1
Introduction
Guano and Its Discontents

Guano in History

Guano is the dried excrement of seabirds. Just off the Pacific coast of Peru, the right mix of natural conditions—the fertile depths of the Humboldt current, the billions of tiny fish it spawns, the millions of gulls on their trail, the arid specks of land called the Chinchas—left, over the millennia, staggering offshore deposits of bird dung. Literal mountains of it. Rich in unleached nitrogen and phosphorus, guano is the best natural fertilizer known to humankind. Ancient Peruvians, masters of American agriculture, recognized the magical properties of the substance known in Quechua as huanu —knowledge lost, like much else, under the Spanish Conquest. It was left to another world conquest—the English scientific, agricultural, and commercial revolution—to rediscover guano's value in the early 1840s. Shoveled down chutes by coolies into waiting clipper convoys and spread across the fields of England, France, Australia, and the southern United States, Peruvian bird droppings excited one of the busiest global commodity trades thus seen in history. For republican Peru, the next forty years became its legendary "age of guano."

The guano age (1845-1880) is not much remembered for its fertile ideas, much less for its lasting economic progress. Instead, it has become the historical paradigm for a fleeting "boom and bust" monoexport experience. The penurious and revolving caudillo governments of Peru

soon strictly monopolized world trade in guano; it became their commercial gold mine, though made of baser stuff. Over the full four decades Peru shipped out some eleven million tons of manure, which fetched more than $750 million (pesos/dollars) on world markets, a mind-boggling sum in nineteenth-century terms. For Peru, it was a rags-to-riches story: stylish living for citified elites, bloated budgets, millions in fancy imports, a purchased political peace, unlimited access to London credit. In the late 1870s guano reserves inevitably ran down. Saddled with Latin America's largest foreign debt, Peru was unprepared for the crash. It was riches to rags, with nothing to show in persisting economic advance. Peru's historian Jorge Basadre, following Cassandras of the time, aptly dubs the entire episode the "fictitious prosperity."^[1]

The Peruvian guano age had caught the fancy of economists in particular as a font of many lessons or formal models. With rising interest in Third World development, Jonathan Levin first presented guano as the classic case of the deleterious "enclave" economy. Guano was isolated from Peru's domestic development. The trade was financed and exploited by foreign firms, and the beds were worked by insignificant gangs of imported laborers; any remaining revenues were "remitted" abroad through government malfeasance and the elites' lavish orgy of importation. Any growth potential bypassed Peru's immobile quasi-"feudal" society.^[2] Several years after Levin, Shane Hunt, in a trenchant quantitative and conceptual exercise, dispelled this image. Guano engendered a "rentier" economy, much like that of contemporary oil emirates. The problem with guano was no longer its separation from Peru; the government (and its native contractors) managed to retain an impressive 71 percent of final sales and disbursed its benefits in a fairly rational and dispersed fashion. However, guano still proved a great "lost opportunity" for development. Exchange rate distortions, undiscriminating free-trade import policies, and huge, risky state invest-

[1] Jorge Basadre, Historia de la república del Perú, 5th ed. (Lima, 1963), vols. 2-4, La prosperidad falaz, 1845-72: the name derives from policy critiques of Cisneros and Copello and Petriconi explored below. Until the 1860s the Peruvian peso and U.S. dollar shared monetary value and sign; where relevant, they are used interchangeably (i.e., until the post-1862 sol conversion and devaluations).

[2] Jonathan V. Levin, The Export Economies: Their Pattern of Development in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), ch. 2, "Peru in the Guano Age." For economists, Levin's was a key developmentalist critique of neoclassical and Keynesian growth formulas, but historians were unduly influenced by his shaky social grasp of nineteenth-century Peru (e.g., "feudalism," lack of markets, etc.).

ments stymied possibilities for national entrepreneurs, diversification, and gains in domestic productivity.^[3]

Other scholars contest time-honored allegations that Peru lost this chance through the sheer perfidy of overseas firms and imperialists. Peru resisted fitful British pressures to open the trade and drove hard bargains with its major foreign consignees, such as Antony Gibbs and Sons, marketing contracts then fully nationalized by the 1860s. Others argue that Peruvian governments, initially wasteful of windfall resources, had acquired a reforming vision and responsibility by the 1860s. The reforms, however, proved futile in the world economic downturn of the 1870s and the crushing Pacific War with Chile (1879-1881). Recent studies also locate scattered signs of diversifying growth in the guano age: investments in modern coastal sugar and cotton plantations, a spread of markets and modernity to the central highlands region, a consolidating legalist bureaucracy and a viable national finance system.^[4] No single explanation, in short, accounts for Peru's stalled nineteenth-century development. But with little glitter in guano, and a dismal outcome, it attracts few seekers.

The most cohesive and influential conception of the period, however, is the broader sociological one offered by recent neo-Marxist and dependency historians of Peru. The failures of independent Peru, the failures of

[3] Shane J. Hunt, "Growth and Guano in Nineteenth-Century Peru," Discussion Paper 34, RPED, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton, 1973; an abridged published version appears in R. Cortés Conde and S. Hunt, eds., The Latin American Economies: Growth and the Export Sector, 1830-1930 (New York, 1985), 255-319 (we cite detailed 1973 version). Hunt's was part of a larger movement correcting "enclave" models of underdevelopment; yet, indicative of sparse research on the guano age, in two decades no one has tested or challenged the new model.

[4] W. M. Mathew, The House of Gibbs and the Peruvian Guano Monopoly (London, 1981); Mathew, "The Imperialism of Free Trade: Peru, 1820-1870," Economic History Review 21 (1968): 562-86; other works by Mathew; Juan Maiguashca, "A Reinterpretation of the Guano Age, 1840-1880," D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1967 (Maiguashca's and Mathew's unpublished writing are widely recycled by later historians); Nelson Manrique, Mercado interno y región: La sierra central, 1820-1930 (Lima, 1987); Manuel Burga, De la encomienda a la hacienda capitalista: El valle del Jequetepeque del siglo xvi al xx (Lima, 1976), ch. 6; Fernando de Trazegnies, La idea de derecho en el Perú republicano del siglo xix (Lima, 1980); Alfonso Quiroz, Domestic and Foreign Finance in Modern Peru, 1850-1950: Financing Visions of Development (London, 1992), ch. 2. For recent surveys of economic history, Christine Hünefeldt, "Viejos y nuevos temas de la historia económica del siglo xix," in H. Bonilla, ed., Las crisis económicas en la historia del Perú (Lima, 1986), 33-60, or Shane Hunt, "Peru: Interpretive Essay," in R. Cortés Conde and S. Stein, eds., Latin America: A Guide to Economic History, 1830-1930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1977), 547-71.

guano, the failures of the entire "century adrift" became the failures of a class: Peru's would-be ruling class. The civilistas (civil elite) raised with guano could not form a coherent "hegemonic" class "project" for the nation. Removed from national realities, wedded to the coastal export oligarchy, and lacking a genuine national-bourgeois consciousness, Peruvian elites failed to transform into an assertive, progressive, or leading "national bourgeoisie."^[5]

Instead, the born-again Lima plutocracy of guano looked abroad. Elites slavishly imitated European economic liberalism, with a self-serving free trade in their exporter and consumer interests. Libertarian political ideals proved less utilitarian. A Europeanized appendage on a forgotten hinterland, by the 1840s native elites eagerly had joined British capital as the "intermediary" or "comprador class" in the imperial exploitation of Peru.^[6] When the crisis of guano reared itself in the mid 1860s, serious efforts to look inward and socially transform, develop, or involve the larger Peru proved unthinkable. By the 1870s, having assumed fragile power in Lima, civilists seemed oblivious to the dangers of national collapse: band-aid solutions prevailed, ever larger European loans, utopian railroads to extract ever more export revenues. Failing to challenge Peru's foreign dependencies, and failing to address Peru's feeble social cohesion, the truncated project destroyed itself—and Peru—in the conflagrations of the late 1870s.

Clearly, such sociological views evince the profound modern discontent with the age of guano! They also successfully supersede a traditional historiography of liberal ideas and fallen heroes with a biting class and

[5] Major works in "new history" include Heraclio Bonilla, Guano y burguesía en el Perú (Lima, 1974); Julio Cotler, Clases, estado y nación en el Perú (Lima, 1978), ch. 2; Ernesto Yepes del Castillo, Perú 1820-1920: Un siglo de desarrollo capitalista (Lima, 1972); Javier Tantaleán Arbulú, Política económico-financiera y la formación del estado: Siglo xix (Lima, 1983). "Siglo a la deriva" is Bonilla's image of the century, now pervading even popular perceptions.

[6] Luis Pásara, "El rol de derecho en la época del guano," Derecho 28 (1970): 11-33; Jean Piel, "The Place of the Peasantry in the National Life of Peru in the Nineteenth Century," Past and Present 46 (1970): 108-33; Bonilla, Guano y burguesía, ch. 3; Jesús Chavarría, "La desaparación del Perú colonial (1870-1930)," Aportes 23 (1972): 121-53; Enrique Bernales, "La instauración del estado liberal en el Perú," in Bernales, ed., Burguesía y estado liberal (Lima, 1979), 231-75; Pablo Macera, "Algodón y comercio exterior peruano en el siglo xix," in Macera, Trabajos de historia (Lima, 1977) 3:275-96; Efraín Trelles, "Modernidad signo cruel: Curso y discurso de modernizantes peruanos (s. xviii-xix)," in H. Urbano, ed., Modernidad en los Andes (Cuzco, 1991), 135-60. Critical versions of concepts are William S. Bollinger, "The Bourgeois Revolution in Peru: A Conception of Peruvian History," Latin American Perspectives 4 (1977): 18-57, and Trazegnies, Idea de derecho .

global perspective—now our conventional wisdom on guano. As a pioneering new historiography, this view refines elements dominating study of the nineteenth century across Latin America. This interpretation also traverses a specifically Peruvian trail of events and policies, and the forms of class consciousness and formation behind them (though paths through the archives are not yet as developed).^[7] What follows, then—to guide the reader through the present study—is a closer chronological and descriptive survey of the decisive developments in the guano age, based on the social interpretation and its recent elaborations. Then we can properly introduce the broader aims, approaches, and aspects of this book, a new social history of Peruvian economic ideas.

Peru's mishandling of its nineteenth-century opportunities now is traceable to its conservative and inadvertent independence from Spain in 1821. Unprepared for nationalism, feeble and factional civilian elites could offer little governing vision for the fragmented ethnic and geographic concoction that suddenly became "Peru." Instead, Peru broke down into "meaningless chaos" as power fell to feuding caudillo bands, military strongmen who ravished the impoverished land for political spoils over the next three decades. During these turbulent times, British interests also slipped into the vacuum of power, all but capturing Peru's rickety national markets with their new industrial wares. Historians are just sorting out the patterns and nationalist politics behind the era of caudillos.^[8]

In the mid 1840s one steadier caudillo, General Ramón Castilla, finally won supremacy, and with the flush of guano prosperity Peru's weakened elites at last found cause for unity: in rebuilding themselves in guano and trade enterprises. Their mentors and partners in the new

[7] However, much of what new history deems traditionalist (for instance, Basadre's early ensayista books) was often quite sociological and interpretive. Our major empirical gap concerns elite formation; the only work is by Engelsen (coastal agrarian elites), Jacobsen (Puno), Quiroz, and Camprubí Alcázar (commercial-financial elites), barely enough to support class generalizations.

[8] Heraclio Bonilla and Karen Spalding, "La independencia en el Perú: Las palabras y los hechos," in Bonilla et al., eds., La independencia en el Perú (Lima, 1972), 15-65; H. Bonilla, "Continuidad y cambio en la organización política del estado en el Perú independiente," in I. Buisson et al., eds., Problemas de la formación del estado y de la nación en Hispanoamérica (Cologne, 1984), 481-98; Alberto Flores Galindo, "El militarismo y la dominación británica (1825-1845)," in C. Araníbar and H. Bonilla, eds., Nueva historia general del Perú (Lima, 1979), 107-23. Paul Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano: Commercial Policy and the State in Postindependence Peru (Princeton, 1989), attempts to make sense of early commercial and political turmoil.

laissez-faire were the foreign houses that oversaw guano consignment and import trades—a liberal alliance formalized by the early 1850s with overseas trade treaties, foreign debt settlements, and the sanctification of the radical free-trade tariff in 1852. Reconstituted elites (conceived as an "alliance" of aristocratic Lima merchant families with "feudal" sierran landlords) would remain dependent on the Praetorian Castillan state for accumulation.^[9] Their formative event was President José Rufino Echenique's guano-financed "Consolidation" of the internal debt (1848-1853). In a massively venal process, the now solvent state concertedly placed lost fortunes back in the hands of traditional clans (to the tune of $25 million), padded with a host of other privileged giveaways. Recent research amends this view of the consolidation (major benefits went to emerging cosmopolitan commercial groups), yet it stands as the signifier of guano-age "liberalism"—as if the republican ruling class were born from corruption itself.^[10]

By 1860 a true Lima "plutocracy" had blossomed in league with Peru's "order and progress" military. It was, however, a strained alliance, steadily questioned in the era's liberal-conservative polemics. The first step toward civilian hegemony came cloaked in nationalist rhetoric: convincing the state to hand over the chief guano contracts (still held by Gibbs) to the hijos del país, the native merchant clan founded in the internal debt. Their basic aim, however, was to transform themselves into fiscal intermediaries for Peru's increasingly indebted government, which required continuing partnership with overseas finance. Centered around Manuel Pardo's National Company of Guano (1862), the swiftly con-

[9] This alliance notion (and "feudal" nature of Andean landlords) remains very weak: only Florencia Mallon, The Defense of Community in Peru's Central Highlands: Peasant Struggle and Capitalist Transition, 1860-1940 (Princeton, 1983), ch. 2, follows relations between a regional elite and the Lima state; see Nils Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition: The Peruvian Altiplano Between Colonialism and the World Market, 1780-1930 (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1993), chs. 4-6, for study of Andean social relations under export pressure. See also critique in Jacobsen, "Desarrollo económico y relaciones de clase en el sur andino (1780-1920): Una réplica a Karen Spalding," Análisis 5 (1979): 67-82, or Stephen M. Gorman, "The State, Elite, and Export in Nineteenth-Century Peru: Toward an Alternative Reinterpretation of Political Change," Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 21 (1979): 395-418, for political extrapolations.

[10] Bonilla, Guano y burguesía, ch. 1, Cotler, Clases, estado y nación, ch. 2, and Tantaleán, Política económico-financiera, ch. 6 (etc.) use consolidation as class-formation centerpiece; see Basadre, Historia 3:1301-4, for wise speculations on "plutocracy" concept. Alfonso Quiroz, La deuda defraudada: Consolidación de 1850 y dominio económico en el Perú (Lima, 1987), is the empirical revision (and superb social portrait of midcentury elites); a modern commercial nexus (foreign and native) effectively exploited the consolidation.

structed banks of the 1860s reaped speculative fortunes from short-term public lending. The bankers' laissez-faire policy prescriptions wavered between self-serving shelter from public scrutiny (analogous to the hands-off "liberalism" of rural oligarchs) or, as others see it, rational coping with Peru's erratic state.^[11] But with the exception of exporting northern plantations, little productive and diversifying investment followed. Peru's budding dueños del país were coming of age.

By the mid 1860s this commercial class had sparked a protobourgeois civilist movement. Historians trace its ideological lineage to the 1860 Revista de Lima , a literary and political forum that first articulated autonomous elite reformist visions. A change of guard from past theoretical liberals, these "new liberals" remain in most accounts a plutocratic circle of interested exporters. Spearheaded by the banker-politicos Pardo and Luis Benjamín Cisneros, the group's policy goal was to arrest, somehow, the budgetary chaos and economic crisis now discernible with the coming depletion of guano.^[12] Cisneros heralded drastic fiscal reforms to diversify Peru's risky dependence and mismanaged military state. Politically, this meant placing stable civil elites firmly in control of their destiny and interests.

Central to the plan, recent historians concur, was Pardo's vision of "turning guano into railroads." A mammoth program of rail construction across the Andes, financed and guaranteed by the mortgage of guano abroad, would usher in a more lasting export prosperity. Railroads were indeed the nineteenth-century world's symbol of modernizing Western progress, but in neocolonial Peru other meanings prevailed. Civilists were not concerned with integrating a fragmented nation and balancing domestic markets for growth. Instead, they hoped to bind Peru even closer to overseas markets and investors with new mineral and agrarian products. Historians regard the scheme as doomed from the

[11] Bonilla, Guano y burguesía , ch. 1; Yepes, Perú 1820-1920 , ch. 2; see Mathew, Gibbs and the Guano Monopoly , ch. 4, for rounded analysis of contract transfer politics. Such analyses rely on the detailed financial study by Carlos Camprubí Alcázar, Historia de los bancos en el Perú (1860-1879) (Lima, 1957); see Quiroz, Domestic and Foreign Finance , ch. 2, for revisions.

[12] Bonilla, Guano y burguesía , 54-64; Yepes, Perú 1820-1920 , ch. 3; for political outlooks, Margarita Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión en la historia: Golpe de estado, Lima, 1872 (Lima, 1978), chs. 1-2, focusing on relations with popular groups; the original (and reversed) source on La Revista de Lima was Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," chs. 3-4. See Efraín Kristal, The Andes Viewed from the City: Literary and Political Discourse on the Indian in Peru, 1848-1930 (New York, 1987), ch. 2, for latest study; the group shows much imaginative concern with greater Peru.

start.^[13] Heady projections of Andean exports and fiscal excess aside, Pardo's plutocrats could fathom neither the revolution required in greater Peru's archaic social relations nor the need to mobilize the people in forging viable internal markets and industrial futures. Such visions were unthinkable to narrow-minded leaders bent on economic escapism and entranced by inapt foreign models. Though recent work recovers wider economic and democratic facets of Pardo's thought, civilismo meant at best a top-down "traditional modernism."^[14]

By the late 1860s manic railroad construction had taken off, farmed out to the deceptively brilliant impresario Henry Meiggs, Peru's Yankee Pizarro. The class project accelerated with the 1866-1867 dictatorship of Coronel Mariano Prado, during which (finance minister) Manuel Pardo and other civil luminaries from the Revista de Lima assumed direct charge of economic policy. The price tag soared (to fully one-fifth of all guano monies), and Peru gambled its future on an unprecedented series of loans on European markets. Peru's external debt would quickly climb to £35 million (about 200 million soles)—second largest in the nonindustrial world—even as the mountains of guano dwindled.^[15]

In the meantime, however, a dramatic reversal of plutocratic aspirations hit with the Balta-Piérola regime of 1869-1872. Fearful of the Lima finance clique's growing grip on policy and seeking wider funding for the railroads, Coronel José Balta abruptly canceled national guano contracts—awarding all public finance to the better-connected French financier Auguste Dreyfus. A bitter blow to Lima's civil elite, the Drey-

[13] Bonilla, Guano y burguesía , 57-65, ch. 3; Cotler, Clases, estado y nación , 102-4; Guido Pennano, "Desarrollo regional y ferrocarriles en el Perú," Apuntes 5 (1979): 131-51; Pablo Macera, "La historia económica como ciencia en el Perú," in Macera, Trabajos de historia 2:35; negative views originally codified in Watt Stewart, Henry Meiggs: Yankee Pizarro (Durham, 1946).

[14] Frenando de Trazegnies, "La genealogía del derecho peruano: Los juegos de trueques y préstamos," in A. Adrianzén, Pensamiento político peruano (Lima, 1987), 99-133, expounds (with his Idea de derecho ) deeper notion of "traditional modernization"—a modernist project constrained by autocratic/aristocratic values—in serious effort to create intellectual history of guano-age state; Carmen MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo, pensamiento y proyecto político: Aproximación a un intento de modernización en el Perú" (tesis de postgrado, PUCP, 1989), marks subtle extension (unfocused on railways) to Pardo's political thought.

[15] Mounting debt is read as perfidious result of national-foreign alliances; for a dispassionate study, see Carlos Palacios Moreyra, La deuda anglo-peruana, 1822-1890 (Lima, 1983), or Carlos Marichal, A Century of Debt Crises in Latin America: From Independence to the Great Depression, 1820-1930 (Princeton, 1989), ch. 4, which places Peru's debacle in international contexts.

fus contract thus sparked a political mobilization for direct civilian rule, often looked on as Peru's first full-fledged "bourgeois" bid for power. Pardo personally led the liberal assault on unreliable militarism, involving (or using) the Limeño masses at crucial moments of the liberal campaign. The Partido Civil won the 1872 election, ushering in Peru's modern form of plutocratic rule.^[16]

Civilist economic ideals, however, did not shift, even in the face of the crunching fiscal and commercial emergency of the 1870s. Dreyfus and Meiggs continued in their posts, and the civilista regime restricted itself to narrow financial reform, unflinching allegiance to free trade, or utopian liberalisms (such as a fiscal decentralization that bolstered rural powerholders). In 1875 the full catastrophe ensued: the first railroads proved unprofitable (halting construction); guano reserves hit bottom; an intervened banking system tottered; and Peru slid into a world-shaking default. The debt-driven formal economy collapsed amid raging inflation and popular distress. Yet bickering civilistas, without a mass base, did little to reverse course. The root cause of paralysis, speculations go, was their autocratic and rigid mentality of development.^[17] The final move, President Pardo's "nationalist" expropriation of Atacama desert nitrates—the rising world brand of natural fertilizer—simply echoed Peru's exhausted guano strategy.

This ploy also sparked the apocalyptic 1879 nitrates war with Chile. Bankrupt and divided, Peru stood little chance in the conflict. Chile's powerful land and sea invasion (and liberal British aid) revealed everything the guano-age elite had failed at. Lacking national resolve, Peru's top leaders squabbled and fled. Although some popular resistance regis-

[16] Yepes, Perú 1820-1920 , ch. 3; Bonilla, Guano y burguesía , ch. 3; for political manipulations, see Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión , chs. 5-6—revised in MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," ch. 4, by study of civilist popular vision. Bonilla, ch. 2, expounds notion of Dreyfus as foreign robber baron, despite new evidence (e.g., Hunt, "Growth and Guano," 65-67). See Bollinger, "Bourgeois Revolution," 30-33, for civilismo as typical Third World elite movement.

[17] Heraclio Bonilla, "La crisis de 1872, "in Bonilla, Crisis económicas , 167-88; Bonilla, Guano y burguesía , ch. 3; Yepes, Perú 1820-1920 , 96-103; more positive treatment in Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," ch. 5, views Peru as overcoming the external crisis. Tantaleán, Política económico-financiera , ch. 11, speculates on Pardo's new "nationalist" project, an idea stretched to extremes in Enrique Amayo, La política británica en la guerra del Pacífico (Lima, 1988), which takes war as free-trade crusade against Peru. See Robert Greenhill and Rory Miller, "The Peruvian Government and the Nitrate Trade, 1873-1879," Journal of Latin American Studies (JLAS) 5 (1973): 107-31, for cogent evaluation of crisis responses.

tered, indigenous Peruian peoples and laborers, bereft of reasons to defend an imaginary patria , broke down into chaotic ethnic, class, and caudillo rivalries amid a hopeless war.^[18]

Peru's humiliating debacle—and inevitable breakdowns—marked the tragic end of the civilist project. By the 1890s it had led into the new kind of foreign capital dependence—embodied in the 1889 Grace contract—that would gravely limit Peru's twentieth-century possibilities. Thus, Peru squandered the opportunity with guano; indeed, it squandered a century-long possibility of making a viable nation.^[19] The fallout continues to scorch, even in Peru's present distress as a national entity.

The historical trajectories just surveyed from sociological-class views evoke the spirit of all dependency syntheses of Latin American national histories and appear largely on target. Obvious criticisms emerge too. For example, this perspective seems intent on incriminating the ideological blinders or blunderings of Peru's ruling class (itself a sign of modern ideational discontent with guano). It poses voluntaristic, "should have done" radical solutions not readily available to nineteenth-century thinkers or bourgeoisies. It perfunctorily considers social-structural constraints (as in the circular notion that Peru's weak internal markets blocked elites from even conceiving them). It follows dependency constructions everywhere in easy reversals of old heroic figures; here, the "modernizing" Pardista martyrs of liberal iconography become Peru's national villains, an interpretation known since the anticivilist polemics of the turn of the century.^[20] It surely uses a monolithic brush on elite pensadores.

[18] Heraclio Bonilla, "The War of the Pacific and the National and Colonial Problem in Peru," Past and Present 81 (1978): 92-119; cf. Mallon, Defense of Community , ch. 3, and Nelson Manrique, Las guerrillas indígenas en la guerra con Chile (Lima, 1981), which argue for a meaningful nationalist content in wartime social struggles. See Jorge Basadre et al., eds., Reflexiones en torno a la guerra de 1879 (Lima, 1979) for recent war scholarship, esp. class conclusions in Luis Pásara, "El guano y la penetración inglesa" (15-42), and the more nuanced Margarita Giesecke, "Las classes sociales y los grupos del poder" (43-74).

[19] For direct links to the present, see Julio Cotler, Democracia e integración nacional (Lima, 1980), or even Alan Riding, "Peru Fights to Overcome Its Past," New York Times Magazine , 14 May 1989, 43-44.

[20] Scattered critiques exist: Guillermo Rochabrún, "La visión d el Perú de Julio Cotler," Análisis 4 (1978): 69-85 (fundamentalist view of sociology); Dennis Gilbert, La oligarquía peruana: Historia de tres familias (Lima, 1982), 25 (on voluntarism); Paul Gootenberg, "The Social Origins of Protectionism and Free Trade in Nineteenth-Century Lima," JLAS 14 (1982): 345-46 ("internal market" analysis); or Marie-Danielle Demelas, "¿Un libro o un autor a la deriva?" Allpanchis 18 (1983): 205-11 (slanted national perspectives).

For earlier codifications, see José Carlos Mariátegui's 1920s notion of deformed liberal mentalities in "Outline of the Economic Evolution," Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (Austin, 1971), 3-21, and the remarkable synthesis (during new import substitution) by poet-economist Emilio Castañón, "Esquema de nuestra historia económica en el siglo xix," El Comercio (Lima), 28 July 1957.

Such shortcomings can be a call for exploring these problems anew as intellectual history. Historians can start by probing deeper at what the era's political elites actually said and thought about development—for example, about the hoped-for uses of guano wealth, the impetus of foreign trade, the mission of railroads, the wider roles of social reforms in national development. Old thinking about guano may reveal new and broader angles on republican development. Building on the advances of sociological history, this book is an effort to restore the intellectual foundations of Peru's problematic yet formative first century.

Scoping the Study

Latin Americanists and students of economic thought may wonder: What wider good is served by a social history of ideas, about such a historically conditioned concept as "development," and of ideas generated by such a historical oddity as Peruvian guano? This historian, reared in old-fashioned (materialist) economics, is not one to argue that ideas per se dictated the possibilities and limits of economic development in nineteenth-century Latin America—notwithstanding the famous dictum of Keynes. Especially as no Peruvian politician rose forth as slave to these defunct local economists.

Then why is this book different from all other books? First, it aims to address a general gap in the history of Western economic thought: nineteenth-century notions of development and their transmission and transformation in Europe's first postcolonial societies of Latin America. Well over a generation ago, the genesis of modern economic growth theory initially inspired discussions of formal antecedents. Classical Smithian and Ricardian Political Economy (and their forerunners) harbored dynamic elements of growth—concerns soon replaced by the allocative, efficiency, and marginalist Economics of the late nineteenth

century. Development resurfaced as a formal field only with postwar preoccupations with macroeconomic management and the modern discovery of Third World underdevelopment, or so our story goes.^[21] In this telling, the intervening century gets submerged, along with the dissemination of economic ideas, however improvised or practical, to the rest of the world. Indeed, current studies of transmission processes appear narrowly confined to relations between economists and policymakers rather than addressing relations across geographic, political, and cultural space. Economic historians stand alone in plotting the formidable transformations worked by North Atlantic paradigms on the entire globe since 1800.^[22]

Second—to indulge in grander generalizations—the history of economic thought suffers from an enduring divide between the economic and historical professions. Economists remain notoriously wary of intellectual "trespassing." Since the passing of archaic Continental historical economics and the consolidation of modern economics as a positivist quantitative science, the history of economic ideas—unlike the new cliometric economic history—has lost its direct relevance to mainstream theory.^[23] To some, economic thought portends the most dismal of

[21] E.g., Bert F. Hoselitz, ed., Theories of Economic Growth (New York, 1960), esp. essays by Litiche, McKinley, and Hoselitz; John Fei and Gustav Ranis, "Economic Development in Historical Perspective," American Economic Review 59, no. 2 (1969): 386-400; Albert O. Hirschman, "The Rise and Decline of Development Economics," in Hirschman, Essays in Trespassing: Economics to Politics and Beyond (Cambridge, 1981), 1-24. For political angles, H. W. Arndt, The Rise and Fall of Economic Growth: A Study in Contemporary Thought (Melbourne, 1978), esp. ch. 2; J. C. Alcalde, The Idea of Third-World Development: Emerging Perspectives in the United States and Britain, 1900-1950 (Lanham, 1987)—an aptly Peruvian view of the north.

[22] Joseph J. Spengler, "Notes on the International Transmission of Economic Ideas," History of Political Economy 2 (1970): 133-51; A. W. Coats and David Colander, eds., The Spread of Economic Ideas (Cambridge, 1989), esp. editors' introduction lamenting primitive state of field, even among distinguished economists represented. Also Alexander Gerschenkron, Economic Backwardness in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1962), one of the last offshoots of the historical-institutional school. Noneconomists, however, are widening approaches to the transculturation of ideas; see, e.g., vanguard literary analysis in Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992).

Sociological "world-systems" analysis rekindles some interest: see Wallerstein's series "Developmental theory Before 1945," Review 13-14 (1990-1991), esp. Jean-Yves Grenier, "La notion de croissance dans la pensée économique française au 18° siècle (1715-1789)," vol. 13 (1990): 499-550; Bipan Chandra, "Colonial India: British Versus Indian Views of Development," vol. 14 (1991): 81-167; and Dieter Senghaas, "Friedrich List and the Basic Problems of Modern Development," vol. 14 (1991): 451-67.

[23] Hirschman, Trespassing ; Donald Winch, "The Emergence of Economics as a Science, 1750-1870," in C. Cipolla, ed., Fontana Economic History of Europe (Glasgow, 1973) 3:507-60; Gunnar Myrdal, The Political Element in the Development of Economic Theory (1929; rpt. New Brunswick, 1990). Hirschman, Gerschenkron, and Hoselitz were the remarkable refugee cohort, eclectic offspring of German historicism, who basically founded modern development; but cf. Gershenkron's influential address "History of Economic Doctrines and Economic History," American Economic Review 59, no. 2 (1969): 1-17, which formalizes split of economic history and economic thought.

Donald N. McClosky, The Rhetoric of Economics (Madison, Wis., 1985), is sole serious "postmodern" critique I know of, from this a vigorously Chicago economic historian. Apart from Marxist scholars, bastion of economic thought is group around History of Political Economy, a journal whose acronym (HOPE ) speaks to their professional marginality.

sciences, given its implied historical relativism of theory. From the economists' perspective, ideas remain a curiosity field, one hermetically sealed from the social and temporal bearings of most working historians.

Historians, for the most part, stand equally guilty of neglect. The materially oriented practitioners of the last generation—the new social history—routinely dismissed economic thought as "ideology." We comfortably inferred its rationalities from convergence with "interest" and its aims from the most tangible of social and class outcomes. Only popular economic mentalities deserved and won greater historical subtlety, diversity, and respect. And isolated from these trends, traditional varieties of intellectual history withered in their vineyard of rarefied philosophical and political themes.^[24]

The recent "turn" of the historical left to cultural and rhetorical analyses holds a rich future for intellectual studies. Yet of all the diverse discourses under deconstruction, economic ideas still seem the least represented or welcome.^[25] Born of ancient aversions to scientistic "bourgeois" economics, this neglect also epitomizes today's easy stampede away from any topics smacking of the materialist and structuralist modes.

Before we turn too fast and trip back into old idealisms, a case must be

[24] For relevant examples, Noel W. Thompson, The People's Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis, 1816-1834 (Cambridge, 1984); Maxine Berg, The Machinery Question and the Making of Political Economy, 1815-1848 (Cambridge, 1980); and in the new mode, Garth Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History, 1832-1982 (Cambridge, 1983). As "ideology," see Louis Dumont, From Mandeville to Marx: The Genesis and Triumph of Economic Ideology (Chicago, 1977), or Albert O. Hirschman, "The Concept of Interest: From Euphemism to Tautology," in Hirschman, Rival Views of Market Society (New York, 1986), 35-55.

[25] See, e.g., Dominick LaCapra and Stephen L. Kaplan, eds., Modern European Intellectual History: Reappraisals and New Perspectives (Ithaca, 1982); Lynn Hunt, ed., The New Cultural History (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989); Roger Chartier, Cultural History (Ithaca, 1988)—all notable for absence of economic ideas. Some efforts surface in recent Geertzian wanderings of William Reddy or Pierre Bourdieu's strained transfer of Marxist economic categories to "cultural production."

made for a reintegrative social history of economic ideas. Economic thought makes fertile ground—for bridging our fading determinisms, the indispensable achievements of social history, and the rising culturalist historical mood. Economic thought evokes texts and intertextualities, to be sure, but by nature never strays (too far) from their material and political groundings, contexts, and dilemmas.^[26] It crisscrosses classes and cultures and in this case goes well beyond European canons and cores. It actively trespasses on the economists' abandoned realm, without provoking a shooting spree. The history of economic ideas can no longer be orphaned; for at its best, it reconciles our increasingly estranged families of history.

Third, this book may also be a different sort for Latin Americanists. Nowhere is the chasm deeper between mental and structural approaches; nowhere is the study of economic thought both so promising and neglected. In the postwar era, with accelerated import-substituting industrialization and the coeval rise of the Latin American CEPAList school of structuralist economics, historians turned to the evolution of regional economic thought. This, too, was a brief detour, in search of national routes of development or the overwhelming force of North Atlantic thinking.^[27] By the 1960s such concerns had been smothered under the avalanche of Annalesque, neo-Marxist, and dependency studies, both here and there, which swept ideas into antiquarian corners. This massive production of economic and social histories, if exceedingly productive, proved exceedingly broad as well. Little room was left in history for conserving intellectual and political creativity and choice, particularly among maligned historical ruling elites. Since then intellectual culture has been left to our historically mindful but economically

[26] For definitions and critiques of social history of ideas, see Robert Darton, "In Search of the Enlightment: Recent Attempts to Create a Social History of Ideas," Journal of Modern History 43 (1971): 113-32; Dominick LaCapra, "Rethinking Intellectual History and Reading Texts," in LaCapra and Kaplan, Modern Intellectual History, 47-85; or Roger Chartier, "Intellectual History or Sociocultural History? The French Trajectories," 13-46. Notable applications to economic ideas (with great political range) include Gertrude Himmelfarb, The Idea of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York, 1985), esp. ch. 1 discussion, and Joan W. Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York, 1988), pt. 3.

[27] E.g., Celso Furtado, Economic Development of Latin America: A Survey from Colonial Times to the Cuban Revolution (Cambridge, 1970); Luis Ospina Vásquez's classic La industria y protección en Colombia 1810-1930 (Medellín, 1955); Luis Roque Gondra et al., eds., El pensamiento económico latinoamericano (Mexico, 1945). North American interest was also short-lived, as in Robert S. Smith, "The Wealth of Nations in Spain and Hispanic America, 1780-1930," Journal of Political Economy 55 (1957): 104-26; Robert M. Will, "The Introduction of Classical Economics into Chile," Hispanic American Historical Review (HAHR ) 44 (1964): 1-21.

illiterate literary and anthropological specialists.^[28] Now, for varied reasons, these boundaries are shifting.

Implicitly, however, ideational arguments always pervaded the region's structuralist historiography, particularly in the dominant dependency synthesis of the formative national era. Economic ideals implicitly served to construct Latin America's "neocolonial" century to 1930. Erratic postcolonial experiments in political and social liberalism, it is now argued, brought few lasting or genuine consequences. But imported economic ideals—the "unifying myth of liberalism"—were another story. The region's nineteenth-century "liberal pause" augured terribly tangible economic legacies: the creation of dependent export and financial structures, capitalist modernization from abroad and above, delayed industrialism—the whole gamut of social and regional disparities bequeathed by the 1850-1930 age of "outward-oriented" growth. Indeed, feverish imitation of Anglo-Saxon free-trade and laissez-faire ideologies made Latin America the purest outpost of liberal orthodoxy in the nineteenth-century world, in this its first true encounter with capitalist modernization.^[29] As seen in the sociological interpretation of Peru, determining economic ideas essentialized the neocolonial order.

Few scholars openly confess that conviction: the nineteenth century as economic "culture conflict." One who has done so deems the encoun-

[28] See Charles A. Hale, "The Reconstruction of Nineteenth-Century Politics in Spanish America: A Case for the History of Ideas," Latin American Research Review (LARR ) 8 (1973): 53-73, for cogent critique of trend. Yet Hale's own work—the best among intellectual histories—itself reveals a trend against economic ideas: Mexican Liberalism in the Age of Mora, 1821-1853 (New Haven, 1968) fully integrates economic ideas, which virtually vanish from científico thinking by The Transformation of Liberalism in Late Nineteenth-Century Mexico (Princeton, 1989). For rootless idiosyncrasy in recent intellectual history, try Richard M. Morse, New World Soundings: Culture and Ideology in the Americas (Baltimore, 1989); a postmodern sign of shifts is Ricardo Salvatorre's "Markets, Social Discipline, and Popular Protest: Latin America from Charles III to the IMF" (paper presented to the SSHA, 1991).

[29] This general reading comes from Stanley J. Stein and Barbara Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York, 1970); Richard Graham, Independence in Latin America: A Comparative Approach (New York, 1972); Claudio Véliz, The Centralist Tradition in Latin America (Princeton, 1980), chs. 6-7, and ch. 8, "Outward Looking Nationalism and the Liberal Pause"; Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin American America (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1979): Thomas E. Skidmore and Peter H. Smith, Modern Latin America (New York, 1984), ch. 1; David Bushnell and Neill Macaulay, The Emergence of Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (New York, 1988), with its more skeptical ch. 13, "The Liberal Legacy and the Quest for Development." Broadly, these views parallel traditional intellectual histories with their shift from romanticism and positivism to more nationalist twentieth-century "isms": e.g., Leopoldo Zea, The Latin American Mind (Norman, 1963).

ter as having been as powerful in cause and effect as Latin America's primordial sixteenth-century kind. "Enamoured" with ill-fitting European notions of "modernization," tiny urban elites purposefully pursued free-trade individualism as a weapon for full social hegemony over fading rural oligarchies and their recalcitrant, Americanized "folk." The legacy of this postcolonial culture clash was modern Latin America's baneful "poverty of progress."^[30] Triumphal elites, if anything, had shown marked "fears" of genuine national "development."

Such views can also reflect a poverty of research. Our isolated intellectual historians largely bypass economic thinking. Or attention focuses on the obvious Latin vitality of ideas born during the twentieth-century age of inward-directed industrialism—portrayed as the antithesis of the passive, anglicized century behind. In the meantime, studies of Latin American political, literary, nationalist, and popular traditions enjoy increasing sophistication, with all their historical ambiguities, cultural contestations, and multifarious and multinational social origins.^[31] Nineteenth-century thinkers could invent nations that barely existed and project constitutions without states; they spun national myths, composed poetic canons, and reified indigenous masses whom they knew nothing about. What did Latin Americans imagine about development? What did they imagine as national futures as they bought and brought themselves into global markets? The discourse could not have been a mindless, materialist, and monomaniacal carbon copy from abroad.^[32]

[30] E. Bradford Burns, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1980), passim. For timely critique, see Florencia Mallon, "Economic Liberalism: Where We Are and Where We Need to Go," in J. Love and N. Jacobsen, eds., Guiding the Invisible Hand: Economic Liberalism and the State in Latin American History (New York, 1988), 177-86—the state-of-the-art collection. For more class-grounded analysis of liberal ideology, see Emília Viotti da Costa, "Liberalism: Theory and Practice," in da Costa, The Brazilian Empire: Myths and Histories (Chicago, 1988), 53-72.

[31] Joseph L. Love, "Raul Prebisch and the Origins of the Doctrine of Unequal Exchange," LARR 15 (1980): 45-72; Albert O. Hirschman, "Ideologies of Economic Development in Latin America," in Hirschman, ed., Latin American Issues: Essays and Comments (New York, 1961), 3-42; Tulio Halperín-Donghi, "'Dependency Theory' and Latin American Historiography," LARR 17 (1982): 115-30; Fernando Henrique Cardoso, "The Originality of the Copy: The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Idea of Development," in Rothko Chapel Colloquium, Toward a New Strategy for Development (New York, 1979), 53-72 (very interesting on innovation during the transmission of ideas).

[32] An obvious influence here is the historical sociology of ideas proposed by Benedict Anderson in Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London, 1983); for examples of strides in other realms, see Nicolas Shumway, The Invention of Argentina (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1991); D. A. Brading, The Origins of Mexican Nationalism (Cambridge, 1985); or Alberto Flores Galindo, Buscando un inca: Identidad y utopía en los Andes (Lima, 1987).

This orphaned status of Latin American economic ideas is reflected in the latest survey literature: in the Cambridge History of Latin American (ed. L. Bethell, vols. 3-4, 1983-85), Frank Safford's and Charles Hale's solid reviews of nineteenth-century social thought barely include economic ideas; yet William Glade's economic survey ignores ideas altogether.

Pursuing visions of development is not just an empirical inquiry, for conceptual dualities impede complex understandings. Periodization itself conceals one gigantic and stifling duality: between Latin America's era of "outward-directed" thinking (1830-1930) and the "inward-looking" developmentalist era after 1929. Other dichotomies include persisting Manichaean divides that pitted intellectual against social forces; national against foreign ideologies; nationalist against comprador strategies; external against internal markets; and elite against popular cultures and politics.^[33] Such divisions must soften in a rounded social history of ideas. But they are fast dissolving anyway—in Latin America's newest mixed bag of developmental and political possibilisms.

Finally, a few words are needed on the scope of this study and the peculiarities of the Peruvians. The "developmental" visions pursued here focus largely on trade policies, diversification, and technological, industrial, and infrastructural progress or on the roles of the state and popular groups in lasting economic growth. One can imagine very different sets of developmental concerns—demography, entrepreneurialism, capital accumulation, finance, foreign investment, human capital promotion, or agrarian surpluses—issues that infused debates in other national republics.^[34]

[33] For similar historiographic critique, see William B. Taylor, "Between Global Process and Local Knowledge: An Inquiry into Early Latin American Social History, 1500-1900," in O. Zunz, ed., Reliving the Past: The Worlds of Social History (Chapel Hill, 1985), 115-90. Despite positive impacts of sociological history, rounded approaches to ideas were arguably advancing before its hegemony; for a relevant overlooked example, see Frank Safford, The Ideal of the Practical: Colombia's Struggle to Form a Technical Elite (Austin, 1976).

[34] For shifting range of developmental concerns, see Paul Streeten, "Development Ideas in Historical Perspective," in Toward a New Strategy for Development, 21-52; Hirschman, "Rise and Decline of Development"; or political analysis in John Sheahan, Patterns of Development in Latin America: Poverty, Repression, and Economic Strategy (Princeton, 1987).

A recent regional historical survey (biographical, with few nineteenth-century thinkers) is Oreste Popescu, Estudios en la historia del pensamiento económico latinoamericano (Bogotá, 1986). For earlier, delimited studies of Peruvian economic ideas, César Augusto Reinaga, Esbozo de una historia del pensamiento económico en el Perú (Cuzco, 1969); Emilio Romero, "Perú," in Roque Gondra, Pensamiento económico latinoamericano (1945), 275-324; Macera, "Historia económica como ciencia"; for survey of social thought, Fredrick B. Pike, The Modern History of Peru (New York, 1967).

There are many reasons for following these facets of development, which are not all that peculiar. First, the setting of the guano-age economy explains a lot. With the enormous commercial, public, and capital resources released by Peru's bird-dung bonanza, the primordial policy questions of the era were in fact how best to channel opportunities of trade into development. Historically, too, the Andean economy was export driven (by silver mining) and marked by a weighty state sector (as viceregal capital of Spanish South America). But second, major transitions had ensued between silver and guano. These shifts—the dramatic example and impact of the North Atlantic's liberal commercial and industrial "revolutions"—most impressed Peruvian observers and became immediately linked to visions and theories of secular progress. Westernized elites everywhere were similarly struck.^[35]

Third, such controversies over trade, diversity, and the state are precisely those isolated in recent dependency visions of the formative nineteenth century. The broad notion here is that free trade forfeited possibilities for diversified development that would have made Latin America part of the industrializing West by 1900. Latin America's historic error, as it were, was taking commercial observer status during the first industrial revolution. By the century's end specialization had transformed colonial backwardness into modern underdevelopment. As a counterfactual, or would-have-been argument, this needs informing with the developmental options genuinely felt at the time.^[36] Moreover, today's pyrotechnics around regional "neoliberal" policies put these very issues of diversity and statism on the front burner, though thus far without much history behind them.

Fourth, Peruvian elites were an especially urban-bound group. An overwhelming majority of the country's educated males lived and intellectualized in the capital port city of Lima, culturally and economically

[35] Besides Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano, and the general Latin American studies cited above, see Michael Adas, Machines as the Measure of Men: Science, Technology, and Idelogies of Western Dominance (Ithaca, 1989), pt. 2, "The Age of Industrialization." See Phyllis Deane, The State and the Economic System: An Introduction to the History of Political Economy (Oxford, 1989), for most general argument putting the state at the center of economic thought; see Hunt, "Interpretive Essay," for incisive analysis of Peruvian policy questions.

[36] Explicit counterfactual approaches are Gootenberg, Between Silver and Guano; Bill Albert, South America and the World Economy from Independence to 1930 (London, 1983); for state making, Maurice Zeitlin, The Civil Wars in Chile, or, the Bourgeois Revolutions That Never Were (Princeton, 1984); or advancing global economic studies, such as Jean Batou, ed., Between Development and Underdevelopment: The Precocious Attempts at Industrialization on the Periphery, 1800-1870 (Geneva, 1991).

worlds apart from the predominantly agrarian, peasant, and (60 percent) Indian country around them. In worldly, white Lima—whose population of sixty to one hundred and twenty thousand never passed 5 percent of Peru's total—resonated the country's ministries, press, schools, lobbies, and vibrant café-salon society.^[37] It proves difficult to pick up genuine provincial accents from the nineteenth century, the tones of thinkers who might have spoken of developmental dilemmas in, say, more agrarian or Andean terms. Yet we will encounter progressively expanding national visions in the nineteenth-century developmental imagination.

Finally, although midcentury Lima already boasted professors and formal courses in European "Political Economy," the country produced no economists of note. Peruvian thinkers emerge literally as wide-ranging pensadores, practical and political men, engaged in building up a new nation as much as raising economic growth. Rather than abstract designs, they imbibed the working examples of overseas statesmen and pundits, though the liberalism they absorbed initially enjoyed a quasiscientific and religious status. It was precisely their broader state-building concerns—with fiscality, national sovereignty and integration, true citizenries, and social control—that eventually gave their visions an eclectic and thus developmental compass.^[38] It also made them typical of nation-building elites across nineteenth-century America.

Rather than oddity, Peru in the guano age posed the developmental challenges of republican Latin America in the sharpest terms imaginable. The stark cultural dualism between urban plutocrats and rural folk, the startling disparities between national wealth and disparate levels of

[37] For demographic and ethnic trends, see Paul Gootenberg, "Population and Ethnicity in Early Republican Peru: Some Revisions," LARR 26 (1991): 109-57; for insight into intellectual culture, Gertrude M. Yeager, "Women and Intellectual Life in Nineteenth-Century Lima," InterAmerican Review of Bibliography 40 (1990): 361-93; I say "male" here, for women writers contributed enormously to literary life (and to indigenismo and educational reform) but rarely broached the gender-segregated realm of economics. Nils Jacobsen, "Free Trade, Regional Elites, and the Internal Market in Southern Peru, 1895-1932," in Love and Jacobsen, Guiding the Invisible Hand , 145-76, an example of regional analysis feasible for later periods; less helpful is the sole regional survey, Héctor Ballon Lozada, Las ideas sociopolíticas en Arequipa (Arequipa, 1986).

[38] Political limits (and transformation) of liberal "theory" is now standard fare in European historiography: e.g., Arthur J. Taylor, Laissez-Faire and State Intervention in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London, 1972); see Steven Topik, The Political Economy of the Brazilian State, 1889-1930 (Austin, 1987), for fine (but nonideological) study of reasons of state in export economies. For official liberalism, see Tantaleán, Política económico-financiera , and its unimaginative officialist policy documentation.

development, and the official enthusiasm for the new liberal exporter creeds—all epitomized the processes in play almost everywhere in the region. A country hardly known for the originality and diversity of its economic policies and ideas, Peru has long served as regional exemplar of growth without development, ill served by its myopic ruling cliques.^[39] For all these reasons, Peru merits the close but eminently comparable case study that follows. If Peruvian intellectuals had other visions in mind, the region as a whole likely enjoys a rich but submerged economic tradition.

This book shows that unofficial traditions of "developmentalist" thought infused both elite and popular Peruvian culture, surviving, even thriving, during the country's age of outward-directed growth. Even among highly Westernized dominant classes, active contestation of regnant European practice and theory was commonplace—drawing imaginatively on Peruvian economic experience, nationalist twists of formal theory, serious concerns over export dependence, reasons of state, and a popular-folkloric ethos of productive and distributive justice.

Chapter 2 briefly surveys the influential nationalist thought, aristocratic and artisan, prevalent in Peru before the triumph of free trade at the advent of the guano age. Chapter 3 explores initial guano-age conflicts about diversification—around Juan Norberto Casanova's native industrializing ideology—and how its failure by the 1850s colored liberal orthodoxy and dissenters over the next generation. Chapter 4 is the massive heart of the matter: a reexamination of the 1860s developmentalist schemes of Manuel Pardo and Luis Benjamín Cisneros, the organic intellectuals of guano. Attentive to mounting social costs of liberalism and looming nation-building tasks, their projects for railways, guano, and fiscal reform aspired to broaden domestic development, technology, sovereignty, and participation—the keys, in their minds, to reversing Peru's growing commercial imbalances. Such concerns found audible echoes in nationwide cries for modern communications and economies. Chapter 5, central in other ways, scrutinizes responses to the enveloping crisis of export exhaustion in the 1870s: the reactivation of artisan politics in the era and a new developmental synthesis in the middle-class industrialism of Copello and Petriconi. Chapter 6, a dé-

[39] For sterile images of the nineteenth century, see Macera, "Historia económica como ciencia"; for paradigmatic later analysis, Rosemary Thorp and Geoffrey Bertram, Peru 1890-1977: Growth and Policy in an Open Economy (London, 1978).

nouement of the 1880s, turns to retrospectives on the national fiasco with export liberalism, as in the integrative industrial indigenismo of Peru's first economic historian, Luis Esteves. The conclusions seek to mend the gap between Peruvian ideas and experience and seek implications for study of Latin American social thought. Along the way many other thinkers are met, in what amounts to a genealogy of discontent with fictive prosperities. If little else, Peruvians fervidly imagined their thwarted development.