exports from the interior. However, Pardo emerges as a deeply flawed architect of bourgeois Peru. When addressing the country's ills, he misread its fundamental social realities and pressing alternatives, national integration, diversification, mobilization among them. Pardo's "deep liberalism expounded in the Revista de Lima " remained a superficial, and thus doomed, neocolonial mentality and solution. The collapse brought on by Pardo's railway mania sealed Peru's fate in the nineteenth century.^[31] More recent studies, turning inward to intellectual culture, capture civilist ideology as a "traditional modernism": a genuine attempt at nation making, it was nevertheless confined by traditional top-down structures of domination. For example, the latest intellectual

[30] See, e.g., López, Pardo ; or prompt hagiography in Andrés A. Aramburú, El asesinato de Manuel Pardo, presidente del senado (Lima, pam., 1878).

[31] A version of Pardo found in every history since 1970: see Bonilla, Guano y burguesía , esp. 54-63 (quotes and analysis); Macera, "Historia económica como ciencia," 35-37; Cotler, Clases, estado y nación , 100-108; Yepes, Perú 1820-1920 , 80-96 (quote, 105); Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión , ch. 2; Hugo Garavito Amézaga, El Perú liberal: Partidos e ideas de la ilustración a la república aristocrática (Lima, 1989), pt. 3; Chavarría, "Desaparación del Perú colonial," 125-28. Modified versions in Tantaleán, Política económico-financiera , 228-29, a theorized civilist "nationalist project"; Amayo, Política británica ; and Bollinger, "Bourgeois Revolution," 32-33, as truer bourgeois movement.

and political biography of Pardo finds subtlety in his evolving civic philosophy and praxis—his lucid notions of modernized state capacities—though that philosophy fell short of true modernism in its anti-industrial economic slant.^[32]

The origins of Pardo's economic thinking remain open to debate. Not only was Pardo the first Peruvian executive trained in political economy, but he also absorbed manifold perspectives. Scion of the prominent conservative thinker Felipe Pardo y Aliaga, the young Pardo attended a Chilean commercial academy and later studied in Lima's San Carlos Academy (with Bartolomé Herrera, Peru's zealous Hispanic conservative); he then undertook advanced work in Spain and tackled formal political economy at the Collège de France (under the radical liberal Michel Chevalier, heir to both the Say and Saint-Simon schools). He returned to Peru during the heady free-trader days at the advent of the guano age. Older biographers point out activist tendencies in Pardo's thinking and work (as one might expect with Hispanic and Saint-Simonian influences).^[33] Recent historians underline the sway of Chevalier and Continental laissez-faire, their importance gleaned from Pardo's mid-1860s campaign to ensure noninterventionist banking legislation (for banks in which Pardo held a healthy stake); from stated antipathy to state monopolies; and from antiprotectionist slogans as minister of finance. The railroad projects themselves speak to his export orientation.^[34] But alone this seems patchy evidence. For example, in countries such as Peru, compelling reasons existed to embrace liberal banking (well-founded fears of capricious state intervention); as president, Pardo himself led the regulation of the banks (over the protests of his financial peers) and introduced national monopolies, as in the nitrates nationalization of 1875. Pardo's conservative political rivals of the 1870s, the Piérolists, wielded in opposition a far purer form of classical laissez-faire—branding civilista policies dangerously statist and protectionist.^[35]

[32] Trazegnies, Idea de derecho ; MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," esp. conclusions, 250-52—revisionism excelling in political ideas (and less focused on railways). Renewed interest likely reflects civic culture concerns among today's Peruvian intellectuals.

[33] For example, Pike, Modern History , ch. 5; Reinaga, Pensamiento económico , ch. 3, on Saint-Simonian edge; MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," ch. 1, for range of influences.

[34] Views gleaned mainly from Camprubí, Historia de bancos , 21, 30, esp. ch. 2, "La absoluta libertad bancaria"; e.g., used in Yepes, Perú 1820-1920 (105-6), and others cited in n. 31, above. Reinaga, Pensamiento económico , ch. 3, titled "Manuel Pardo: Un neoliberal del siglo xix"; Romero, "Perú," 306-8, favors as "mestizo liberal."

[35] See Quiroz, Domestic and Foreign Finance , ch. 2, for finance revisionism; Alberto Ulloa, Don Nicolás de Piérola: Una época en la historia del Perú (Lima, 1949), a serious biographical study on opposition thinking.

But most important, we have just a foggy sense of Pardo's long-range vision of development.

In June 1860 a circle of aspiring young writers, businessmen, and politicians founded La Revista de Lima —now regarded as the seminal policy organ of the nineteenth century. Lasting three years, the journal appeared in the aftermath of the city's artisan riots and amid a gathering storm of liberal disillusion with Castilla's heavy-handed treatment of the 1857 and 1859 congresses. Troubling regional and political unrest were resurfacing, as were signs that Peru's heavy reliance on guano revenues (and related debt and trade imbalances) had entered a newly perilous stage, soon confirmed by the government financiers of the early 1860s. Elite political worries, especially distrust of the military, was revealed by the scholarship that first recovered the ideological role of the Revista de Lima .^[36]

Deeper meanings ascribed to the Revista de Lima vary. Some historians grasp the groups' reformist outlook on guano as cloaking export-class greed, part of coeval native merchant campaigns to nationalize the trade and of their growing operations in public finance. Others read the group discourse as that of Peru's new coastal capitalist elite, defining themselves in a deeper ideological contest with Peru's precapitalist landlords of the interior—a position exemplified in the journal's literary indigenismo. Some perceive a straightforward "generational" shift at work—a change of guard from Peru's aging theoretical liberals so traumatized by caudillo instability. Younger liberals strove for a durable civil order in Peru, based on a thoroughgoing civilian rationalization of the state.^[37] Such orienting notions of class and political culture can be placed in tangible social contexts. The writers of the Revista de Lima lived amid the shifting social malaise of Lima—the early 1860s urban scene driven home by Fuentes, a noteworthy contributor. Furthermore, shriller voices had just broken out on the political scene—the Zamacueca Política iconoclasts (explored below)—firing direct assaults on guano and plutocratic complacence. The Revista de Lima appears as a timely class organ, but a moderating one responding to these omnipresent Limeño tensions.

Many essays in the Revista de Lima indeed appear to be the work of an aspiring managerial elite, hoping to cool ideological passions and polar-

[36] Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," chs. 3-5.

[37] Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age" (generational reform); Bonilla, Guano y burguesía (comprador elite); Kristal, Andes from the City , ch. 2, "The Export Oligarchy" blends in original analysis of Revista de Lima writings on Indians.

izations with effective reform. The inaugural issue boldly announces their pragmatic and eclectic approach: "The Revista de Lima is not a periodical with a flag or a system; nor is it conservative, liberal, romantic, positivist, protectionist, or abolitionist."^[38] What was it, then? The majority of its writings were poems, stories, and novellas with little overt (but much hidden) political content; it was the starting place for outstanding artists such as Ricardo Palma, José Arnaldo Márquez, Luciano Cisneros, and the feminist Juana Manuela Gorriti. There were also clearly enunciated political messages by would-be políticos such as Espinoza, Laso, Luis Cisneros, Noboa, Pacheco, Lorente—and Manuel Pardo. In contrast, the journal published many a numbing technical report on this or that economic proposal. A cultivated readership also caught up on the world's latest social trends in, for example, an essay on positivism or a favorable series on "feminism" by the reputably stodgy Fuentes.^[39] Travelogues—geographic and literary excursions into the uncharted territory, and possibilities, of Peru—were also popular feature articles, reminiscent of the salon scientific and cultural genre of the late-colonial Mercurio peruano . Antonio Raimondi's reportage on Amazonia was first savored here.

Lead policy articles stuck to the announced independent political stance. President Castilla, the father of the plutocracy, is roundly scolded for ignoring the "social question" as well as fundamentals of democracy. Other writers vaunt popular education, for "the school is a great workshop"—a theme of coming resonance. A June 1860 series entitled "Foreigners" tackles diplomatic accusations that Peru was not doing enough to protect and advance foreign property. On the contrary, argues the anonymous author, Peru has afforded every privilege imaginable to Europeans, even at the expense of "indigenous industry." The country was literally inundated with foreign trinkets—"from our hats to shoes, and from the mirrors and gilded furniture of the salon, to the pots and pans of the kitchen." Foreigners had claimed all the benefits of Peru's liberality.^[40] This old refrain in artisan discourse here stands as an indict-

[38] La Revista de Lima , no. 1 (15 June 1860).

[39] Kristal, Andes from the City for literary-social role; the Revista de Lima linked to the later journals of Palma, Ulloa, Pérez, and Gorriti, esp. the 1870s Correo del Perú . Fuentes in vol. 4 (1861); Pardo left an important (economic) travelogue, "El partido de Saña, o Lambayeque, en el siglo pasado," Revista de Lima 2 (1860).

[40] "Extranjeros," Revista de Lima , 15 June 1860; cf. Luis B. Cisneros, "El Perú en el aniversario de su independencia" 2 (July 1860); Tomás Dávila, "Instrucción primaria," 2 (1860).

ment of Peru as a plutocratic, consuming household. The same year, Luis Benjamín Cisneros (not so pleasing a poet as his brother) proffers nationalist verse excoriating the "egotistic pamphleteers selling us Europe." An 1860 analysis of guano commercialization was among the more interesting of such surveys. The author, the liberal journalist and pioneer medical figure J. C. Ulloa, was soon accused of rojo tendencies and later became an anticivilist critic with his free-trader daily, La Patria . Ulloa proposed the most nationalist solution of all: direct state administration abroad, a rejection of all foreign consignees that would conserve "two millions annually." In a later piece Ulloa warns of the impending "Anglo-Saxon invasion and conquest of Latin America"; the United States, with its incorrigible "contempt for the raza latina " and its Monroe Doctrine, was particularly dangerous.^[41] In short, motley opinions were heard by what were no doubt equally diverse and curious Limeño audiences.

The most decisive—and currently noted—proposal from the Revista de Lima was surely Manuel Pardo's 1860 series "Estudios sobre la Provincia de Jauja," swiftly republished in a sixty-six-page booklet.^[42] It was one of six economic essays that Pardo, at the ripe age of twenty-five, contributed to the journal. Estudios sobre Jauja won immediate acclaim as the first formalized warning that Peru's guano wealth might lead into national catastrophe. Pardo demanded resolute action to employ the country's remaining deposits productively, to reverse the wasteful expenditures of the past, and to avert Peru's impending crisis of export depletion. The 1860s thus opened in Peru with a new and many-sided watchword, "productivity." Pardo's crucial policy reform—the productive transformation of guano into trans-Andean railroads—followed from his detailed analysis of the possible impact of modern communications on the sleepy valley of Jauja, in the central highlands. How was Pardo to convince his readers, the policymakers, his class?

Few of his readers should have taken Estudios sobre Jauja as a clarion call for further export bonanzas. Pardo's proposal here is, in fact, a

[41] J. C. Ulloa, "Huano (o examen comparativo entre los diversos sistemas ensayado o propuestos para la administración del huano)," Revista de Lima 2 (1860): 773-90; Ulloa, "La Reconquista" 4 (1861): 9. Basadre, Historia , vol. 3, for Ulloa's maverick (nationalist) activities; Ulloa earlier authored El Perú en 1853: Un año de su historia contemporánea (Paris, pam., 1854), a scathing antifeudal attack on Echenique—based on Proudhon.

[42] Revista de Lima 1 (June-July 1860); Manuel Pardo, Estudios sobre la provincia de Jauja (Lima, 1862); rpt. in López, Pardo , 211-72.

measured and cogent scheme for enhancing the productive diversity of Peru's potential regional and domestic markets. It includes a surprising and detailed project of import substitution, as part and parcel of Peru's productive revolution.^[43] Three influences or themes stand out, none of which falls into the binaries of export/national development or laissez-faire/interventionist thought.

First, though Pardo's scheme is reminiscent of Casanova's (unnoted) diversification ideals, a key difference emerges too. Pardo shifts concern away from the productive potential of Lima, where factories faltered amid the capital's Europeanized consumption elite. The alternative, which assumes clarity in the work of subsequent writers, is a pristine national countryside brimming with productive possibilities. An imagined economic decentralism preceded the civilist political decentralism of the next decade. Second, Pardo relies on no standard European theorists in his developmentalism, referring perfunctorily only to his own French mentor, whose touted models are roundly ignored. Apart from a new positivist tinge, the unspoken influence appears to be the utopian Saint-Simon—in his indictment of idle consumption, obsession with productive "work," and forms of people's industrialism.^[44] But in the main, local dilemmas, economic history, and specific country cases (especially an undreaded United States) guide Pardo's thinking.

If Casanova kept his own experience in mind, Pardo's model was likely new experiments in rural manufacturing. In 1859 the venerable Cuzqueño landowner, merchant, and prefect Francisco Garmendia revived the long-defunct Lucre obraje as a modern woolens factory; his tortuous haul of imported machinery over the Andes became a legend in its time and spotlighted again the obstacles posed by Peru's primitive transport. In 1862 another hacendado , Jacinto Terry, performed a similar feat in the northern mountains of Ancash, after the recipe offered by Pardo. (Neither man was a country bumpkin; after Garmendia's successful manufacturing venture, for example, he reappeared in Lima as Pardo's 1872 civilista vice president!)^[45] In Estudios sobre Jauja Pardo

[43] Curiously overlooked in writers citing Estudios sobre Jauja , who depend on Maiguashca's 1967 "Reinterpretation of Guano Age"—focused on guano and finance reform (pp. 100-104 briefly cover Pardo's hopes for "domestic" economy).

[44] Chevalier merits one introductory mention—for activist posture towards "vías de comunicación"; see Hale, Transformation of Liberalism , ch. 2, for Saint-Simon influence on Mexican científicos' "fomento."

[45] Basadre, Historia 3:1293-95, for rich (family history) account of Garmendia efforts; or obituary in La Patria (Lima), 20 Mar. 1873.

championed similar developmentalist efforts for Junín, predicated on the spread of modern communications. But the background experiences remained the flawed one of Limeño protectionism and an equally flawed official liberalism of the 1860s—which would admit no form of diversification in Peru.

Pardo opens his Estudios sobre Jauja in a famous definition of Peru's national dilemma. Over the past fifteen years guano had provided the country some $150 million of revenues, but that wealth was "already lost" to development: "The honor of Peru has so very little to report." Pardo reviews for readers Peru's mounting difficulties in public debt finance, unmanageable import burdens (now over $20 million annually), and the specter of rapidly depleting guano reserves. Peru's entire wobbly edifice rests on guano. The central theme appears: "Peru is consuming far more than it can naturally produce"—a theme that was soon to be a cliché of the 1860s guano-reform movement.^[46] But Pardo departs in fundamentals from countless calls of the 1850s for revamping the ways of guano trade and finance, plans for squeezing just a little more out for Peru's state. The deeper issue is Peru's need to "produce." Threats of "bankruptcy," Pardo forewarns, are no longer "metaphor." Peru now has left perhaps ten or twelve years of prime guano deposits. But if guano were used correctly, genuine, lasting, and transforming productive benefits can register. The chief use and stimulus must be national railroads.

One of myriad lines already under consideration in 1860 was to highland Jauja. Adjoining the old central Cerro de Pasco silver mining district, the export epicenter of late-colonial Peru, the Mantaro region now stood isolated from both capital and coast. Pardo had studied the province firsthand in the mid 1850s, when doctors sent him there for his asthma. (He was accompanied by his old teacher, Herrera. The attachment was lasting: in the late 1870s Pardo would be the region's man in the senate.) Junín was a temperate and diverse zone, rich in natural

[46] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 4-5, 41-44; see Mathew, Gibbs and the Guano Monopoly , ch. 4, and Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," ch. 3, on guano reform movement; Ulloa's 1860 "Huano" was far out in left field. For Pardo's fundamental departure from mainstream ideas of time, compare, e.g., with Carlos Barroilhet, Ojeada sobre la crisis política y financiera del Perú (Paris, pam., 1859). "Peru consumes more than it produces, and without doubt the prolongation of this state will lead in a direct line to a disaster. Reducing consumption and augmenting production—those would be, for any other country, the only adequate measures to prevent the catastrophe" (14). But Barroilhet assures readers that Peru is "exceptional" because of its "incomparable guano riches" and thus need only reform consignment systems.

resources, though mining had decreased markedly since the advent of guano. Jauja's outstanding social feature (which Pardo clearly grasped) was a wide dispersal of small property. Instead of a typical Andean latifundia or Indian zone, Pardo settled on a society in which deep-rooted and resistant mestizos (and scattered native communities) dominated farming, herding, and overland commerce.^[47] The choice was not coincidental. To Pardo, Jauja had clearly demonstrated a natural entrepreneurial style, for example, in the rapid rebound of wool estates after every civil commotion. Furthermore, given the region's strategic location above and adjacent to the capital, Jauja was of military importance as a center for staging and harboring revolts during the course of the caudillo era.

How would effective connections with Lima help the region and the nation? "If the locomotive, in other countries, facilitates production and commerce, in ours its mission is much higher: to create what today does not exist; to fertilize and give life to the elements of wealth, that today lie in an embryonic, latent state."^[48] Though posed in vague and very general terms, this recipe for building ahead of demand takes graphic form. Pardo proves both more and less the dreamer usually portrayed.

To be sure, communications might galvanize the region's wool and precious metals, but traditional provincial exports actually get slighted in the essay. First of all, Pardo emphasized potential "foodstuffs for the consumption of Lima." He hardly needed to remind readers of the "alarming problem" of food shortages in the capital: the inflation and subsistence crisis had just been dramatized by destitute artisans in the 1858 riots (and later by Mayor Pardo, the activist head of a late 1860s commission on urban prices). But price inflation was more than a spark to worrying unrest: taking off with the guano boom, it was aggravating Peru's unsteady trade balances as well, cheapening imports relative to national agriculture.^[49] Pardo emphatically opposes the costly public

[47] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 14-24; Pardo's interest in smallholders also clear in "Inmigración vascongada," Revista de Lima 1 (July 1860): 101-8—against coastal planter coolie trade, in favor of Basque colonization (who share the "amor al trabajo" of Anglo-Saxons). See MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," 187-94, for less sympathetic attitudes to Indian. For now well-studied Mantaro society, see Mallon, Defense of Community , pt. 1; Nelson Manrique, Mercado y región , using Pardo; or Carlos Contreras, Mineros y campesinos en los Andes: Mercado laboral y economía campesina en la sierra central, siglo xix (Lima, 1987).

[48] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 24; cf. Bonilla, Guano y burguesía , 57-65.

[49] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 26-27. [M. Pardo], Lima, Consejo Provincial, Datos e informes sobre las causas que han producido el alza de precios de los artículos de primera necesidad que se consumen en la capital (Lima, 1869); for inflation shortages and impact, see Gootenberg, "Price Levels in Peru," or Vincent Peloso, "Succulence and Sustenance: Region, Class, and Diet in Nineteenth-Century Peru," in J. Super and T. Wright, eds. Food, Politics, and Society in Latin America , (Lincoln, 1985), 46-64.

recourse to duty-free subsistence imports—a favorite populist ploy of 1850s free-traders—which he would later oppose again as finance minister. Why, he insists, does Peru import 300,000 fanegas of Chilean wheat when with reduced transport costs, fertile regions such as Jauja could supply consumers their grains, cattle, sugar, and salt with "magnificent" national savings? Agriculture, then as now, was a major element of Pardo's productive and integrative import substitution.

In this emphasis, Estudios sobre Jauja also echoes timeworn polemics of aristocratic agrarian protectionists of the early republic. However, Pardo's plan differs from past agrarian nationalisms both in its context and in the class of potential farmers that it imagines.^[50] By 1860 Peru's recuperating coastal planters (including Pardo's family in Lambayeque) were turning decisively to overseas sugar and cotton exports, plowing under their former fields of rice, wheat, and beans. For the most part, they were also turning into a potent oligarchic free-trader interest—the backbone, in most views, of the civilist rise itself. But here Pardo lauded the agrarian promise and home markets of predominantly peasant-farmer producers of the sierra. In 1867 Pardo would boldly challenge planter export "interests" in his ministerial fiscal package. Such autonomy of interest marked the reveries of many of Peru's urban thinkers.

What else could efficient internal transport trim from Peru's precarious import bill? Coal. Fossil fuel had recently become an essential new input for machinery and even home heating. By the 1860s galloping urban demand had denuded Peru's traditionally exploited coastal woodlands. Given freight costs from Newcastle, coal imports were already a pressing burden on the balance of payments, approaching $2 million annually. With railroads on line, coal imports were bound to skyrocket. But Pardo's technological revolution was designed above all to be an exchange-saving one. Pardo probably drew on the coal development studies of Mariano de Rivero—the republic's premier mining engineer (and the Junín prefect during Pardo's sojourn)—who, in vari-

[50] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 26-27; M. Pardo, "Memoria que el ex-secretario de estado en despacho de hacienda y comercio presenta al jefe supremo provisorio de la república" (1867), López, Pardo , 363. On early agrarian protectionists, see Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano , ch. 3, or Ledos and Rivero tracts cited above; Juan Rolf Engelsen, "Social Aspects of Agricultural Expansion in Coastal Peru, 1825-1878" (Ph.D. diss., UCLA, 1977), chs. 3-5, 7, on rising exporters, including Pardos (423).

ous surveys published during the mid 1850s, vaunted exploitation of central highlands deposits.^[51]

The Estudios sobre Jauja hardly stops at primary products. Pardo turns next to a discussion of Peru's nascent wool trades: the briskly growing business of shipping sierran wools to England in return for industrial woolens. In the four decades since independence alert Peruvians had grasped how this trade had finished off Peru's colonial obrajes and country weavers and must have sensed the dominance of textile imports (some 70 percent) in Peruvian foreign trade.^[52] Pardo refuses to endorse expanding fiber exports to close the gap. Instead, he implores Jauja, via railways, to reverse the export-import trend:

What? That a factory of coarse cloth for the consumption of the people cannot be established in a province that possesses the primary materials, that has the workers, where wages are so cheap, where there are all sorts of dyes? And above all, the region is protected from foreign competition not by high customs duties, but by another protection, which nature puts on everything this province wants to import. Can we hope for more favorable conditions for the establishment of any industry? But what do these conditions serve, when the transport of raw material for a great factory—supplying some forty leagues of Peru—costs double the value of the material. Can it then be done? Make roads and all will grow from the soil; without them, all efforts are useless!^[53]

Pardo's profound Peru was not "naturally" unsuited to industry. His precocious (if muddled) application of the modern concept of "natural protection" turned liberal slogans on their head. Now the interior, so remote from competitive markets, appears naturally amenable to manufacturing.

From one angle, Pardo was seemingly evading tired protectionist—free-trader polemics. Tariffs, ever controversial in Peru, merit only passing mention as a "sad deception for promoting manufactures." Speaking

[51] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 28-29, 59; Mariano Eduardo de Rivero, "Minas de carbón de piedra del Perú" (1855) in Rivero, Colección de memorias científicas, agrícolas e industriales publicadas en distintas épocas , 2 vols. (Brussels, 1857) 2:211-17 (with substitution idea); and "Apuntes histórico-estadísticos sobre el departamento peruano de Junín en los años que lo administró como prefecto" (1855), 186-210.

[52] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 30; cf. export-favoring M. E. de Rivero, "Memoria sobre las lanas del Perú" (1855), in Rivero, Colección de memorias científicas e industriales 2:240-58; Rivero, e.g., discusses vanishing colonial "telares employing thousands" (243). Heraclio Bonilla, "La expansión comercial británica en el Perú," Revista del Museo Nacional 40 (1974): table 3, for textile import shares.

[53] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 30.

to urban coastal elites, Pardo believed in neither their workability nor their political advantage. As finance minister in 1867 Pardo dubs tariffs the "mistaken protectionist idea"—albeit in an ironic (and misunderstood) passage ridiculing planter fiscal resistance—all in the name of "protecting national agriculture."^[54] Others, notably Cisneros, would directly readdress the bogey of state protection. But Pardo's overoptimistic thinking is indicated by his notion of "productivity" advancing so "naturally"—in a sort of bucolic vent-for-surplus—demanding few of the sacrifices or trade-offs needed in large-scale and long-term investments. This was a utopian strain in much Peruvian thinking to come, though Pardo the civilist corrected himself with his later dedication to educational—that is, gradual human capital—investments.

From another angle, Pardo was right to pinpoint dismal transport as the prime obstacle to the start-up and productivity of all highlands enterprise—including his envisioned factories. Peru suffers the most fissiparous geography of all American states; transport costs had soared with the severe dislocation of national muleteer communications in the postindependence years, in part as mules (but less so llamas) became a coveted prize of military bands. Whole internal exchange networks vanished, withdrawing from monetary society, becoming, in a word, "Indian." In complex senses, deteriorating communications melded with larger issues of Andean "feudalism," though not always in the ways imagined by city liberals, indigenistas, or historians.^[55]

To economists, lower transport costs (and, closely related, reduced transaction costs) would make a most efficient means to foster growth in such an economy and would work more directly than tariffs or even monetary subsidies would. This, for example, is what happened in

[54] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 41; Pardo, "Memoria de hacienda y comercio" (1867), in López, Pardo , 350-51, 363; readers can judge Pardo's irony here: "Las ideas proteccionistas probado con este motivo [sugar tax resistance] que tiene raíces profundas aun en las inteligencias más claras y más familiarizadas con los sanos principios de la ciencia" (350).

W. A. Lewis, of course, hailed the modern (allegedly costless) theory of industrialization by "unlimited supplies" of rural labor; however, Pardo does not discuss labor markets enough to warrant this interpretation. On Pardo's later educational drive, see David Cornejo Foronda, Don Manuel Pardo y la educación nacional (Lima, 1953).

[55] On extant transport sector, see Nelson Manrique, "Los arrieros de la sierra central durante el siglo xix," Allpanchis 18 (1983): 27-46 (and adjacent studies by Urrutia and Valderrama and Escalante). Gootenberg, "Population and Ethnicity," 141-52, for social conceptions of indigenous feudalism. I am taking issue here with Bonilla, Guano y burguesía , 151-53 (notion of constricted "internal market"), which does not truly explain why railroads were a misplaced priority for market widening.

comparable Mexican industries with the coming of railroads, when factories fared better with wider national markets than had their heavily protected counterparts of an earlier era.^[56] Throughout this essay Pardo pushes for a more integrated national economy, with wider markets that contrast with but do not clash with the country's dominant export economy. The shift of scene to Peru's rural sector—in the narrow cost sense more promising than inflationary Lima for development—also attests to the emerging national outlook. Inspiration for railway mania, at least in Pardo's canonical text, seems both rational and national.

The depth of Pardo's manufacturing proposal becomes evident in his critical rundown of prospective rural industries. Pardo explains that "what is happening in the Peruvian interior with wools will happen with all our primary materials when exported. But most of them can be put to use there in manufacture, for which there is no lack of elements."^[57] Besides revealing those "elements" denied by free-traders, Estudios sobre Jauja reflects Peru's previous frustrations with attempted diversification. Pardo preaches that Peru should not hope for "huge factories" devoted to making such luxuries as fine cloth, silks, porcelain, or glass. Instead, with

cheaper wages and foodstuffs, primary materials, ready coals and better yet—powerful waterfalls—why can't Peru establish factories for coarse cloth, rough cottons, and linens, or those for ordinary pottery, for leather goods, and a host of potassium and chemical products. In contrast, these are the industries within reach of the secondary classes, and those that best advance the welfare of the people and progress of the nation.^[58]

Pardo goes on to criticize the classic (and revenue-eating) French models of luxury workshop promotion. Colbert, long the protectionist idol in Peru, was out—though Pardo, among others, still found much to admire in the broader French activist state of his times.^[59]

[56] See John H. Coatsworth, "Obstacles to Economic Growth in Nineteenth-Century Mexico," American Historical Review 83 (1978): 91-92; and Haber, "Obstacles to Industrialization."

[57] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 31.

[58] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 31.

[59] See, e.g., preference for French developmental activism in M. Pardo, "El crédito hipotecario en Francia y Chile en 1859 y 1860," in López, Pardo , 312-18 (Revista de Lima , 1861) and "Inmigración vascongada" (1860), which praises French agrarian promotion in railways, irrigation, and mortgage banks in support of private accumulation: "The Peruvian state is the richest operating in the world—yet we still complain we lack private capital."

In part, Pardo's realistic assessment of appropriate industries seems inspired by the fate of Lima's luxury craft guilds, which, despite decades of promotion after 1821, had made little headway. As Casanova had before, Pardo envisaged Peru's prospects in simpler mass markets, those easiest to master in technique and those (apart from the highly visible elite trinkets) that could actually reduce Peru's worrisome import bill. For such an eminent figure, Pardo's developmental vision was eminently small-scale and "popular"—by and for those "secondary classes." It exudes the spirit of Saint-Simonian industrial trabajo . The best investments, Pardo contends, are those that

spawn modest dividends for their owners and contribute modestly to the welfare of the populations that sustain them. The city of Cincinnati, erected only yesterday in a wilderness, has achieved with its leatherworks, slaughterhouses, crude furniture factories, and its eight-piece wooden clocks such prosperity and growth that it is now the western capital of the United States—if not the leading manufacturing capital of the Union.^[60]

Here one finds—much as in Casanova—the blatantly imitative model: the incremental, decentralized, and popular industrialization of what Pardo playfully calls "l'enfant colosse." Pardo's exemplar verifies an intellectual trend among Peruvian writers of the 1860s—disillusionment with long-admired Continental models (whether statist or liberal), which are being superseded by the "barbarous" example of North American frontier development.^[61] It makes sense, too, for the formerly colonial United States represented the world's premier newly industrializing nation. Yet few writers, Pardo included, grasped essential differences with their internally "discovered" frontiers: Peru was a nation of entrenched Andean peasant populations, who, until the 1880s, remained unimaginable as an element of progress.

Still another inspiration stems from Pardo's reading of Peruvian economic history—his resuscitation of the Spanish colonial regime as a model of benign and balanced intervention. This reading was probably a tradition continued by civilist state builders of the 1870s. Pardo's fascination with the viceregal state rings clearest in a concurrent regional

[60] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja, 32.

[61] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja, 33, 45. Britain, by contrast, was rarely a development model for Peruvian writers (except in tariff debates, that is in the actions of Peel and Huskinson). Beyond language barriers, Britain may have seemed too interested a status quo party in Peruvian eyes. See discussion of imperialism in Copello and Petriconi and in Esteves, below.

foray of the Revista de Lima, his 1860 essay "El partido de Saña o Lambayeque en el siglo pasado"—a pioneering stab at Peruvian economic history and surely the first to deploy "modern statistics."^[62] This northern coastal plain, home to Pardo's own budding sugar plantation, felt the stirrings of commercial revival after 1850. In Pardo's search for the coast's prior development, historical diversity and promotion policies merit special attention.

Pardo laments, as all liberals reflexively did, Spain's harmful monopolies, in the spirit of "Colbert and Sully." But advantages were to be had, too:

They regulated production yet could favor it at the same time. Local authorities protected the laborer and industriosos and prevented their depredation. They fostered every new crop and new industry, made roads and built bridges. It contrasts to the economic system today in place—called by some "liberty"—and that with our excessive respect for the word, we would never call "abandonment." Today, to be sure, we don't regulate production or direct industry. But neither do we protect or promote it, safeguard the artisan from robbers, found new industries, or construct bridges and roads.^[63]

Thus, Pardo believed that the liberal state, with its obsessive individualism, had lost valuable social functions, developmental ones worth national recovery. Pardo's assessment was a long way from instinctive liberal curses of Spain—as source of every baneful habit of Peruvian sociology. From the century's foremost modernizer, this perspective is novel; perhaps Pardo's conservative father (or stay in Spain) left this surprising outlook.

After formal criticism of mercantilist theory, Pardo dwells on the specially favored colonial productions—industry—in a strained revision of imperial "industrial" policy. At a time when proposals abounded to revamp the coast for specialized cotton exporting—Duval's, for example, in the same Revista de Lima issues—Pardo sounds ambivalent. Cotton cultivation for local weavers

was specially favored under the auspices of colonial officials, as if they divined the role this shrub was called to play a century hence in the general riches of the world. Without abstracting Spanish authorities from the era's dominant economic ideas, their productive efforts went more into weaving

[62] Pardo, "Partido de Saña," Revista de Lima 2 (1860): 688-96; MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," 143-45, notes this colonial influence as well; we explore (similar) economic history—of Esteves—in ch. 6, below.

[63] Pardo, "Partido de Saña," in López, Pardo, 282.

industry than into agriculture—as if promotion were creating in the colonies (as in the madre patria ) their own elements of production, emancipating them from foreign trade. Not so strange—since only in our century has reciprocal commerce between civilized nations demonstrated all its advantages. But the fruit of such textile promotion was the zone's immense workshops.^[64]

In his historical relativism Pardo seemed strangely impressed by the diversity and level of colonial production, though he could not openly endorse the "protectionist policy" that he found responsible. Colonial revisionism would crop up again in Peruvian critical writings, notably in Esteves's economic history of the 1880s. Pardo's historical fascination with diversity, direction, and manufactures spilled over to Jauja—though there mainly as an automatic result of powerful railways.

In neither economics nor politics is it correct to read Pardo's work as some Andean "Notes on the State of Jauja." The political inspiration was, at best, ambiguously democratic, harking to the orderly peace of the colonial era. Estudios sobre Jauja could just as well be read as an urban scheme to reassert sovereignty over, and renewed exploitation of, Lima's then distanced and discontented agrarian domains. Stock liberal concerns about Indian "lethargy," the violence of rustic caudillos, and the specter of urban breakdown colored Pardo's vision of a national "moral uplifting" through railroads. To Pardo, productive "work" disciplines and forges modern citizenries, as well as disciplining an unruly balance of payments. Railways would accelerate rural mobility, cultural contact, and thus enlightment among peasants:

By merely bettering their moral condition, we can give them those principles of personal dignity and independence without which they can never amount to anything but miserable helots, commoners attached to the soil—and blind instruments of everyone who cuts a cudgel to order them about. By improving the material condition of our people, we shall erect the most effective barricade against the advances of tyranny, on the one hand, and on the other, against the forces of the anarchists.^[65]

Pardo is not terribly specific on just who represent Peru's tyrants and anarchists, though his Athenian gibe at Spartan oppressors suggests a

[64] Pardo, "Partido de Saña," in López, Pardo , 284; cf. Alfredo Duval, "Memoria sobre algodones" and "Algo sobre algodones," Revista de Lima 3 (1861). Pardo, though, was not against cotton exports, which he once praised as "the replacement" for guano in "Inmigración vascongada" (152-53).

[65] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 47.

lot. It is not hard to guess whom he imagined in 1860 Lima as liberal reformers went about carving out a civic space between strongman Castilla and the restless plebes. Balder repressive and strategic arguments followed, for railroads, lifting federal troops swiftly to the scene, would forever neutralize the central highlands as a staging ground for caudillo revolts. The heart of the message, however, seems to be neither Pardo's patent liberal paternalism toward natives, nor his revulsion toward locomotive-bashing artisans in the streets, nor his pointed aversion to Castilla's autocracy. It was the long-term civilist political mission itself. Railroads were to work a national social transformation, the república práctica as voiced in later party ideals.^[66] National communications, national technology, and national development would slowly lay cornerstones for solid civil rule—national and popular bedrock for civilist politics. Pardo was much more the Juárez than the Díaz of Peru, and not just in their precocious shared visions of integration by rail.

To be sure, the involved Estudios sobre Jauja touches many other points besides the unexpected option of regional manufacturing—for example, varied railroad finance schemes, enabling fiscal reforms, imagined resource discoveries, or Amazonian colonization from Jauja (that recurrent pipe dream of Limeños anxious over city "vagrants"). As it began, though, the book ends with guano.

As it was for Casanova, the pressing issue for Pardo is not whether but how to direct the extraordinary gift of export wealth. By 1860, Pardo warns, Peru was consuming from abroad "three times" what it could "naturally" produce: "This cannot be eternal." When guano fades, Lima-style incomes will abruptly collapse by three-quarters—throwing Peru from "civilization back to barbarie ." A positivist Pardo was reminding his class here of the traumas of caudillismo and penury haltingly reversed by Peru's successful brand of centralist free trade.^[67] Yet despite

[66] See Manuel Pardo, "Algo sobre el proyecto de código penal (vagancia)," Revista de Lima 4 (1861): 103-10, which chides a libertarian congress for not harshly punishing vagrancy—as "a collective crime," akin to "sedition and revolt," especially among "inferior races." "A state, especially a republic, must form citizens, not Lazzaroni."

See Maiguascha, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," ch. 3, for reformist order concerns; Kristal, Andes from the City , ch. 2, on civilist "Indians"; and esp. MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," as "traditional modernizer"—but with deepening social analysis and popular mobilization towards the 1870s.

Pardo was not humorless: a relevant example is his call for Peruvians "to become a nation and not migratory birds"—one of the few memorable guano puns of the age ("Memoria de hacienda y comercio" [1867], in López, Pardo , 301).

[67] Pardo, Estudios sobre Jauja , 39-50. Anticaudillismo was vital in initial 1850s victory of free trade; see Gootenberg, "Beleaguered Liberals," 79-89.

dire warnings, the Estudios sobre Jauja ultimately brims with optimism. Pointing again to the North American romance with canals and iron horses, Pardo conjures up "a magic change," a totalizing "moral revolution." The imagined transport revolution will revolutionize Peruvian economics, fiscality, politics, and values—themes embraced and embroidered across the Peru of the 1860s. The Estudios sobre Jauja was not yet a document of crisis.

On a Railroad to Nowhere?

Rereading the Estudios sobre Jauja suggests that the origins of Peru's manic railway development of the 1860s and 1870s are not adequately explored—despite the many verdicts on the process. In 1861 the Peruvian congress, moved by Pardo's panegyric, approved the country's first major trunk line to Jauja. That same year Pardo composed another policy essay on railroads for the Revista de Lima , his "Ley general sobre ferrocarriles." In it Pardo, in the cause of development, took to task the narrow fiscal and security concerns of Castilla's stolid regime: "Peru wants public works instead of fifteen thousand soldiers—the spirit of the nineteenth century has finally seized the people and congress." But this was largely a technical consideration of financing schemes. Pardo cautiously endorsed state profit guarantees to lure foreign capital and contractors into Peru's politically risky construction climate—the solution effectively required throughout Latin America. Phrases here (such as liberal fiscal incentives "to attract foreign capital") can mislead historians to truncate Pardo's original conception, as if railroads were meant to open Peru to a new age of foreign capital.^[68]

Pardo's diversifying vision in Estudios sobre Jauja was no fluke, neither in his own intellectual and public trajectory nor in Peru's energetic

[68] Manuel Pardo, "Medidas económicas del congreso de 1860: Ley general sobre ferrocarriles," Revista de Lima 3, 3 pts.; López, Pardo , 299. For verdict on export railroads, see Bonilla, Guano y burguesía , 55-63; Cotler, Clases, estado y nación , 102-7; and Pennano, "Desarrollo regional y ferrocarriles." Standard (unanalytic) text is Stewart, Meiggs; Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," ch. 5, "Turning Guano into Railroads," is most attuned to development schemes; for modern evaluation, Rory Miller, "Railways and Economic Development in Central Peru, 1885-1930," in R. Miller et al., eds., Social and Economic Change in Modern Peru (Liverpool, 1975), 27-52; propositioned in Heraclio Bonilla, "El impacto de los ferrocarriles: Algunas proposiciones," Historia y Cultura 6 (1972): 93-120.

national and official response to railroad ideals. Just where were Peruvian railways going? Was the lofty destination something like Pardo's nebulous "moral" revolution?

In 1851 Peru opened the first functioning railroad in South America (the short Callao—Lima line). Its commercial success in rationalizing port communications underscored the need for modern transport in the country with the most daunting geography of the Western hemisphere.^[69] Slow and scarce mule trains could no longer suffice. By the late 1850s, as every awakening regional oligarchy pined for its own outlet to the sea, formal railroad proposals became a kind of techno-literary genre in Peru. The Revista de Lima alone, in less than three years of existence, published three other projects: a highly liberal financing plan by the noted free-trade professor Felipe Masías; an engineering and industrial survey by Federico Blume, later the crony of Henry Meiggs; and a "proyecto" for an Arequipa—Islay line by Toribio Pacheco (a European-trained legal theorist who in the 1840s wrote glowingly of Lima's factories), who also called for reversing export formulas. A railroad through the south would allow guano to pass inland to Arequipa's granary, employing tradable fertilizers at home to multiply food production for domestic markets.^[70] Dozens of such proposals—such as the 1867 report by Cisneros (under Pardo's Ministry of Finance)—suggest the genuine spirit and direction of the rail frenzy that came to dominate the final decade of the guano age.

Most of these feasibility studies indeed share Pardo's developmental, social, and political concerns and fall into three discernible categories: prognoses, regionalist responses, and technological spin-offs. A logical place to begin is Peru's first formal governmental communications report, an 1856 compilation of engineering studies, which Pardo himself cites, stressing spurs to internal commerce and industry. The chief surveyor, one Ernesto Malinowski (the Polish émigré who later oversaw Pardo's trans-Andean line), expressed high hopes that railroads for Peru

[69] Regal, Historia de ferrocarriles —with fine detail on early involvement of Lima commercial elites.

[70] Revista de Lima —Toribio Pacheco, "Proyecto de ferrocarril de Arequipa a Islay" (Nov. 1860); Federico Blume, "Breves observaciones sobre el establecimiento y economía de ferrocarriles considerados como empresas industriales" (Nov. 1860); Felipe Masías, "El gobierno y las empresas de ferro-carril en el Perú" (Nov. 1861); Luis Benjamín Cisneros, "Memoria sobre ferrocarriles" (1868), rpt. in L. B. Cisneros, Obras completas (Lima, 1939) 3:141-86; a compendium of studies is Cuerpo de Ingenieros y Arquitectos del Estado, Anales del cuerpo de ingenieros del Perú (Lima, 1874), 2 vols.

"will be the resolution of all social problems." Two-thirds of the country had yet to be made "Peruvian," according to this Central European's nation-integrating ideal. Malinowski's memorial also underscored special benefits that would accrue to national producers grappling with import competition. He argued that with reliable rapid transport, nationals "should be able to compete with analogous goods from other countries. And not just in foreign markets, but even in this country, as wheat, coffee, cacao, and so on prove, which for the coastal consumer now come largely from abroad—even when interior growers can supply them in sufficient quantity, even superior quality."^[71] He, too, wrote of opening coal mines and of honing local engineering skills (with a national "school of engineers"), all the while invoking the apt precedent of railroads across the Alps. More than a decade later, Malinowski (fully assimilated into national elite circles) recalled his original nation-building ideals in an 1869 memorial on the trans-Andean project: the aim, he reminded a flagging congress, is to unite the Amazon with the Pacific, bringing into play the national wealth foreseen by Pardo in 1860.^[72] A pertinent question, explored below, is the cultural lens such immensely influential foreign engineers brought to the Peruvian scene.

An even more striking project evaluation appeared in 1868—just when Manuel Pardo's economic team was pushing to accelerate Andean rail construction. (By the early 1870s Peru had nearly fifty different lines underway, public and private, financed under the Balta-Piérola scheme of mortgaging all remaining guano deposits on European markets.) John William ("Juan Guillermo") Nystrom, another prominent foreign engineer and adviser, reported a more ambitious vision than Pardo's, heralding potential backward (as well as forward) linkages from railways. His vision focused on Cuzco, ancient and decrepit pole of Andean economy. Nystrom, the state engineer, predicted that the Cuzco railhead would

attract the most important manufacturers to come there, principally with machines to cut wood, to make doors and windows, and to build and finish the carts, roads, and steamboats that will locate in the valley. In addition,

[71] Peru, Convención Nacional, Documentos legislativos sobre el establecimiento y la mejora de las vías de comunicación en el Perú (Lima, pam., 1856)—primarily enclosed Malinowski "Memoria," 16, 24; E. Malinowski, Ferrocarril central transandino: Informe del ingeniero en jefe d. Ernesto Malinowski (Lima, pam., 1869); see Stewart, Meiggs, 44-45, for role.

[72] Malinowski, Ferrocarril central transandino, 7.

there will be manufacturers of glass, porcelain, rubber articles; and machines to weave wools and cotton and to obtain the articles that chemistry demands.^[73]

Nystrom's case for more complex railway capital goods was just as emphatic. Nowhere in Latin America was this feat contemplated or achieved on a significant scale (though in the 1880s Chile was making sophisticated copies of cars and locomotives, and in southern Peru, a British foundry tried the same).^[74] But writing in 1868, Nystrom envisioned constructing rails and engines in such remote and primitive zones as the valleys of La Convención and Urubamba. A crony of Malinowski, he proposed a "Sociedad Metalúrgica del Cuzco" to organize the area's new foundries, which would surround locally developed iron and coal deposits. "When one makes motors at home," Nystrom insisted, "the peculiar experience of each locality grows in the measure that each operation advances. Such local capital goods might cost, at first, double the imported ones; but at least the funds and outlays would remain there to benefit the interior."^[75] The precedent hailed here—industrializing St. Petersburg (rather than Cincinnati)—is sociologically intriguing, as that city was planned and placed on the Russian frontier. Traditional peasant Cuzco had been, of course, a major colonial center of obraje manufacturing and had suffered terrible economic losses through the first half of the nineteenth century, virtually withdrawing from the national economy. To promote regional revival, Nystrom suggested the immediate formation of state workshops, backed up by an equally ambitious provincial "Institute of Science." The peculiar mind-set of tinkering engineers doubtless spawned such wide visions of "learning by doing" and indigenous technology.^[76] Like Pardo's industrialism, none of this—particularly the use of domestic inputs in railroad building—ever got off the

[73] Juan Guillermo Nystrom, Informe al supremo gobierno del Perú sobre una espedición al interior de la república (Lima, pam., 1868), 7, 11.

[74] Palma, "Growth and Structure of Chilean Industry," ch. 3, explains special market for capital goods; Ballon, Ideas en Arequipa, 177-79.

[75] Nystrom, Informe al gobierno, 20-27, 77; Magnus Mörner, Notas sobre el comercio y los comerciantes del Cusco desde fines de la colonia hasta 1930 (Lima, 1979), 9-15, for regional decline.

[76] Among studies of foreign perceptions of nineteenth-century Peru (Macera, Tauro), none shares Safford's Ideal of Practical (ch. 4) focus on technical elites; an attempt is Jorge Grieve, "El desarrollo de las industrias mecánicas en el Perú entre 1800 y 1880," Historia y Cultura 15 (1982): 23-69. No contemporaries positively mention Paraguay's metallurgic industries; see Thomas L. Whigham, "The Iron Works of Ibycui: Paraguayan Industrial Development in the Mid-Nineteenth Century," Americas 35 (1978): 201-18.

ground. But men like Nystrom knew what would pique the imagination of their Peruvian hosts. Another Nystrom report of 1869 (on opening the Chanchamayo jungle region) insisted on the inhumanity of reducing its famously recalcitrant natives by force; instead, trade and transport should peaceably assimilate Indians to "comercio y industria."^[77] Here was another motif of railway writings: modern communications as liberal "discovery-conquest" of a mysterious greater Peru.

With models such as these, a rhetoric of railroads echoed throughout the Peru of the 1860s. Overlooked regional rail proposals are easily pursued, for along with varied critiques of guano sales policies, they make the ubiquitous genre of the decade's economic pamphleteers. Sampling the scores of regional proposals and progress reports reveals two overriding themes. First, as a forum for the convergent thinking of regional, political, and technical elites, the schemes reveal lofty dreams of national integration and stability—broad noneconomic ideals, able to hold diverse material aims. Hidden agendas were more economic: provincial public works as means of decentralizing Lima's guano wealth, a dissembled policy of national fiscal redistribution. The second element was technological dynamism: the railroad as nineteenth-century civilizing agent—a fascination with transforming science, under the influence of engineers and explorers streaming into the Andes. Both facets expressed discovery principles: the capital's conquest (in Cisneros's memorable phrase) of the "real Peru."^[78]

One sterling regional proposal—the 1864 Ferrocarril de Arequipa: Informe de los empresarios —harked from Peru's second city and Lima's chronic republican political rival, Arequipa.^[79] Backed by the solemn actas of scores of Arequipan notables (and then from upland Cuzco, Puno, and Lampa), the project was presented by migrant promoters "Patricio" Gibson and "José" Pickering, the former of the important southern merchant clan. Apart from usual technical and financing considerations, the group promised four outstanding benefits from a $10-20 million link from the sea through the southern Andes: economic diversity, machine culture, Indian incorporation, and regional political stability.

First, the developmental prospects of Arequipa's coming railroad

[77] J. G. Nystrom, Informe al supremo gobierno sobre la espedición de Chanchamayo por J. G. Nystrom (Lima, pam., 1869), esp. "Programa para el fomento del progreso."

[78] Luis Benjamín Cisneros, Proyecto de ley presentado por el diputado por Jauja L. B. Cisneros y memoria sobre los ferrocarriles peruanos (Lima, pam., 1868).

[79] Ferrocarril de Arequipa: Informe de los empresarios (Arequipa, pam., 1864).

were couched in terms of a diversified regional revival. With Arequipa's efficient outlet to the sea, the city's withered agrarian campiña would bloom anew. Until postindependence turmoil and invasive Chilean food imports, the zone had traditionally supplied a wide selection of wines, cereals, and vegetables for the urban and Andean trades. Linked by rail, new internal markets, lively labor mobility, and the latest farm implements would erase the legacies of foodstuffs competition. "What disgrace," lamented the report, "to see in Peru, on the outskirts of its main cities, thousands of uncultivated 'topos' of land, forcing us to buy from Chile even the flour of our daily bread. Thus, it will be feasible to raise the proper products of our fields—abandoned for inability to compete overseas."^[80] Echoing Pardo's breadbasket call for Jauja, such notions had obvious appeal for Arequipa's dominant landed classes. Rather than focusing on the area's fallow mines of silver and copper, the proposal privileged wheat, cotton, and alfalfa.

Powerful locomotives steaming across deserts and mountains make an impressive symbol of nineteenth-century progress. Here the powerful import was a demonstration effect. The railroad would foreshadow the viability and spread of modern "machines" throughout the sierra. "Equally," the report imagined, "the railroad, allowing the introduction of machinery, will promote new factories of many classes. Peru exports many articles of constant value and demand in a rudimentary state—when in the country itself we could fabricate them, at least in first preparations, thus facilitating their transport and augmenting their values."^[81] The south thus replicated Pardo's vision of import-substituting railways, though here it was conceived mainly in a value-added sense. But why should transport-cost reductions lend themselves to local processing of wools, cottons, and minerals when, in economic terms, savings would just as likely favor bulk exports? The answer seemed to center on unusual backward linkages expected from Andean technology imports—a contagious social "admiration for machines and the arts." In this mission, muleteers were hardly competition.

[80] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, 3-4; see Tomás Dávila, Medios que se proponen al actual congreso constitucional del Perú y al gobierno supremo, para salvar de su total destrucción la casiarruinada agricultura de la importante provincia de Moquegua (Arequipa, pam., 1853), for protective agrarian interests and transport difficulties (52-53); one of greatest civil war losses was precisely mules. John Frederick Wibel, "The Evolution of a Regional Community Within the Spanish Empire and Peruvian Nation: Arequipa, 1780-1845" (Ph.D. diss., Stanford University, 1975), for regional background.

[81] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, 5; see Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, ch. 2, 5, for area crafts and later rail impact.

The Arequipeños were equally mindful of rural mass markets: "Many articles of home manufacturing, principally for Indian use, could be had so easily and economically with the help of simple machines. And the time saved by Indians in their fabrication could be employed advantageously in indispensable manual labors."^[82] Arequipeños envisioned two specific productivity advances from labor-saving devices: first, the revival of formerly widespread part-time household weavers of the sierra, a revival that in turn would enhance their availability for critical labor—presumably for seasonal work on elite haciendas. It is hard to grasp why more efficiently employed peasants would seek outside wages, but this was a tortured logic of landed classes, suffering through an era of contracted native labor markets.

The third theme of Ferrocarril de Arequipa concerned the Indians themselves. Arequipa constituted a white and mestizo beachhead in a sea of native community hinterlands, and its Europeanized spokespersons contemplated a wider technological regeneration of Indian workers—at first glance a strange association with trains. This analysis was also among the first open discussions of the Indian problem since the 1840s talk of native welfare and vanishing obrajes. The project stressed, "When we study the possible advancement of Peru, and especially the south, it is absolutely necessary to consider the condition of the Indian." "Well known" are the Indians' paltry "wants" and disincentive to betterment, ran their familiar neocolonial refrain. But after five years of steam engines "he won't be the same Indian of today! We don't need so-called useful European immigration"—the usual despairing whitening recipe in Peru—when "apt" Indian workers abound.^[83] "Frequent communications of this race with the whites will help to mix them; thus the railroad will be the most efficacious means for creating the healthy and intelligent proletariat that, content as the English peón, his place fit in the world, will make the base of a democratic republic—moderated to law and friend of national progress."^[84]

As a revelation of the imagined "moral" and "civilizing" mission of steam, this vision supersedes Pardo's classless mestizo reveries, though

[82] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, 5, 19.

[83] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, 6; see Pardo, "Inmigración vascongada" for more typical whitening views; Charles Walker, "Rhetorical Power: Early Republican Discourse on the Indian in Cusco" (paper presented to the AHA, Chicago, 1991), for consolidating racialism; Gootenberg, "Population and Ethnicity," table 8, shows Arequipa department about 50 percent Indian, hinterland Puno over 90 percent.

[84] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, 6.

Pardo hinted at similar effects from rail mobility. Fixed to its nineteenth-century moorings, the ideology is both unmistakably racist (Indian sloth and withdrawal as genetic) and imaginative in its improving, flexible, and socially defined mestizo ideal. Mestizaje equals the commercialization and proletarianization of Peru's self-sufficient native, now a salvageable being. With heightened contact and inevitable miscegenation, peasants might even surpass their coveted utility as laborers and consumers and become real citizens, bedrock of the republic. If we follow recent studies of nineteenth-century technology, colonialism, and caste and ignore Peru's peculiar racialist context, this was an incorporative modernization worthy of a Rostow—or, indeed, a Marx.^[85] To southern elites and their advisers, the railroad amounts to a machine to civilize their own colonized peoples. By omission and confession, much of Peru's gathering technological fascination suggests such neocolonial undercurrents.

Finally, Arequipa's promoters heralded the long-term political stabilization project of railroads: that confluence of "order, law, entrepreneurial élan, peace"—and machinery. In part, this association serves as a veiled regional threat to Lima state makers, albeit with payoffs in the wings. Liberal Arequipa, Peru's legendary "pueblo caudillo," had staged four decades of destabilizing revolts against the northern centrist state, as leaders such as Castilla, Pardo, and Cisneros knew all too well. By the 1860s Peru was moving toward a tense national compromise, but memories remained fresh. Arequipans reminded their Lima audience how much they remained "feared in the north of the republic."^[86]

The argument begins by repeating that old mental linkage between poverty, unemployment, empleomanía, and caudillismo. The "natural" contentiousness of "energetic" Arequipeños stemmed from their greater historical need for "work." Only the railroad would stop forever the

[85] Adas, Machines as Measure of Men, "Epilogue," analyzes lost origins of 1950s modernization theory. Adas quotes a similarly minded nineteenth-century thinker on colonial technology; this thinker believed not only that railroads would "dissolve" all caste divisions but that "when you have introduced machinery into the locomotion of a country, you are unable to withhold it from its fabrication . . . without introducing all those industrial processes necessary. . . . The railway system will therefore become, in India, truly the forerunner of modern industry" (K. Marx, "The Future Results of British Rule in India" [1853], 240). Kristal, Andes from the City, chs. 2-3, for civilist indigenismo as "proletarianization" ideology.

[86] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, 7; classic account is Juan Gualberto Valdivia, Memorias sobre las revoluciones de Arequipa desde 1834 hasta 1866 (Lima, 1874); Wibel, "Arequipa," chs. 4-5, for political integration.

"revolutions," as commercially "regenerating" Arequipa "is called on to become the center of civilization for a colossal portion of the globe."^[87] They imagined themselves the coming Pacific entrepôt of the Andes, and indeed, Arequipan commercial sway had at least spread toward Cuzco since 1821. In a less grandiose economics of stability, the pamphlet then promised Lima savings of $1 million annually—the current expenditures for stationing the 2,000-man (occupation) garrison in the south.

These were other ways of speaking of national integration, ultimately posed as the great unfinished task left by Spanish colonialism: "When the day comes uniting north and south by railroads and other common interests, the last vestiges of provincialism will vanish, that favorite plant of the colonial system, cultivated and harvested by despots ever since."^[88] To extend their agrarian metaphor, rail lines would wither the deep-rooted southern caudillo. The promoters aptly pointed to Italy as a new nation united and consummated by rail.

Finally, although Pardo receives no credits here, the proposal closes on his realpolitik jeremiad. Peru is at the crossroads. "The day is coming, and not terribly long, when the earnings of guano cease. Then, Arequipa and the resources of its interior will be the stuff of southern industry—that which Peru will rely on to exist among the nations." Will Peru relapse into regional turmoil and "barbarism"? In guano's end of days, "confusion and anarchy will drag Peru into the abyss—unless that forward-looking spirit in our legislative body takes advantage now of their profitable resources, to establish industry and individual wealth, as bulwarks for the country's salvation. The Arequipan railway must be the first step."^[89] Here was an offer few politicos could refuse.

So many other tracts parallel these Arequipan lines of national integration, political security, and regional development. One very public confirmation comes from Luciano B. Cisneros—the noted poet brother of Luis Benjamín, fellow Revista de Lima figure, and in 1868 Minister of Beneficencia (public welfare) in the liberal coterie around the Prado junta. Following the devastating 1867 southern earthquake, Cisneros headed a Lima mission to the region to assess reconstruction needs. His official report reads like the developmentalist counterinsurgency pro-

[87] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, 7, 17; Alberto Flores Galindo, Arequipa y el sur andino: Ensayo de historia regional, siglos xviii-xx (Lima, 1977), ch. 2, for emergent regional hegemonies.

[88] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, 22.

[89] Ferrocarril de Arequipa, 8, 22.

grams that officially entered Latin America a century later with the Alliance for Progress.^[90]

After calculating short-term damages, Cisneros quickly turned to his long-range program for southern "paz y trabajo": large state investments in irrigation and land reclamation, a regional mortgage-reconstruction bank, technical assistance and schooling, and, of course, swift development of area railroads, "that noble aspiration of modern societies." In unpoetically blunt prose Cisneros warned: "Even political advantages accrue here—for it is clear to all that lack of useful work is the source of empleomanía, and thus of revolutions. The best means to nip them in the bud, stealing every pretext from rabble-rousers, is to provide southern dwellers the productive tasks of agriculture."^[91]

Cisneros's program zeroed in on specific regional security issues and benefits, not unlike those of Peru's progressive officers of the 1960s. "Under economic aspects, does Peru need foreign grains, with such fertile valleys capable of astonishing fertility? As far as political aspects, would these Arequipeños always live agitated by revolutionary ideas and political passions—if they could draw from the land a cheap existence?"^[92] Capital intellectuals and policymakers were clearly picking up on southern warnings and hopes. Too late this time, for the Prado regime fell the very next year to the southern-based (and pro-railway) uprising of Coronel José Balta. With his sensitivity to food production, Cisneros captured both angles—domestic subsistence and external autonomy—in future national "food security" doctrines.

That same year, Luis Benjamín Cisneros (brother of Luciano Benjamín) presented his lengthy 1868 message to congress on the evolving railroad mania, now encompassing nineteen lines. Cisneros's emergency plan: divert by 1872 all German guano profits directly into Meiggs's construction, something Balta's southerners would parrot (with Cisneros's blessings) in the grander form of the French Dreyfus contract. Cisneros reminded congress of the overarching mission of railways: "Especially to unite the Pacific shore with the trans-Andean regions, putting the true Peru into easy communication with the rest of the world."^[93] This was a telling Limeño word choice, which Peru's great

[90] Luciano Benjamín Cisneros, Apuntes sobre la comisión al sur por el ex-ministro de beneficencia (Lima, pam., 1868).

[91] Luciano Cisneros, Apuntes sobre el sur, 50.

[92] Luciano Cisneros, Apuntes sobre el sur, 50; see Víctor Villanueva, El CAEM y la revolución de las fuerzas armadas (Lima, 1974), for modern social developmentalism, still focused on southern agriculture (the giant Majes project) as security zone.

[93] Luis Cisneros, Memoria sobre ferrocarriles, 37.

historian Jorge Basadre would put so evocatively in the enduring notion of "el Perú profundo"—Peru's imagined real country. Here Cisneros attributed Peru's national disparateness to being a nation that imports "so much" from abroad, the flip side of the emerging ideals of market integration. Even at this late date Cisneros conceived the projects as a form of "national exploration," as city bureaucrats, from the railroad surveys, encountered the social geography of their "lightly populated country." In this discovery mode Cisneros decreed distinctly domestic criteria for selecting rival routes: first, know where real villages thrive and commercial traffic already flows.^[94]

In the most general analysis, railroad proposals mark a midpoint in a larger but dimly understood nineteenth-century genealogy of regional political awareness. In the late 1840s Peru's "regions" (principally the uppity south) became a linchpin in the new liberal hegemonies of the Castillan state and free trade. The passing of postindependence north-south trade wars, initial caudillistic separatism, and autarkic interior protectionism was seized by Lima liberals as an opportunity for national integration. Their political regime, however, remained shackled to the unitary designs of Gamarra's constitution of 1839.^[95] But it was the guano revenue of the 1850s that rapidly resurrected Peru's de facto economic centralism—as the nearby monopoly's profits flowed over-whelmingly into the coffers of the Lima state, its merchants, its urban consolidation and rentier classes. Retired caudillos and motley regional talents converged on Peru's burgeoning capital, when, despite initial hopes, comparable opportunities long lagged in the provinces. By the mid 1850s regional rumblings had resurfaced against the new centralism of guano, though Arequipa stayed relatively dormant, erupting only at high points of liberal-conservative strife.

Pardo's Estudios sobre Jauja signaled a reactive and reformist rhetoric of decentralism, framed with a possible Lima hinterland in mind. In the 1860s Peru's national scientific-discovery literature, among other factors, deepened integrationist desires. (Perhaps most important was Raimondi's two-decade obra, culminating in El Perú of 1874.) On its own the economy of guano had spilled over only into littoral plantation fever. But it was the railroad proposals, written in their exaggerated regional scripts, and the revanchist political pressures around them that truly

[94] Luis Cisneros, Memoria sobre ferrocarriles, 45.

[95] Gootenberg, "North-South"; Jorge Basadre, Elecciones y centralismo en el Perú: Apuntes para un esquema histórico (Lima, 1980), ch. 1; Quiroz, Deuda defraudada, ch. 5, on 1850s unrest; Víctor Villanueva, Ejército peruano: Del caudillaje anárquico al militarismo reformista (Lima, 1973), chs. 1-2, on political migration.

rekindled and rallied a resurgent regional politics. At heart, Peru's generous railroad investments became a form of national redistribution of export wealth, posed in the name of regional developmentalism (irresistible in the provincial politics of congress) and amenable to farsighted Lima state makers for their long-term promise of political peace.^[96] This seemed a safer form of national politics than the open centralist-decentralist warfare of the initial republic.

These developments moved apace into the 1870s—as rail construction itself became an active medium of national discovery (seen, for example, in the countless dispatches devoured in the Lima press); as national economic prospectors and census takers fanned out into the sierra (Fuentes was again a major figure); and as provincial notables aligned to meet the new agencies, demarcations, and possibilities of the slowly spreading central state. In murky ways, these shifts laid the groundwork for the drastic fiscal-political decentralization mounted by President Pardo in office, following the first truly national (and "electrifying") campaign in the republic's history.^[97] As civilism tried to connect Peru in new fashions, such nationalism would reflect (as we will see) in the wider scope of economic thinkers of the 1870s (Copello and Petriconi), culminating in a proto-indigenista rejection of Lima of the 1880s (Esteves). Railroad pressures stood halfway, in the meeting of capital and regional minds.

Other reports and essays mimic and extend the pivotal themes. A splendid statement of regional "revindication" came together in an 1864 essay, "Los ferrocarriles y su influencia sobre la economía nacional."^[98] The author, one "Tomás" Miles, posed the railroad mission as a reversal of provincial decline and grievances, a typical perception. He opened with stock nineteenth-century slogans: without "commerce and wealth, nations, communities, individuals regress"—that is, slide back into barbarism. The Incas, even the retrograde Spanish, had maintained superior interior links across the Andes. In the common conflation of science and industrialism, Miles wrote that "in the present age when other nations

[96] Pennano, "Desarrollo regional y ferrocarriles," for pressures; for discovery works, consult countless examples in Carlos Moreyra y Paz Soldán, Bibliografía regional peruana (Lima, 1976).

[97] MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," ch. 3; Basadre, Historia 4:1919-22; Mallon, Defense of Community, ch. 2, for incipient state expansion; we follow these larger themes in chs. 5 and 6, below.

[98] Tomás Miles, "Los ferrocarriles y su influencia sobre la economía nacional," El Tiempo (Lima), 15 Oct. 1864; placed as a series, continuations were unfortunately not found.

are seeking the potent help of science and the motor force of steam, . . . the arts, factories, and manufactures flourish."

What had happened in Peru? In this overview, Andean Peru, as late as the 1840s, remained bustling in self-sufficiency, producing all varieties of weavings, foodstuffs, and artifacts "spread out through all pueblos of the interior." Now, after decades of guano, Peru was saddled under $16 million in imports; agriculture had "expired" under the weight of food imports (some $5 million of these); outsiders were invading sierran shops and occupations.^[99] Railroads, in these commonsense understandings, were the solution for reversing harmful foreign trade patterns, halting interior decline, revitalizing internal markets and exchange.

Few spoke of additional exports—which Peru (unlike, say, Mexico) hardly needed anyway. The exceptions were overtures for short private lines to specific haciendas or mines. Even in such obvious export zones as southern Iquique—stark desert save for its mule-traversed nitrates and copper oases—other themes beckoned. The southern impresario Carlos Basadre, who publicized Tacna in the Revista de Lima, spoke in terms of "national" material gains, for example, the "hundreds to be employed in a national enterprise."^[100] With a railway, an infectious "spirit of association" (J. M. Químper's 1850s liberal code word for capitalist enterprise) would bury notions of Peruvians fit only for bureaucratic and military posts, that "we display activity and energy only for ripping out the entrails of our patria." In short, a railway would stem the chronic "revolutions" of Tarapacá—an attractive enough proposal for Castilla's own birthplace. The "Commerce of Iquique" appended the petition in their own idiom of "moral and political" uplift; communications revealed "degrees of civilization." In Peru, pacifying sweet commerce rode an iron horse.

Foreign railroad contractors spoke the same civilizing tongue, amplified for audience effect. Henry Meiggs's speeches at each subsequent railway opening approached hyperbolic absurdities. At the extravagant 1871 inauguration ceremony for the long-sought Mollendo-Arequipa

[99] Miles, "Ferrocarriles y su influencia."

[100] Carlos Basadre, El ferrocarril de Iquique: Observaciones jenerales sobre los benéficos resultados que esta empresa producirá en favor de las industrias salitreras y minerales de la provincia de Tarapacá (Lima, pam., 1860), 22-24, "Informe del comercio de Iquique," which appends copy of Chevalier's "Curso de economía política," endorsing guarantees for private construction. C. Basadre, "Apuntes sobre la provincia de Tacna," Revista de Lima 6 (1862). Also, José Antonio García y García, Ferro-carril de Eten a Montsefú, Chiclayo, Lambayeque, Ferreñafe (Lima, pam., 1867).

line, the Yankee Pizarro preached, among other theological injunctions, that "this railway converts the divine precept of work into sweet occupation." Hundreds—the cream of Limeño society—were shipped and railroaded in to imbibe speeches celebrating this arranged regional political marriage. Before enthralled crowds at the completion of Pardo's Lima-Jauja line, Meiggs anointed the railroad as "social revolution," "battering-ram of modern civilization, whose whistle will awaken the native race from slumber." Parroting Pardo, he adds, "Today, Peru as a nation has its beginning."^[101]

Compared to such grandiosities, the ongoing congressional railroad debates of the 1860s stuck closer to practical matters, usually the intricacies of financing schemes and settling the scores of rivalrous regional pleas thrown at their feet. It is hard to find export mania in the congress, either. In 1862 proposal-smothered politicians confessed they could not "deny this kind of request," particularly, one might add, given their putative representation of the regions. A later commission on the Jauja project fell into the usual social hyperbole: "We are convinced that the only cause of public misery, the sole obstacle to progress in this society—in every sense—is the lack of facilities for transit and transport."^[102] An October 1864 debate on funding the Arequipa line saw ultraliberal Silva Santisteban leading a noneconomic charge: as a revolutionary hotbed, Arequipa has proved too defensible. With rail links, the central government would always prevail (and save millions) by swiftly mobilizing and dispatching troops only when necessary—an excellent Porfirian twist on the southern security argument. In a prior debate Silva Santisteban had extolled the mines, woods, wheat, and coal of northern Cajamarca—especially those on his own family estancia—as good reason to expect a decided "influencia social" from a proposed line. No invisible hand here. Mainly, however, projects won priority on the basis of existing traffic (i.e., merchant reports) and signs of possible agricultural diversity, as clarified in one mid-1860s debate over a hastily drawn rival Tacna-Arequipa line.^[103] The moral, material, and national expectations of railroads were never on the table: by now, these were too ingrained in the minds of Peruvian elites.

In sum, this foray suggests a larger national discourse around rail-

[101] Inauguración del ferro-carril de Mollendo a Arequipa por A. U. G. (Lima, pam., 1871), 44; Stewart, Meiggs, 61-64, passim.

[102] Diarios de los debates: Congresos ordinarios, Cámara de Diputados (Lima, 1862-70), Oct., Nov. 1862.

[103] Diarios de debates, Sept. 1863, Oct. 1864.

roads markedly similar to Pardo's in Estudios sobre Jauja . The awaited moral revolution of railroads symbolized diversification, regional rejuvenation, social peace, stability, and national, Indian, and market integrations. In political terms, such writings presented a form of fiscal regionalization of guano wealth, one easily digested by anxious Lima state builders. One last element—the mechanical imagination—was gaining ground over time, as exemplified in the thinking of one Héctor Davelouis.

Davelouis, a French chemist employed at the Lima mint, penned an 1863 memo analyzing the probable impact of roads and rails on a modernizing Huancavelica mine—the legendary colonial mercury source in disrepair since Spanish times.^[104] In Davelouis's thinking, a railhead there would quickly displace onerous California quicksilver imports (thus raising silver output everywhere); lead imports would cease as well as Peru came to supply emerging industrial metals "to the entire globe"; woolens works would spring up around reviving mines. Peru, in short, would "join the ranks of great powers." "It is a principle universally admitted in political economy," averred Davelouis, "that from one industry springs others, so that an enlightened and prudent government should sustain one, even if unprofitable, to promote others." Huancavelica was of doubtful profitability, he confessed—as should have many of the rail pamphleteers. But all seemed drawn to what modern economists term positive "external economies" in the development process, or even the "unbalanced" stimuli to growth suggested by other theorists.^[105] And they were mesmerized by something else.

One doubts that chemist Davelouis really read political economy; more likely, his multiplier effects came as natural to him as the clockwork mechanisms of the Newtonian universe. Moreover, his costly rail scheme was woven in his mind with broader technification notions. The state-run Huancavelica mine would become "a true school, a stimulating fount for all who are idle." Literally, Davelouis's railway would lead to a new school of mines. This idea of public works as technical tutelage would reach its apogee in the manic building spree of the Balta regime. In one presidential address of 1870 Balta sold his shaky, debt-run pro-

[104] Héctor Davelouis, Informe que el suscribe eleva a la consideración de los poderes legislativo y ejecutivo sobre el estado actual de la minería en el Perú (Lima, pam., 1863), 7-9, 15.

[105] Davelouis, Informe sobre minería, 15. See Tibor Scitovsky, "Two Concepts of External Economies," Journal of Political Economy 52 (1954): 143-52; Albert O. Hirschman, The Strategy of Economic Development (New York, 1958).

gram as "the happy dream of the people—it mobilizes work, stems joblessness, creates industry, engenders the spirit of business, renews credit, and is the root of public tranquillity." The goal: "convert the entire republic into an immense workshop [taller ], in which we construct the fortunate future of the nation."^[106] This was technification from above writ large.

In the 1840s free-traders had peddled commerce as the multiplicative mother of invention; by the 1860s, however, it was European science and industry sweeping the imagination of Peruvian elites. This was a mentality of technicians and tinkerers suddenly loaded with cash. In representations at least, the railroad arose in the Andes as a technical messiah, as a gargantuan, positivist Christ child. Railroads would magically resurrect, convert, and tutor Peru in the scientific marvels and capacities of the nineteenth century. It implied utopian social engineering, too, that uncanny power to "always" resolve "all" social problems at hand. Clearly, much of this hyperbole was the product of sales pitches, political and otherwise, but it was also a larger cultural movement of Westernizing elites. (The next chapter looks at technification from below, when popular participatory voices also embraced these scientistic ideals.)

The high priests, or missionaries, of this movement were the dozens of European engineers, surveyors, geographers, advisers, archaeologists, scientists, and machine tenders who swarmed to Peru after midcentury. Some—eclectics such as Malinowski, Blume, Nystrom, Pickering, Raimondi, and Davelouis—continued to sink roots. Their flock multiplied—Thorndike, Sada, Duval, Backus, Bibinski, Jaworski, Lembcke, Middendorf, Wiseman, Johnston, Martinet, Habich, and so on—as Meiggs's empire expanded in earnest after 1869. Even Garmendia lured in European technicians to run his Lucre woolens mill. The foreign emissaries of science had first appeared in the midcentury Andean and Amazonian exploration-travel literatures. In their "capitalist vanguard" eyes, technology-poor Peru became Midas-like: in Raimondi's words, that "beggar sitting on a mountain of gold." Men like Pardo transculturated these ideas, producing their own Peru—just in time for the arrival of the técnicos in the 1860s.^[107] These men brought with them not

[106] P. Ugarte and E. San Cristóval, comps., Mensajes de los presidentes del Perú (Lima, 1943), vol. 1, 28 July 1870; and messages of Pardo years (1872-1876).

[107] Stewart, Meiggs, is among best sources; see Pratt, Imperial Eyes, for "transculturation" of science notions.

so much economic ideas (of the political economists) but can-do technical capacities and optimistic transforming attitudes that Peruvian officials were eager to adopt. A few, notably Malinowski and Raimondi, as political refugees of 1848, surely brought a distinctive social baggage to their jobs. Some, Meiggs included, were rumored "Israelitas"—a secret source, no doubt, of their biblical discourse and prophetic inspiration. Often the esteemed engineers became promptly confused with economic experts as well: how else to explain Malinowski's blueprint for Peru's monetary reform of 1862, or Blume's influential ideas for banking reform in the mid 1870s?^[108]

To be sure, Peru had long cultivated its own modest national scientific tradition, exemplified in the late-colonial spirit of Hipólito Unánue; the republican life and works of the geologist and naturalist Mariano Eduardo de Rivero; the chemists' debates in the 1840s over the uses and nature of guano (was it animal, mineral, or vegetable?); the inventive naval engineers of the new Bellavista foundry; or guano-age tinker-thinkers such as the clockmaker Pedro Ruiz Gallo or the inventor José Arnaldo Márquez (discussed below).^[109] But in contrast to other Latin American republics—Colombia is the best-known case—few Peruvians traveled abroad to imbibe modern science and technology in the nineteenth century. European literary or political sojourns were the norm. Instead, science landed in Peru, especially during the climactic railroading years of 1869-1872, in the persons of technological advisers and mechanical carpetbaggers; they naturalized Western science, scouted the country (with a distinct lens from former commercially minded travelers), or literally set up shop, including small industries. Under such mentors Peruvian students soon eagerly learned on the job. As with several thousand other white, middle-class immigrants of the late guano age, fair skin and European mind-sets favored their easy entry into the Lima elite. Many engineers naturalized into patriotic Peruvians whose names still grace Lima high-school academies. (For example, Malinowski, in addition to fiscal services, also played a hero's role designing

[108] Meiggs was one rumored Anglo "marrano," for having helped establish the Jewish cemetery in Lima! E. M. [Malinowski], La moneda en el Perú (Lima, pam., 1859); Federico Blume, Observaciones sobre el proyecto del banco central (Lima, pam., 1876); Luis Alberto Sánchez, Historia de una industria peruana: Cervecería Backus y Johnston S.A. (Lima, 1978), chs. 1-2, analyzes an engineer's industrial role (and finance roles, 55).

[109] Mariano Eduardo de Rivero, Colección de memorias científicas e industriales (1857), 2 vols., for some idea of his eclectic career; for incipient liberal interest, see "Ventajas de la tecnología," Progreso, 8 Aug. 1849; ch. 5, below, for Márquez. We still need a history of republican science.

Callao's successful defenses against Spanish invasion in 1866; Blume, besides monetary policy, concocted his legendary anti-Chilean submarine for national service in 1879.)^[110]

Their lineage and cult affected the establishment of mechanical sciences in Peruvian universities, the creation of Pardo's agricultural normal school, experimental farms, the faculty of political science and administration, the census bureau, the school of mines, artisan schools of arts, and Cuerpo civil de ingenieros —institutions of the 1870s that best embodied civilismo's vision of building a "practical republic." Pardo imported a coterie of Poles to start his impressive network of normal schools, cornerstone of civilist educational expansionism. The Cuerpo de Ingenieros, headed by another Pole, "Eduardo Juan" de Habich, emerged, after a slow start, as civilismo's most lasting achievement. With more than three hundred graduates in the decades after 1880, engineers became the country's largest new professional class, erecting Piérola's 1895 Ministry of Development (Fomento ), spearheaded by the next civilista president of Peru (López de Romaña, 1899-1904).^[111] New-style educational nationalists emerged, vaunting the sciences in national reform: "The glories that the sciences are producing only exist in England," argued impetuous Mariano Amézaga, "but among us, scions of Spaniards, only politics! Science does not possess a patria, and we have to use it to scale the heights of civilization."^[112] By the 1870s technological determinism came wrapped in the social evolutionism of Comtean positivism.

A remarkable sign of this naturalizing mechanic mentality appears in the founding pamphlet of the private 1871 Asociación de Ingenieros del Perú. Here technology has acquired unmistakable Peruvian accents.^[113]

[110] Safford, Ideal of Practical (Colombia), esp. ch. 4; Basadre, Historia 4:1583; 5:2084, 2103, 2473; Pardo's push to "middle-class" immigration seen in ch. 5, below. Recall that in 1856 Malinowski ("Memoria") called for an engineering academy; on his commission were the formidable liberal Gálvez brothers.

[111] Macera, "Historia económica como ciencia," 50-51; Basadre, Historia 5:2099, 2103, 2121, 2125-27; Pike, Modern History, 186-90; Cuerpo de Ingenieros, Anales del cuerpo de ingenieros; Anales universitarios del Perú (Lima, 1862-69).

[112] Mariano Amézaga, Problemas de la educación peruana, A. Tauro, comp. (Lima, 1952), 8, and "La facultad de ciencia," sec. 20; among earliest critiques was Manuel Pardo, "Sociedad de beneficencia de Lima," Revista de Lima (1860), in López, Pardo, 405-11; we follow Amézaga populist group in ch. 5, below.

[113] La asociación de ingenieros del Perú (Lima, pam., 1871), 4; the frontispiece displays a seductive muse of "science and progress," who reappears in similar publications; I suspect the group centered around Felipe Arancibia, national engineer active in founding of civilismo (MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," 255).

"Industry and work," the manifesto begins, "are the branches that foster the life of societies"; science explains how "nineteenth-century civilization has surpassed all others." Similar grandiose claims follow. The application of science in Peru, however, was long hampered by "political fratricide." But with peace and guano had arrived this "unique moment of tranquility—and progress in all directions is being woven from below, in a web of iron."^[114] Their transparent rail metaphor seems hardly accidental. Bit by bit, the quality of new scientific methods in mining and agriculture was improving. In the closing section, "What Is Left to Do," the association's aim, their engineering vision, expands—unconstrained by the ordinary scarcities and sobrieties of economics.

Like the arguments of Nystrom and fellow tinkerers, this was a call for science to nationalize—by doing—and by placing science at the heart of the economic process. "Progress and industry have not been represented among us because it has been purchased abroad to simply apply here." In short, Peru had eluded true technological development by importing it wholesale, a perspective shared in more recent agendas of technological autonomy and appropriate technology. The association's solution was direct enough: "Now, it seems, is the time to consider fabricating ourselves what should supply our necessities . . ., fábrica nacional, adequate to our own uses."^[115] Their projects varied but leaned toward domestic capital goods production: "Railroads, bridges, docks, boats, machinery, we could easily construct, if we dedicated ourselves to try our work. It should not be said we are at the beginners stage; aptitudes we have, plus energy and sufficient knowledge. One day we must stop living in this odious wardship; we must make industry attain a national character."^[116] This recommendation contrasts with Pardo's simpler import-substitution ideal and in some sense was timely. By the early 1870s capital goods (for railways, mechanizing plantations, mines, and small shops) had risen perceptibly in the Peruvian import bill. Some engineers, as railroads laid them off in the crisis of the mid 1870s, would drift into establishing machine shops, foundries, and pioneer factories.^[117]

[114] Asociación de ingenieros, 11.

[115] Asociación de ingenieros, 20.

[116] Asociación de ingenieros, 20.

[117] William S. Bollinger, "The Rise of United States Influence in the Peruvian Economy, 1869-1921" (M.A. thesis, UCLA, 1971), ch. 1; Grieve, "Artes mecánicas"; Bonilla, "Expansión comercial británica," table 3. During 1870s, capital goods climbed to 8-10 percent of imports, higher in U.S. bill. We explore 1870s "microindustrialism" in ch. 5, below.

Beyond their banner of nationalist capacity (that "odious wardship"), Peru's engineers insisted on its clear economic sense: "We have exported huge capitals in exchange for industry and progress, and these capitals could have been employed in the country with greater profit and economy." The society spelled out its objectives: "promote the fabrication of all types of machinery, adaptable to agriculture, mining, and manufactures," as well as launch a private technical academy, a large model machine shop, and sundry little projects.^[118]

Lima's engineering association left little visible imprint in the 1870s in its hope of capturing and transforming a modest share of Peru's huge public works' expenditures. Nor did their thinking approach the form of peoples' science embodied in the era's coeval craft renaissance, explored below. However, the association faithfully reflected novel mentalities of technical nationalism and the improving "civilizing" mission at the very heart of Peru's railway mania.

A few closing comments are needed on the ultimate outcomes of the subsequent Peruvian railroad boom. How do such ideas tally with the results or with lasting images in Peru's political imagination? This analysis surely suggests that Peruvian leaders had more in mind than go-for-broke export promotion when they embarked on the massive railroad projects of the 1860s and 1870s. How to balance such visions with the ultimate cost of the scheme, which ended so disastrously for Peru, is another question. One wonders about laying blame exclusively on the civilist elite (much less on narrow ideas), for many factors were at work. Paradoxically, the breadth of driving ideas makes a more likely suspect.

One factor was the choice of the flamboyant Yankee Meiggs as chief contractor, who, along with Dreyfus, was charged with spawning the subsequent financial imbroglios. But Meiggs's unrestrained building activity (and by extension, Peru's hefty foreign debt of £35 million) collided head-on with the London market's panic in the early 1870s and with the ensuing world depression. Essentially unforeseeable events, these were the proximate cause of Peru's bankruptcy in 1875, which, among other consequences, doomed most of the railways underway.^[119] Clearly, railroads had always been (in Hunt's modest phrase) a "risky overinvestment" in one project. Still, this gamble should not negate the

[118] Asociación de ingenieros, 25-27; see Adas, Machines as Measure of Men, 221-30, for comparable railroad (mental) associations elsewhere.

[119] Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," ch. 5; Marichal, Century of Debt Crises, ch. 4; Bonilla, Guano y burguesía, for one dismal evaluation.

fact that large-scale public works were among the few effective means for Peru to benefit directly from guano wealth. State spending was one rational way (given unmanageable exchange rates) to keep export income working in domestic markets.^[120]

Historians often fault widespread elite corruption, extravagance, and ineptitude (not to mention foreign perfidy) as the fatal blows to Peru's public works program. But rarely can a school of scandals explain much of scale; even in today's Latin America, corruption remains a convenient factional shibboleth, with, in relative terms, modest economic costs. For the guano age, this ad hominem imagery is traceable to Fernando Casós's caustic anti-oligarchic (and highly political) 1870s novel Los hombres de bien —which also exemplifies the critical bent of prominent liberal writers.^[121]

Swindlers and dreamers no doubt had their day, but impersonal forces and compelling ideals were also at work. At base, Peru faced the same difficulties suffered by all Latin American countries in railroad development—and even more so. Because of extraordinary geographic challenges and an extremist strategy of building ahead of demand, Peru's railroads, most notably the line way up to Jauja, became mile for mile the most expensive in history. Meiggs was a talented promoter, and as engineering (and touristic) feats his vertiginous railroads remain a marvel. But as critics point out, these were basically "railroads to nowhere," a lunatic passage to "the moon." As such, they took years to turn profits and stimulate the sorts of commercial payoffs and development imagined at the onset; some never did. The first lines of the mid 1870s were clearly operating at a loss and came quickly under fire. Somehow the uninspiring mules survived the competition!^[122]

The why of this dismal economic result remains obscure, even in a strict accounting sense. Financial tomfoolery aside, Peru's losses suggest some powerful noneconomic motives at work. On the face of it, the notion of modern communications appears rational enough—though Candide-like extreme rationalities often run the risk of lunacy. Railroad unprofitability is not explicable by simply projecting a Fogelesque North

[120] Hunt, "Growth and Guano," 107-9.

[121] Stewart, Meiggs, passim; see Basadre, Historia 5:2153-56, on Casós's impact (prominent, with anticivilist González Prada, in Stewart's old formulation).

[122] Stewart, Meiggs; Bonilla, Guano y burguesía, ch. 1; Miller, "Railways and Economic Development," only economic study; Juan Ignacio Elguera, Memoria presentada por el ministro de hacienda y comercio a la legislatura ordinaria de 1874 (Lima, pam., 1874), for early recognition.

American thesis onto Peru (the idea that nineteenth-century railroads represented unnecessary social investments). It was precisely in underdeveloped mountainous regions, as John Coatsworth persuasively proved for Mexico, that the railroads' social savings and boost to productivity were unmistakable, since no alternative transport innovations sufficed. This is not to mention the intrinsic difficulties, anywhere, in measuring the many external economies of transport.^[123] For Peru, clarifying profitability issues gets even thornier. The physical devastation, financial collapse, political turmoil, and two-decade depression that followed the Pacific War made all types of economic expansion improbable, directly impinging on both the forward impact and book profitability of the railways. By the time Peru fully recovered, the automotive truck was becoming an efficient alternative and effectively finished national integration during Leguía's road-building drive of the 1920s. Nor are the sociological counterfactuals—the notion that Andean "feudalisms" somehow blocked the dynamic impulse of railroads—very convincing ground, since most recent studies of rural society reject that immobile image of Andean social structure.^[124]

Above all, the evidence of railway unprofitability itself belies notions that railroads were born from monomaniacal desires to capitalize on Peru's potential export resources. In that scenario Peru would have built railroads to somewhere, as so clearly occurred in profiting Mexico, Argentina, and Brazil. The major factor behind Peru's fiasco—and global default—was that railroads did not link as yet economically significant zones and thus did not bring new exports into line, dilemmas recognized at the time from London to Lima and in Meiggs's last-ditch exporting schemes. Silver, for example, Peru's most marketable Andean export, hardly required railways to prosper, as it was such a high-value-to-weight item.^[125]

[123] John. H. Coatsworth, Growth Against Development: The Economic Impact of Railroads in Porfirian Mexico (De Kalb, 1981).

[124] On roads, see Fiona Wilson, "The Conflict Between Indigenous and Immigrant Commercial Systems in the Peruvian Central Sierra, 1900-1940," in R. Miller, ed., Region and Class in Modern Peruvian History (Liverpool, 1987), 125-61; or Mallon, Defense of Community, chs. 6-9. Gootenberg, "Population and Ethnicity," for new rural research; Bonilla, Guano y burguesía, epilogue, for thesis of precapitalist block and civilist failure; only Bollinger, "Bourgeois Revolution," 32-33, suggests a successful forging of rural proletariat.

[125] Julio Revilla, "Loan Frenzy and Sovereign Default: The Case of Peru in the Nineteenth Century" (typescript, Boston, 1990), concurs in economics; William Clarke, Peru and Its Creditors (London, 1877), 61-71, for Meiggs's critique of "beautiful theories" and own efforts to redirect rails to Cerro exports; by then, Meiggs felt guano had hurt Peruvian productivity; Topik, Political Economy of Brazilian State, ch. 4, on integrative and political aims of even coffee railroads.

In Peru other considerations—noneconomic idealisms of regional integration, diversifying development, social and civil stability, technological tutelage—were brewing in the minds of those who directed the lines into obscure and primitive corners of the country. Ultimately, railways might best be judged by those idealist standards, even if problematic on their own integrationist terms. Such utopias rarely run on short-term accounts. Utopias are always "nowhere."

With a long lag, in some zones, Peru's railroads did stir commercial life and even a degree of capitalist modernization, as some have shown precisely for Junín. But such gains were obscured by other unintended outcomes, well past the disasters of the Pacific War. Because of Peru's massive default, the finished trunk lines became largely foreign-owned after 1890 (as part of the Grace contract settling Peru's delinquent external debt). Peru thus lost the one concrete legacy of its guano age, a nationally owned communications network.^[126] Subsequently, in the early twentieth century, foreign firms manipulated the lines to advance their new export enclaves, as occurred quite scandalously with the U.S. Cerro de Pasco Copper Corporation in Junín. Strong nationalist sentiments ensued against the railroads in general, now clearly associated with imperial enclaves; among other factors, this politics colored lasting perceptions of their origins. A dispassionate history of Peruvian railroads has yet to be written. But post facto reasoning from painful legacies of the civilist project barely conveys the original intent of thinkers such as Pardo.

Luis Benjamín Cisneros: Neoprotectionist Turn

For Pardo and countless rail pamphleteers, rural manufacturing was imagined as one beneficial, if natural, side effect of national

[126] See Samuel Velarde, Deuda externa y ferrocarriles del Perú (Lima, pam., 1886); Rory Miller, "The Making of the Grace Contract: British Bondholders and the Peruvian Government, 1885-1890," JLAS 8 (1976): 73-100; Miller, "Railways and Economic Development"; Mallon, Defense of Community, ch. 5; Peter Klarén, Modernization, Dislocation, and Aprismo: Origins of the Peruvian Aprista Party, 1870-1932 (Austin, 1973), 71, 125. By 1915 rail renationalization became a formal anti-imperialist (and later APRA) cause, yet even free-traders (like Gubbins in 1900) attacked foreign transport monopoly.

integration and a productive use of guano. A more concerted, intricate, and striking industrial proposal appeared in 1866: Luis Benjamín Cisneros's landmark study, Ensayo sobre varias cuestiones económicas del Perú, usually heard as a clarion call for fiscal reform.^[127] Apart from its profound impact on the fiscal restructurings of the late guano age, Cisneros's 150-page book marks three innovations in Peruvian diversification thought. First, in a novel "structural" analysis of Peru's rapidly gathering crisis, Cisneros brings the state back in—to save it from its own self-destruction. This was a broad plan for forced and accelerated diversification, which could no longer be left to the magic of markets or railways. Second, Cisneros does not blithely pass over thorny issues of consumption trade-offs or tariffs; he critically reformulates protection as a key component in Peru's diversifying development. Third, Cisneros departs by championing manufacturing as a direct solution to Peru's impending crisis, backed by a new and wider set of institutional supports. In short, the Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas was an unmistakably work of the external crisis, whose urgency had become unmistakably clear in the six years since Pardo's warnings. Though this was still not as comprehensive (or political) a response as would come in the 1870s, Cisneros came to critical thought through local dilemmas, apparent in the very form of his neoprotectionist argument. Why did Cisneros push to overhaul Peruvian fiscality? Was his the narrow technocratic answer usually supposed?

A well-traveled and well-versed intellectual and activist, Luis Benjamín Cisneros and Pardo shared remarkably similar careers, social standings, and legacies. Through most of their lives the two budding statesmen relished close personal and business ties, ties finally cut by their political differences of the 1870s. Born in the late 1830s, as a youth Cisneros (like Fuentes) absorbed the last burst of artisan politics; his brother served as legal adviser to the Lima guilds in their troubled year of 1850. By the late 1850s Cisneros had emerged as a leading civil reform thinker, first disseminating his ideas from the platform of the Revista de Lima . A lawyer, senator, and European-based diplomat (his 1866 book was written and published while he was commercial attaché in France), Cisneros went on to become a leading civil ideologue, best known for his contributions to constitutional theory. He also pioneered the romantic novel in Peru: Julia (1860), a scathing critique of Limeño

[127] Luis Benjamín Cisneros, Ensayo sobre varias cuestiones económicas del Perú (Le Havre, 1866), rpt. in Cisneros, Obras completas 3:16-140.

materialism, published serially in the Revista de Lima, and Edgardo (1864), an ambivalent portrait of the volatile caudillo figure.^[128]

Cisneros was also a wealthy banker, among the most active stockholders in Pardo's Banco del Perú and in the late 1870s director of the prominent Banco de Lima. With Pardo, Cisneros crusaded for railroads and public works, heading up the emergency 1867 commission that put Peruvian railway construction on the fast track, as part of the civil team around the Prado regime.^[129] Only in the 1870s did Cisneros and Pardo part political ways, though not so far as to prevent Cisneros from serving as vice president for Pardo in 1872 and on prestigious educational posts. The dissension began in 1869 with Cisneros's outspoken role as principal national defender of the Dreyfus contract—which Pardo hammered against as spokesman for spurned national guano contractors. (To end the controversy, the regime finally ignored the supreme court's verdict against Dreyfus.) Apart from being one of Dreyfus's main Peruvian business partners, Cisneros hoped that the European contract would help rationalize the state (by distancing it from the demands, frauds, and bunglings of national financiers) and thus best expand funding for the development projects all parties were banking on. It was a stance consistent with Cisneros's fiscal reforming zeal, and posed in equally patriotic terms. Later Cisneros embraced the oppositional liberalism of Piérola, leading congressional charges of "socialism" against Pardo's presidential banking regulation.^[130] One of Meiggs's closest associates and friends in Lima, Cisneros in the late 1870s became founder and director of the Peruvian Nitrate Company—Pardo's state-sponsored corporation for extending the fertilizer bonanza. Cisneros's entrepreneurial and political life, obviously, took many turns. Following the Pacific War, Cisneros, like his poet brother Luciano, retreated into his lifelong literary pursuits.

Economic history remembers Luis Benjamín Cisneros best as archi-

[128] Basadre, Historia 3:1742, 1886-87; Revista de Lima (1860); Comercio, 20 Aug. 1850, for brother's artisan involvement (defending against Echenique merchant contracts); Edgardo, in Basadre's reading, was a call for "peace, order, and social and national solidarity."

[129] Milla Batres, Diccionario biográfico, vol. 1; Camprubí, Historia de bancos, 188, 208, 249, 289, 346; Cisneros, Memoria sobre ferrocarriles (1868).

[130] See Luis B. Cisneros, "El negociado Dreyfus 1870," in Obras completas 3:187-227; and later (1874) policy critique of his "joven y ilustrado presidente" in "¿Que no hay remedio?" 3:358-69. Diario de debates, Sept. 1876 (and 1870 for Dreyfus controversy); Stewart, Meiggs . Ulloa, Piérola, is about the only modern book to defend Piérola strategy; but Hunt, "Growth and Guano," 66-67, shows that at the least Peru even raised its profit margins with Dreyfus—to over 100 percent, excluding unknown costs.

tect of Peru's fiscal reform of the 1860s—a Limantour of the guano age. In Peru, unlike científico Mexico, lucid and stringent budgets were not drawn to entice foreign capital in a concerted bid for a stable international "investment climate." The country enjoyed an ample investible export surplus and copious capital flows—from 11 to 20 percent of national product in recent estimates.^[131] Peru's dilemma was how best to manage, absorb, and invest its available funds.

Along this line, scholarship tracing the reform movement that grew into civilismo points to Cisneros, on a par with Pardo, as its ideological mentor. The Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas served as a precision model for Peru's fiscal and budgetary reforms of the late 1860s. Exploiting the praetorian powers and platform of the anti-Castilla Prado regime of 1866-1867, Cisneros and Pardo began the task of rebuilding Peru's domestic tax systems (liberally and foolishly abandoned in the mid 1850s) and of putting an end to the chaotic guano consignment systems.^[132] The general thrust of export and budgetary reformism, promulgated in varied ways by varied regimes over the next decade, was to transform guano into a strictly managed and predictable regularized income, with significant portions earmarked for diversion into public works. The short-term goal was to reverse the fiscal deficits, overseas stopgap borrowing, and financial disarray that had become so destabilizing during the mid-1860s conflict with Spain. Coronel Prado's project was joined by virtually every leading liberal of the age (the two Gálvezes, Lissón, Pacheco, Casós, Químper, and Tejeda among them), despite their militarist aversions; such advisers added a pinch of liberal constitutionalism to the caldron of top-down economic reform. Cisneros's stamp also marked the emergency measures of the Balta-Piérola years (1869-1872); this regime, with its burgeoning ties to Dreyfus and European developmental loans, has been too easily depicted as a clearcut example of entreguismo . Piérola's movement, too, encompassed important reforming elements, as seen in Cisneros's many defenses.^[133]

[131] Hunt, "Growth and Guano," 93-96. Peru's capital surplus (apart from absorption problems) is one reason why Peruvian thinkers and statesmen prove far more flexible with and critical of foreign capital and investment, than say, Mexican counterparts. On Mexican climate, see Alexander Dawson, "Mexico—The Treasure House of the World: Perceptions of Economic Development in Porfirian Mexico" (M.A. thesis, University of Calgary, 1991).

[132] Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," chs. 3-—which integrates Cisneros's literary and fiscal concerns.

[133] On Piérola and Dreyfus, see n. 130, above. See fine analysis of Prado group in Basadre, Historia, vol. 4, chs. 63-64; critical historiography in Bonilla, Guano y burguesía, 54, ("[Pardo] y más tarde Luis Benjamín Cisneros, son los principales inspiradores de la política económica de la emergente elite económica"), 70-116; Cotler, Clases, estado y nación, 104-7; Yepes, Peru 1820-1920, 68-75.

From 1872 to 1876 Cisneros's fiscal blueprint continued to serve Pardo's party, the new civil militants of budget organization and retrenchment. And just as in Pardo's case, Cisneros's original developmental visions remain lost, perhaps in his flurry of public activism and positions. Historians charge that liberal fiscal reform, ignoring the country's structural and social flaws, was as escapist a reform valve as were the civilist railroads. But what was, to Cisneros, the grand purpose of Peruvian fiscal reform? What might a firm hand on export monies achieve?

On the surface, the Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas reads as another call to avert the looming commercial and fiscal crisis of guano exhaustion. Cisneros dedicates his package to Prado's closest circle of advisers—notably the beleaguered "Secretary of Hacienda and Commerce, Manuel Pardo"—with hopes of winning their immediate approval.^[134] It seems neither the ultraliberal nor "neomercantilist" plan variously depicted by historians. It proved a workable policy document—and much more than that in its imagined development.

Characteristically, the Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas opens with a sweeping diagnosis of Peru's commercial boom since the 1850s. It was guano alone that has allowed Peru's two-decade binge of consumption, as most other exports faded. Tapping his own sources and methods, Cisneros reestimates the true Peruvian import bill in 1865 at more than $34 million—double the official figure (of $15 million) and probably an exaggeration. Flattering reader sensitivities, Cisneros takes pains to laud the "progress" worked by this commercial revolution. Guano affluence revived Peru's languishing coastal cities and heralded a new capitalist spirit, remarkably so among merchant activities joined to world trade.^[135] But now, in 1866, this whole style of development has reached its limits—and directly imperils the Peruvian future.

Recalling Pardo's rhetorical query, Cisneros asks, "What will happen when guano is depleted or artificial fertilizers mades?" (The latter prob-

[134] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, dedication, 30. The "neomercantilist" label is (liberal-orthodox) Romero's, "Perú" (310-12), seeing Cisneros as regression from Pardo liberal modernism—a "groserío mercantalismo monetista," obsessed with colonial-style "trade balance." This, too, is a reading corrected by analyzing Cisneros's developmental and budgetary aims.

[135] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 1-27; presumably, Cisneros's insider trade data came from his duties as commercial agent in France.

lem was already emerging in Europe.) All of Peru's midcentury advance "is due to this accidental wealth of the fertilizer of Chincha"—framing guano as the most artificial of Peruvian "industries." As his critique shifts into full gear, Cisneros dubs commercial prosperity as merely superficial: "If we employed all the productive forces of Peru to buy foreign manufactures, as some insist, just how will our cities continue to progress?"^[136]

For a fiscal thinker, Cisneros's boldest move was, in fact, to shift discussion away from technical fiscal recipes to a deeper commercial and structural analysis of balance-of-payment dilemmas. Peru's import mania was the root cause of the country's external crisis. So far, Cisneros cogently points out, only $6 million of guano revenues go to meet foreign debt payments, despite the bad publicity around them. Current budget deficits are even less demanding. What needs much sharper attention, then, are the many millions more—Cisneros's $34 million—needlessly "wasted" on unproductive imports. If Peru wants government to underwrite railways and nationhood, then it must first address those losses. Peru's national dilemma is not how to pay off debts and consume French luxuries but how to reduce drastically its commercial dependence. Cisneros's answer is a rigorous and permanent cut in imports.

Cisneros's critical eye on guano consumption was not so uncommon by the mid 1860s, and it was not the prerogative only of miserly and jealous artisans. For example, Carlos Lissón (a leading liberal educator, Prado adviser, pioneer sociologist, and later civilista founder) wrote scathingly of fictive prosperities in his 1865 La república en el Perú, a social study steeped in the anti-Spanish nationalism of the day. Lissón decried Peru as a truly "poor" country, dangerously deluded by illusions of export wealth, lacking in true and progressive entrepreneurs. Its "Indians, agriculturalists, mestizos, tailors, and shoemakers" are all choking in the lap of others' passive luxury. More generally still: "A country's wealth is not some easy deduction of its soil. That can be very poor and its inhabitants very rich, and vice versa. Just look what happened to Potosí and Pasco. What will be left in time from guano?"^[137] Instead of a "lottery" of giveaways to the country's "nobility," Lissón calls on Peru to

[136] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 26, 29-31.

[137] Carlos Lissón, La república en el Perú y la cuestión peruano-española (Lima, 1865), 73-74; we explore anti-Spanish nationalism with artisan politics in ch. 5, below. Lissón, a volunteer artisan teacher, explores issues further as positivist in Carlos Lissón, Breves apuntes sobre la sociología del Perú en 1886 (Lima, 1887), 69. Basadre, Historia, vol. 3, chs. 52-54. Cisneros shared in anti-imperial movements: see poem "Al Perú" (1864), rpt. in Obras completas 1:121-22.

educate and produce a productive citizenry. Cisneros codified these growing misgivings into a concerted government program. Pardo had evinced idealisms of productive diversification; Cisneros demanded that the state make them happen.

The core chapter 2 of Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas is titled simply "Industria"—that nineteenth-century catchall term for all kinds of productive work. Here Cisneros covers the usual array of formulas to foster Peruvian "industry": stable public peace, less urban welfare empleomanía, irrigation schemes (like his brother's for the south), public investment banks, scientific schools and experimental stations for regional agriculture and mining, chartered companies for resource development—and, of course, Andean railroads. Regarding the latter, Cisneros proves as devoted to the creed as Pardo: "The wealth that railways are destined to create and develop in the interior of the republic will be sudden and beyond our wildest expectations."^[138] Yet Cisneros knows that mere faith in the good works of railways no longer suffices.

Along with these projects runs a retrospect critique of letting commercial progress run an unguided course. Cisneros's synopsis of the first half of the export age could have awakened Peru's Casanovas from oblivion: "And had we devoted the huge revenues of guano to create new industries, to foster those we have, or to help exploit the overflowing commercial resources that nature gave us—in this way, we would have opened in the country a thousand spheres of industrial activity, in which every man and family would have found their elements of subsistence—and future."^[139] To Cisneros, undisciplined commercial growth was not just behind Peru's macroeconomic instabilities but, as artisans would have it, was the root of the country's unsettling social problem. The pervading social theme of Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas is this struggle against "empleo-necesidad." Cisneros invents this term for bloated public employment to emphasize diminishing possibilities in the private sector—idleness caused by Peru's rentier economy.^[140] Public employment not only drains the national treasury but is politically

[138] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, ch. 11, "Industria," 29-37 (quote p. 34). Cisneros's Memoria sobre ferrocarriles (1868), discussed above, was largely technical, not developmental, study.

[139] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 31.

[140] Maiguascha, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," chs. 3-5, analyzes this theme. Hunt, "Growth and Guano," 80-83, however, dispels the notion of public employment itself as a wasteful cause; not only were real salaries and expenditures decreasing, but much of this spending was "developmental"—in education, health, public works.

explosive for the state, the calling card of restless caudillos and clients everywhere. Industria for the masses is the sole guarantee of civil rule, regional peace, and development, by now a ubiquitous standard. Paradoxically, in Cisneros, building an autonomous and stable state—his ultimate aim—requires its productive activism.

Having isolated Peru's social and fiscal quandary, the Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas abruptly turns to more specific "Industrias de fábrica y manufactura." Over the next pages Cisneros presents, as the centerpiece of reform, a plan for state-sponsored industrialization—or as he puts it, "the road to an industrial future." The journey begins, however, by turning back to Peruvian historical experience. Like others, Cisneros knows his European theory (the book was composed and published there), but he grounds his analysis in Peruvian realities, in what we would now consider a structural argument. The shortage of native manufacturers was driving Peru's import overload—reaching the breaking point with the 1860s hike in world industrial prices. The roots go deeper, however, into the historic market orientations of would-be native import substituters.

Everyone knows that the scarcity or, better put, total absence of factories and grand manufactories has made it necessary for Peru to import virtually everything needed for a comfortable life. Sure, our artisans work with some regularity on shoes, clothing, and furniture. But naturally they have never achieved the level of perfection of the Europeans—which is why the majority of such goods consumed throughout the republic fare from foreign lands.^[141]

Quoting Fuentes to establish his points on consumption, guilds, and factory failures, Cisneros paints that conventional image of a guano-age Peru clothed "from head to foot" by foreigners.^[142] This "shortage" of national goods has a cause, but it is not the liberals' imagined shortage of native labor. Cisneros's analysis zeroes in on the misdirected luxury orientation of urban artisan production; local crafts stood little chance of competing with overseas goods in refined, Westernizing elite markets. This conundrum originated in deeper historical-commercial trends—intensified since Peru's 1820s opening to Atlantic trade—which ingrained

[141] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 29.

[142] Cisneros also uses Fuentes, Estadística de Lima, on tariff needs; sole study mentioning Cisneros's industrial idea is Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," 131, 157.

the "taste, need, and economy for European imports throughout Spanish America . . . and which has made us realize the low quality, vulgarity, or primitiveness of all our industries."^[143] In other words, Cisneros is not talking about cost factors, as Casanova and Pardo had in their different ways; indeed, he has little to say on comparative advantage or even terms of trade. Colonially forged tastes and colonially structured crafts could not survive Peru's critical nineteenth-century moment of incorporation into the Atlantic world—leaving discontinuities and gaps in indigenous production. Cisneros's diagnosis approaches modern structural analyses of lagging industrialism in the commercially and culturally created Third World.^[144]

Cisneros cannot romanticize Peru's backward ("vulgar") artisans, who remain just as hooked on imported styles as urban elites. For example, he discusses at length the bustling Limeño tailoring trade requiring reams of costly European cloth. But Cisneros seems to be reacting mainly against the plutocratic version of "civilization," code word for their colonized, imported life-styles. For industrial efforts to succeed in balancing trade, local taste and productive orientations would have to be matched. From Cisneros's pen, this becomes justification for a new type of Peruvian protectionism. To distinguish it from the traditional sorts easily debunked by free traders, Cisneros dubs his "the intelligently applied system of protectionism."^[145] Cisneros takes his protectionist turn.

There are four elements in intelligently applied protectionism, but these "all reduce to one: consolidate the exceptional wealth of guano in order to make it infinitely productive." First, Cisneros comes out for industrial subsidy incentives to cover start-up costs of new factories. Dubbed the "system of direct protection," such guano subsidies bring to mind Casanova's early scheme or the tradition of Continental state workshops. But the state, insists Cisneros, should award monies only to factories that use raw materials abundant in Peru and that enjoy efficient scale. Cisneros thus rules out the "artificial," import-dependent, and petty production of guilds—which neither display dynamism nor con-

[143] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 41-42.

[144] See similar concerns in Celso Furtado, "Subdesarrollo y dependencia: Las conexiones fundamentales," in Furtado, El desarrollo económico: Un mito (Mexico, 1978), 92-114, or David Felix, "De Gustibus Disputandum Est: Changing Consumer Preferences in Economic Growth," Explorations in Economic History 16 (1979): 260-96.

[145] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 37-38, 57.

serve precious foreign exchange. Later Cisneros illustrates the subsidy plan by examples, showing how far a modest annual fund of $200,000 could go in incipient factory enterprises.^[146]

Second, Cisneros extolls the "intelligently applied" use of customs duties—which means applying them only where indispensable, only for industries that can truly be established and multiply, only on a temporary basis, and only with careful foresight and selection. Such strict criteria were informed by Peru's fruitless prior attempts at industrial tariffs and privileges. Cisneros also factors in what is now known as "effective protection"—lower duties for industrial tools and inputs—with its potent protectionist incentives (though at another point he speaks of special subsidies for factories supplying national inputs). Interestingly, with so many criteria to settle Cisneros never specifies Peru's required tariff levels. But his vision is clearly not of a closed economy. He is too sophisticated to pose protection as the liberals' zero-sum choice between related external and internal markets. But his is an explicit plan to reorient Peruvian trade and consumption—the issues that Pardo found too hot to handle.

In part, Cisneros's "intelligent" protection simply affirms a productive and balance-of-payments priority on mass-consumption lines, as others had before. But he is also taking on the free-trader bugbear of "artificial" industries, seemingly confirmed by indiscriminate craft tariffs and factory failures. Cisneros's insistence that guano is the most "artificial" and fleeting "industry" looms central here. Guano revenues must be diverted into productive lines to "free us from the tyranny of foreign markets and procure an element of our own life. The benefits they lend the country are everlasting and thus inestimable."^[147]

What remains murky is why tariffs become the policy tool—if taste preferences (rather than cost) had driven consumers abroad. One suspects that Cisneros, in his budgetary zeal, was simultaneously looking toward revenue raising. The focus on articles of everyday use is decisive, though, for in mass necessities tastes need not pose an insuperable obstacle. Consumer preference might be shifted with temporary tariffs, equal to any premium placed on overseas origin, until buyers learned the insignificance of quality difference. Cisneros opines:

It would be absurd to try to establish now in Peru factories for certain luxury

[146] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 37, 44.

[147] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 44; recall Basadre's "fictious prosperity" periodization—allegedly from Copello and Petriconi (1876)—and more important, the rhetorical and conceptual reversal here of free-trader "fictitious" industries.

goods, for fine cloth for instance, for which we enjoy neither the elements nor advanced industrial skills. But we can create industries for less difficult and widely consumed products. Factories for coarse cottons and woolens, for eating utensils for the poor, for farming tools, and for building materials merit the preferred protection of public power.^[148]

In short, Cisneros wanted to push the style of development previously only fantasized by Pardo—doing so in product lines with decent chances of survival, in lines weighing down the import bill, in lines with wide employment spin-offs, in lines of basic technology. He heralds the successful precedents of Garmendia's Cuzco woolens mill and the sparkling new home-market sugar refinery in nearby Callao. Later Cisneros avers that import quotas would make the most direct instrument for project selection and foreign exchange savings.^[149] If confusions remain, at least Cisneros had the clarity (or courage) to confront needed trade-offs of present consumption for long-term productive investments—issues obscured by those evading tariffs in their plans.

A third element of "intelligent protection" is rejection of all exclusive industrial privileges—a condition harking back to the controversial (and failed) technology monopolies of the half century since independence. This stance also accentuates the liberal spirit and expansive scale of Cisneros's developmental vision, which shares in the wider technological mission of civilist railroad writers.^[150] Finally, returning to Peru's miserable artisans, Cisneros demands "unlimited protection" for the just-opened Lima School of Arts (which we explore later). Such schools will improve their techniques and style, the only way for viable craft competition in upscale markets. And Cisneros, echoing the new regionalist imperatives, is adamant that analogous schools be placed in "every province of Peru" (something civilistas would try). Cisneros thus actively pursues technological innovation and spread, which, significantly, he joins to "intelligent" protection. Ultimately, rural manufacturing will offer steady "work and salary" to poor families, including the debased "indigenous" ones.^[151] Alone, none of these ideas seem startling, having floated around since the advent of the export age. The novelty lay in

[148] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 40-41.

[149] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 37, 41, 76; in 1872 Garmendia and Cisneros would serve as Pardo vice presidents.

[150] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 37; for analysis of monopoly policies, see Gootenberg, "Artisans and Merchants," 101-7; or Salcedo, Memoria de hacienda de 1860, pt. 14, for vast contemporary criticism.

[151] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 37, 40; influence of school seen in ch. 5, below.

Cisneros's integration of these elements into an urgent, encompassing, and activist program.

Peru's last elite protectionist ideas had issued from Casanova virtually two decades before. Cisneros's "intelligently" applied tariffs were a more critical and conditioned variety and came embedded in a new array of positive social supports. His critical edge was sharpened in contrasts with outmoded artisans and with the cutting critiques of a liberal generation. In anticipating potential drawbacks to protection, the Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas exudes a modern flavor (akin to current Latin American and neoliberal critiques of twentieth-century import substitution). Cisneros was concerned that industry genuinely relieve external imbalances, foster appropriate and dynamic technology, and break through monopoly or retrogressive patterns of consumption and distribution—not exacerbate them.^[152]

It is crucial to observe how Cisneros, one of Peru's most cosmopolitan intellectuals, addresses the critics of protectionism, at this the height of free trade's international prestige. At first Cisneros denies his colors: "We are not partisans of the protectionist system; on the contrary, we are zealous for an unlimited liberty of commerce. But in the present economic situation of Spanish America there are exceptional circumstances that make it imperative to grasp the terms of this grave issue."^[153] The disclaimer is not fully disingenuous, for the Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas does embrace expansive tenets of contemporary liberalism.

To define the "exceptional" contexts, Cisneros turns to history, of the proximate nineteenth century, in his defense. His are not just the age-old potshots at Europe's "hypocritical" past. Lagging Latin America won its independence, Cisneros points out, just when Europe was making its greatest strides in industry and marine transport. Overseas goods and examples quickly antiquated Latin American skills, yet they paradoxically inspired desires for national emulation and development.

Now once one grasps these conditions, what system should be employed to create and develop the industries for which we are suited? When the economists discuss the principles of protectionism and free trade, no doubt they have not placed themselves in the perspective of countries without roads and

[152] See, e.g., survey by Catherine Conaghan, James Malloy, and Luis Abugattás, "Business and the 'Boys': The Politics of Neoliberalism in the Central Andes," LARR 25 (1990): 3-30.

[153] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 41; from Casanova on, critics emphasized "exceptional circumstances."

dense populations, and deprived of all types of factories and manufactures. Their doctrines are based on the industrial systems of the European states, more or less rich in workshops and factories. Their own partisans defend the doctrines under the principle of the reciprocal convenience of states, referring only to themselves, and without ever thinking of the situation of the new, small, and distant republics of Spanish America.^[154]

It is not a bad reading of Smith's original realpolitik, though it comes closest to List's national economic system, posed in an "Americanist" idiom. (Cisneros partook of the pan-American movement against midcentury Spanish and French regional imperialism.) Several ideas are packed in here. One is identification of a pressing national development gap: could trade alone bridge it? Another is historical relativism: political economy had indeed ignored non-European lands (save for its orientalist brush on Asia). Were its universalist assumptions of factor mobility, for example, correct here, or did new states have to take a leading role in forging market conditions? At the least, Cisneros contests that natural-selection version of static comparative advantage that had filtered to free-traders in the Americas, so amenable to colonial-physiocratic partisans of a país minero y agrícola. Cisneros focuses a nationalist lens on a pivotal juncture in world economic history. Peru must struggle, in its national interest, against being relegated to the lower rungs of economic specialization. Other writers would follow up, in a kind of local, nineteenth-century dependency thought. Analogies aside, Cisneros genuinely argues against all "imitative" systems, as, for example, when taking swipes at statist French models. Each "constellation of states"—Spanish America in his case—must decide its own preference, and if it be protection, it must follow the "general interests of the nation."^[155]

Of greater historical import is why protectionist thought revived in the Peru of the mid 1860s. Two speculations, ideological and political, help make sense of Cisneros and relate to his mission of bolstering the Peruvian state. The first concerns the ideological power of free trade among the guano-age elite, an appeal that had outlived its usefulness to emerging state builders.

At its apex in the early 1860s, free trade was largely an ingrained

[154] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 42; mention of transport bottlenecks, of course, is not accidental.

[155] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 42-43; see analogy in Senghass, "List and Problem of Development," or Will, "Classical Economics in Chile." Esteves and Copello and Petriconi, below, for "dependency" notions.

legacy of the successful liberal state building of the previous generation (i.e., its coeval rise with elite political stability and capitalization of the 1850s). It was a congratulatory ideology synonymous with elite order and progress.^[156] But by the 1860s free trade had assumed a stultifying rigidity. In 1864 Peru's minister of finance was still busy extirpating ghostly "ideas of the protective system, mistaken in theory, absurd in practice"; Peru needed only its "natural industry" of agriculture and mining, "which are recognized by science over fabrication, which still can't root in our soil." Congress took similar extremes, for example, rejecting any supports for national foodstuffs farmers in 1862 on the grounds that contagious "protection is all illusion." In 1864 even the military's plans to build a reliable national armory (on the Springfield system) in the secure Jauja valley were thrown out, as Deputy Silva Santisteban put it, "because manufactures are not for all countries"—gleefully reciting the fate of Casanova's cottons!^[157] In liberal Peru not even national security made a tenable exception to laissez-faire, not even as Spanish fleets besieged Callao. Official liberalism took its starkest form in that classic, guano-soaked slogan of Silva Santisteban: "'Tis better to pay for all manufactures than know how to make 'em."

Cisneros stood this slogan on its head. To concerned statesmen, such ignorance was no longer better. Clearly, it would soon be impossible to pay for lavish imports—as drilled home in the 1860s by topsy-turvy terms of trade brought about by the U.S. Civil War, the cotton famine, swinging guano revenues, and the frightful experience of the Spanish war, which exposed the almost lethal frailty of public finance. The state needed the flexibility now to set priorities regarding import consumption, fiscal and military survival, expansion of services, and national development. Peruvians were even resisting the modicum of domestic taxation as a confiscatory market infringement. As Peru's fiscal breakdown became imminent, unbending allegiance to free trade was becoming an anachronistic threat to the viability of the state—and the state was the life force of Peruvian liberalism and its Limeño constituency.^[158]

[156] Gootenberg, "Beleaguered Liberals," 79-89. For sample contemporary ultraliberal view, see El Perú y la influencia europea (Paris, 1862), 13, 23, 27—a virtual call for liberal neocolonization of the country.

[157] Ignacio Noboa, Memoria que el ministro de hacienda y comercio presenta al congreso de 1864 en los distintos ramos de su despacho (Lima, pam., 1864), 27-28; Diarios de debates, Oct.-Dec. 1862, July 1864. Silva argues: "It is necessary to grasp that not all pueblos are fit for all things—look at the results obtained when the cottons factory was tried, full of illusions, then disillusions. Manufactures are not for every country" (171).

[158] Pardo, Memoria de hacienda y comercio (1867); Cisneros always argued with state "autonomy" in mind, as in "Negociado Dreyfus" (1870), which defends (211) contract as the "2 de mayo de nuestra hacienda pública"—date of Peru's triumphant 1866 victory over Spain. See Topik, Political Economy of Brazilian State, for general model of export-led polities assuming interventionism for reasons of state; or Ronald Berg and Frederick Weaver, "Toward a Reinterpretation of Political Change in Peru During the First Century of Independence," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 20 (1978): 69-84, for (ambiguous) Peruvian political class autonomy.

Cisneros (despite his later assaults on Pardo's fiscality) is interesting for the ideational flexibility he reveals among high financial, official, or commercial circles. Men such as Cisneros and Pardo did not have to regard an export economy as a zero-sum game with domestic development, nor did they necessarily fear elevated tariffs. To them, policy was not religion but a political, practical, and protean reason of state.

Second, Cisneros was also likely grappling with the rise of a more rigid and genuine class (not just ideological) interest in free trade—though we still know precious little of these elite configurations. By the early 1860s a new Peruvian planter export group was rapidly taking root along Peru's central and northern coast. The planters' progress leapfrogged with the decade's remarkable world cotton and sugar prices (the result, again, of the U.S. and Cuban civil wars), with more than 250 modernized plantations dominating nonfertilizer exports by the mid 1870s. Millions of soles of guano revenues recycled through Lima's new agrarian mortgage bank, the Banco Hipotecario Territorial, infused the coast, in one of the few diversifying developments of the decade. The nouveaux riches, such as the Aspíllaga clan of Pisco and Saña or the agrarian banker Aráoz, quickly positioned themselves in politics, organizing their neighbors and clients into a unique lobby on Lima and intertwining with the country's top commercial and financial circles. To Peruvian planters, unlike erstwhile merchant and political elites, free trade and laissez-faire were indeed bald economic imperatives: for securing low-cost imported machinery, for competitively placing their products abroad, for preventing dreaded export levies, and for halting the diversion of scarce labor into alternative activities.^[159] The sugar planters were the germ of the rigidly liberal Peruvian ruling group that would plague crisis-prevention efforts such as Cisneros's, placing constraints on the notable autonomy of the guano-age state. By 1867 they had already forced Minister Pardo's resignation over his fiscal plan

[159] Engelsen, "Social Aspects of Agricultural Expansion," ch. 5, and esp. ch. 7; Pablo Macera, "Las plantaciones azucareras andinas (1821-1875)," in Macera, Trabajos de historia 4:116-50; MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," 221-22; or Vincent Peloso, "Entrepreneurs and Survivors in Rural Peru: Planters, Peasants, and Cotton in the Pisco Valley, 1840-1940" (typescript, Howard University, 1991), ch. 2, on export development and emergent planter politics.

(based on Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas ) to enact a trifling 3 percent export tax. (Pardo later confessed, "It collided with a great number of interests, from the most elevated sectors of our society.") In the early 1870s planters joined the civilists in droves, organized regional Juntas de Agricultura, and set themselves up in a potent Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura, further complicating or neutralizing autonomous policy initiatives. In part, sugar was becoming king because it was producing royal amounts of foreign exchange (over 12 million soles in 1876, three-quarters of agrarian exports)—most of it out of the state's needy reach. Neoliberalism was as contagious as protection.^[160] By then Cisneros himself had turned antistatist, in the congress defending bankers against Pardo's tyrannical "socialism" (i.e., efforts to stabilize unbacked bill emissions and establish a workable national currency).

In the mid 1860s Cisneros, of the wide-ranging and literary urban elite, was exposing the dangers of a structurally embedded liberalism. His scant detail on recommended levels of taxation and tariffs may well have reflected this general political purpose. Still missing, however, was a political strategy for gathering a national developmental coalition to push through his imagined reforms. That would have to wait until the new actors of the 1870s, notably Copello and Petriconi. In any case, the timely interventionist thought of the 1860s hardly arose from thin air.

A host of other detailed and heterodox proposals permeate the Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas . There are plans for apt agroindustries, such as silks and dyes, and here Cisneros speaks obliquely of a colonization "land reform." Quinine ("Peru-bark") collection in the southern Andean rain forest must advance to a "fabrication stage" before export. A full chapter explores the long-controversial issue of a merchant marine, which Cisneros hopes to "Peruvianize" (a term echoed by much later reform-

[160] Despite literature just cited, we lack elite studies precise enough to determine if debates themselves reflected discrete elite economic factions. See Cisneros, "¿Que no hay remedio?" (1874) for his own conversion; quote, Manuel Pardo, Memoria que el exsecretario de estado en el despacho de hacienda y comercio presenta al jefe supreme provisorio de la república (Lima, pam., 1867), 350.

See García Calderón, Estudios sobre el banco hipotecario (1868), for striking example of new agrarian laissez-faire. (He calls for full specialization in coastal exports, partially on the grounds that "Peru can't be a fabricating nation. . . . The Lima factories of silk, cottons, and glass absorbed huge capitals, dying right after birth" [17].) Linked with Piérola's anti-Pardo group, Francisco García Calderón was among the most influential thinkers of the 1870s; e.g., his codifying Diccionario de la legislación peruana (Lima, 1879) brims with invectives against "gremios," "industria," privilegio," etc. See also agrarianist Fernando Casós, La minería y la agricultura al punto de vista del progreso (Lima, pam., 1876).

ists) in state-sponsored shipyards, though to the benefit of all "America." This question galvanized protectionist-liberal polemics of the mid 1860s, with Pardo coming down on the other side.^[161] All sorts of industries must "nationalize" in Peru, claims Cisneros.

Another chapter confronts difficulties at customs, where free-traders always found potent ammunition in the state's fiscal reliance on customs duties and the costly smuggling spurred on by tariffs. In painstaking detail Cisneros forwards administrative reforms to thwart contraband. In an innovative twist he ultimately attributes pandemic contraband to Peru's global structure of commercial dependence; saddled with such an unwieldy variety and complexity of imports, bureaucratic procedures are tough to rationalize and easy to evade. Cisneros also assails government subservience to free-trader merchants as the deeper cause for declining customs revenues.^[162] Tax reform proposals—to counter the fit of liberal generosity in the mid 1850s that left Peru bereft of nonguano revenues—include novel upper-class consumption and export duties, those that Pardo found so hard to realize.

There is the better-known plan for rationalizing the guano trade itself, which found instant and effective partisans in the state. The reform ended long-standing merchant advances, cost-leaky consignments, and international pricing irregularities, not only to raise public profit shares but, equally important, to free guano funds from the pressures of ordinary (and political) expenditures. Its ultimate aim was fiscal austerity not for its own sake but for liberating both the state and ample funds for developmental projects. From a rationalized budget of 25 million soles, some 7 million could then be devoted to "roads, public works, and industries."^[163] In context, "Guano," the final chapter of the book, had been prefaced by five sections laying out the coveted developmental projects. Export and railway reforms, as history tells, proved the easiest to assimilate by Peru's civil elite—because effective political constituencies were already in place and, one suspects, because they could be had without deferred prosperity.

[161] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, chs. 3-4; quinine ideas from M. E. de Rivero studies. See Perú, Congreso, La protección y la libertad: Debates del senado y otros documentos (Lima, pam., 1868), for polemics following Prado purchase of three boats for a "Compañía Nacional de Navegación," after Cisneros's notion. Congressional free-traders killed the project, for "there can be no vacillation. Liberty is alone our cult—for she resolves all social problems" (89)—invoking a bit of liberal social utopianism, too.

[162] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, ch. 4, esp. 78-80.

[163] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, "Huano" and conclusions; see Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," chs. 3-5, for reform movements.

Finally, Cisneros's perspective on the popular classes deserves a fresh look as well, for it proves more elusive than a starkly defined divide between elite and the masses. The technocratic Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas was not openly an essay on the social question. The most obvious social message, from beginning to end, is the forging of social peace through employment—never a revolutionary insight in Peru—and Cisneros's idiosyncratic worries about the pressures of political employment ("empleo-necesidad") on the workings of the state—an exaggerated concern, as modern studies show.^[164] Fiscal reform was sold as a way to ensure "twenty years without anarchy and civil war," the time needed to place Peru on a steady growth path. Throughout Cisneros brandishes a national standard, along with blatant criticism of oligarchic mismanagement and rentier values. The more concealed message is that to progress, Peru must somehow involve its people in production. Surely the mounting urban social unrest of the mid 1860s was on his mind (with xenophobic and bread riots now an inescapable fixture of the urban scene), intensifying his generational obsession with orderly and civil political process. But few of Cisneros's specific proposals reveal a particularly popular bent: at his most radical he calls for enhanced technical training (for decades a guild aspiration) and some lower duties on goods and inputs for popular sustenance and production.

Above all looms Cisneros's larger conception of development itself as the antithesis to fleeting guano abundance and unbridled consumption. Executives and congress must promote "an industrial future" because it is "human work, not minerals, that makes the measure of real wealth."^[165] This was neither the value notion of classical economy nor the industrial ethic of Saint-Simon, nor the capitalist civilizing dreams of nineteenthcentury liberals. It was also a concept that many a local artisan could relate to, as it shared in their own customary ethos of "honorable" and "skilled" trabajo .

Yet at the same time Cisneros firmly rejects the artisan protectionist standard and was clearly not trying to develop or cater to a popular following. The guilds, he claims, cannot be trusted, on their own, to

[164] I.e., Hunt, "Growth and Guano," 80-83, showing declining real welfare transfers and (Cisneros-like) rising developmental funding. Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, conclusions; see also Cisneros, "Consideraciones sobre el contrato de 17 de aug. de 1869" (Obras completas 3:225-35), where he promotes Dreyfus contract as a blow against an upper-class "banker-merchant monopoly" and as "solving forever" "the thirst for material progress."

[165] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 57.

promote productive industry. Such skepticism was understandable after the initial trials of republican trade policy, when guilds still wielded influence. Cisneros knew of the last haphazard artisan campaign of 1849, when each craft promiscuously demanded ever higher tariffs, with scant thought to Peru's fiscal or developmental horizons. The Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas thus cuts directly to deep-seated (and essentially political) dilemmas of applying protection intelligently. Rather than dismiss artisans out of hand (a free-trader reflex of the 1850s), Cisneros proposes here an institutionalized process of industrial and protective project selection. This he conjures as a sort of state control board to avert the irrational sway of popular and parochial group interest:

The government should, for the first time, conduct a serious, careful and effective survey, taking in the views of the guilds of industries in all corners of the republic. In this way, we can discover their true necessities and clearly recognize which industries are those that require a just protection; which would harm the consumer without benefit; and which are ready for even lower duties. This is how protection must be formed, rather than letting them demand of the government. In the latter case, all industries will simply plead for "protection"—without the data and opinions that must be collected by a commission of illustrious and practical men.^[166]

Cisneros, like Fuentes, Pardo, and the railway promoters, was not a democrat in the popular sense of the word. The best turn for policymaking was depoliticizing the state—hardly an inclusive move in a society that naturally excluded most everyone in the streets, villages, and fields. His stance exuded a suspicious class bias and a top-down technocratic sensibility, along with the sensible aversion to the traditional passions of liberal and protectionist politics. In another national context Cisneros would have made a good fiscal científico, working toward a more independent and still exclusionary state.^[167] Later writers, whom we turn to next, would pick up on and extend the dilemmas of popular participation in development. For Cisneros and others of the reformist elite, neither his fellow elites nor the people alone could save Peru from its impending crisis.

[166] Cisneros, Ensayo sobre cuestiones económicas, 76, 74-75.

[167] Cf. Hale, Transformation of Liberalism; or Trazegnies, Idea de derecho (but which omits legal corpus of this "traditional modernizer").