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.