5
The Return of Popular Industrialism
Copello and Petriconi, the 1870s

The Arriving Crisis

The crisis of guano dependence burst in full force by the mid 1860s—and would persist, without relief, over the next decade and a half. It unfolded amid the political maturation of Lima's reformist civilian forces—Pardo's Partido Civil of 1872—whose flurry of responses would fail to stem the collapse in time.

Peru's first signs of emergency showed up as simple budgetary imbalances of the early 1860s, alarming enough in a state assuming ever more administrative scope. By the mid 1870s this gap had transformed into an insuperable external crisis—with Peru's foreign debt of £35 million matched only by that of the Ottoman Empire—after a desperate race against the exhaustion of the Chincha Islands. In 1869 Peru earmarked a quarter of its £4 million of guano exports for debt service; by 1876, the year of its shattering default on the London market, all of Peru's evaporating £2.6 million in guano sales poured into interest alone.

The crisis unfolded in twists and turns to avert it. In the early 1860s the bolstering of national finance became the principal policy: the transfer of guano contracts to leading Peruvian merchants (after derogation of the last Gibbs monopoly) and their creation of a profitable modern financial system to meet Peru's chronic fiscal shortfalls. However, the costly defense against Spain's attempted invasion (1864-1866) starkly re-

vealed the inadequacies of public finance—rescued by a Pardo-arranged £7 million war loan—just as it prompted a nationalism demanding stronger initiatives from the state. (Spain, on the pretext of 1863 incidents with citizens in northern Talambo, had first occupied the guano isles and, after drawn-out diplomatic maneuvers, blockaded and attacked Callao in 1866.) In reaction to these political and economic events the ephemeral Prado regime (1866-1867) pursued a stringent national fiscal reform (restored taxation, rationalized guano lending) while moving headlong into diversification through railroads—toward realization of the fiscal and developmental programs heralded by Cisneros and Pardo. But in 1868 the treasury still fell short by a third and owed the increasingly distrusted hijos del país bankers more than 15 million soles. The following Balta regime (1869-1872) disavowed the nationals, as Finance Minister Nicolás de Piérola, in a controversial about-face, turned over the entire guano enterprise to the French financier Auguste Dreyfus. Dreyfus was given full charge of managing Peru's fiscal straits abroad, based on his ability to quickly raise massive capital (on dwindling guano reserves) to underwrite Meiggs's railroads, now frenetically heading toward Cuzco and Junín. This was Peru's euphoric era of public works. The first major issue—of £11.9 million—succeeded; the second loan of 1872, for £36 million, crashed on takeoff, as rumors spread of Peruvian insolvency. Whatever the intent, Dreyfus succeeded primarily in multiplying Peru's external debt ten times in three years.^[1]

In part, the Partido Civil gained power in 1872 as a national reaction to the Balta-Piérola strategy, yet Pardo necessarily remained attached to both Dreyfus and Meiggs. Peru turned toward austerity. Pardo offered a comprehensive program of economic and fiscal stabilization and a gradualist vision of national modernization, but his plan was shaken by chaotic events. By 1873 the national banking network and all the businesses jerry-built around it were tottering; government moves to control emissions only aggravated the liquidity crunch. On ordinary expenditures alone, budget deficits reached 8 million soles, nearly 50 percent. In 1875 Pardo engineered a bold statist takeover of southern nitrate fields, with the help of national banks, as a makeshift solution. But nitrate revenues and galloping sugar exports could not make do. By January 1876 Peru had defaulted on European markets; the national railroads

[1] Basic sources on crisis (and reforms) include Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," chs. 5-6; Yepes, Perú 1820-1920, chs. 2-3; Quiroz, Domestic and Foreign Finance, 58-70; Marichal, Century of Debt Crises, ch. 4.

halted after seven hundred kilometers (leaving twenty thousand workers wandering the countryside); major banks closed doors; credit-starved planters stopped sowing seed. And foreign interests were infuriated with Peru.^[2] Pardo's compromise successor, civil-military Prado, inherited the ravages of unbacked paper money, world depression, deepening unemployment, and a £40 million debt. Calamity soon hit harder, in the form of the Chilean invaders of 1879.

The rise of civilismo was surely a trial by fire. It also occurred amid a mystifying renewal of national political instability (eight military regimes in the 1860s followed by a decade of bitter civil-military strife). By 1864 the age of Castillan strongmen had passed, the victim of the general's alienation of erstwhile liberal allies, his myopic economic vision, and paralytic response to the Spanish invasion threat. To be sure, political fault lines still erupted around timeworn liberal-conservative constitutional issues (in 1860 and 1867), yet civil aversion to militarism now was taking on a life of its own. This drive to full civilian rule is often associated with a rising generation of pragmatic liberals and a grupo de poder from the maturing national merchant, banking, and planter classes of the 1860s. After embracing the Prado dictatorship, reformists ran their first candidate, Manuel Ureta, in 1868 and intensified their mobilization against "militarists" Balta and Piérola in their 1871 campaign, now reaching out to disaffected urban and provincial groups with their new-style political party. After heading off Gutiérrez's golpe in July 1872, Pardo suffered four stormy years as Peru's first civilian elected president. The civilistas attempted, amid grave circumstances, to move forward on broad administrative, educational, military, democratic, and decentralist reforms, against an intransigent church, army, and conservatives rallying around the cult of caudillo Piérola.^[3] General Prado's uninspiring compromise succession in 1876 and deepening elite factionalism revealed the limits to Peru's nascent republican politics.

By the late 1860s Peru's economic transformations were finally spilling over from Lima. "Capitalism" was beginning to infiltrate the profounder Peru. Postindependence population had doubled to 2.7 million by 1876; markets spread into the reaches of the central and southern

[2] Clarke, Peru and Creditors; for recovery program, Pardo addresses, 21 Sept. 1872, 28 Apr. 1873, 3 Feb. 1875, 28 July 1876, Ugarteche and San Cristóval, Mensajes de presidentes; or Bonilla, "Crisis de 1872."

[3] Balancing survey in Pike, Modern History, ch. 5; critical analysis in Bonilla, Guano y burguesía; Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión, chs. 1-2; MacEvoy "Manuel Pardo," ch. 3, for revised political history.

sierra, awakening their landed elites to new possibilities. Diversification and guano investment occurred: in southern wool and alpaca exports, very rapidly in northern, coastal sugar and cotton plantations (via agrarian mortgage banks and the import of fifty thousand indentured Asian workers), in austral Atacama nitrates, and in the occupational, physical, and institutional complexities of Lima. The state began to touch the lives of Peruvians. New interests and new national configurations brewed. Little of this change, however, affected the daily lives of Peru's submerged social majority—the 60 percent who struggled on as "Indian" peasants of the Andes—or at least not positively.^[4]

This chapter pursues intellectual responses to the gathering national crisis of the 1860s and 1870s, of publicists and activists who wished to look (and push) beyond the fiscal straits and solutions of governments. This time, thinkers steeped in the fervor of rising civil politics began to grope for an imagined "people" (of Lima) as a social and political force in development. This shift began in ambiguous liberal notions about artisans of the 1850s; took shape with the real-life revival of popular-nationalist politics of the 1860s; won credence in a new socially oriented technical education and work ethic of the civilista 1870s; and gained a foothold in the budding sociology of immigrant small industrialists. These influences spawned novel thinkers of the mid 1870s—such as Juan Copello and Luis Petriconi—whose middle-class industrialism this chapter places in their long-term social and intellectual contexts. No one, seemingly, could avert the crisis, but some at least hoped to learn from it.

Artisans as Liberal Challenge, 1852-1858

By the mid 1860s a contagious new strain of "populism" gripped many Lima thinkers, converging with, and ultimately enriching, their fiscal and economic concerns. Its social seeds remain buried in what we still don't know about nineteenth-century Lima, but this populism was already affecting 1860s writers such as Cisneros, who felt compelled to address, in roundabout ways, an artisan challenge. As the revival of popular protection advanced, major pro-industrial prophets of the

[4] Mallon, Defense of Community, ch. 2; Burga, Encomienda a hacienda capitalista, ch. 6; Manrique, Mercado y región, chs. 2-3; Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition, chs. 5-6; Gootenberg, "Population and Ethnicity," esp. 148-52, on Indians.

1870s went straight to the people in a transformed climate of activated urban politics. Such writers, to some degree, were manipulating the marginalized old artisan politics for political gain or hoping to channel Lima's new forms of social unrest into new sluices of "social control."^[5] Yet above all homespun industrial ideologies reveal that developmentalist thinking was not confined to oligarchic dreamers such as Pardo and Cisneros; it had spilled over into a "politics" of development, sharing in the delayed republican aspirations of Lima's artisan class, however reified by elites. By the time Peru's predicted export crisis hit with full force in the mid 1870s, a synthetic middle-class industrialism had appeared, blending long-standing elite and artisan standards. The celebrated 1876 nationalist manifesto by Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica del Perú, embodied these social developments, its roots stretching back to the early 1850s.

The last stand of traditional Lima guilds was their 1849 campaign to foist on congress the Ley de Artesanos—a last-ditch appeal against Peru's nascent import economy, defeated by the liberal tariff of 1852. At first guilds appeared to be closing in on victory, with early political "clubs" and caudillos catering to artisan clientele. But Peru's new liberals swiftly rebounded and crushed the drive. Old-style guilds were caught in a reactive class mobilization against craftsmen (especially those hoisting the radical anti-aristocratic banners of 1848); against a customary unfocused artisan protectionism; against industrialism writ large; and against the fluid politics of the 1850 election, which finally brought the free-trader conservative Echenique to power. Policy was set for the guano age.^[6] In part, the guilds lost for lack of a credible developmental perspective.

Guilds felt intensely "betrayed" by their traditional patrons and by the political system. As one craftsman bemoaned, "Equality is unknown among us; prosperity calls to its breast only the owners of money. The worker is condemned to be victim of the whims of metallic power. No measure is felt to raise the people from the misery in which they are

[5] For varied models, see Steve Stein, Populism in Peru: The Emergence of the Masses and the Politics of Social Control (Madison, 1980) (urban populism as social control); June Hahner, Poverty and Politics: The Urban Poor in Brazil, 1870-1920 (Albuquerque, 1986) (rare look at origins of "clientelism"); Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión (Hobsbawmian "primitive" popular politics); MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," ch. 3 (civilist citizenry search). Rather than shibbolethic social control of prepolitical masses, I seek convergent political concerns—an approach closest to MacEvoy's analysis.

[6] Gootenberg, "Social Origins of Protection and Free Trade," 347-58.

sunk . . . and the indifference of the rich." Denigrated and pushed aside by Peru's official liberalism, Limeño artisans all but withdrew from formal political activity. Republicanism seemed a sham: "Sure, around us there are democrats, but not democrats of the heart! For they only live to gulp down guano. . . . Viva la libertad! Ha, poor artisans!" By late 1851, instead, beleaguered and disillusioned artisans organized the first of their republican mutual aid societies in hopes of weathering their crises far from a disappointing liberal politics of elites.^[7]

Not much was heard from the submerged guilds over the next decade, their worst on record as luxury imports and inflation kept workshops from sharing in the glitter of commercial recovery. Evidence suggests material changes as well; for example, customary guild masters were losing their grip on workers and apprentices as unemployment, and a generally more fluid labor market, accompanied Lima's demographic expansion. The abolition of black slavery in 1854, and the rapid influx of fine European craftsmen to the city, also undermined traditional guilds. In high politics the 1850s became the congratulatory, if bickering, time of elite liberal dominance. Only a handful of political mavericks still voiced overtures to artisans, among them Juan Bustamante, the Puno deputy long dear to protectionist and other lost causes and eventual martyr in the bizarre southern peasant uprisings of 1867.^[8] Such calls remained exceedingly vague—isolated reminders for government to heed the forgotten "arts." For the most part, outcast artisans quietly endured assaults from rising liberals, relentless attempts, it would seem, to bury popular memory under a shroud of laissez-faire.

José Simeón Tejeda's 1852 antiguild polemic, Emancipación de la industria, penned with his native Arequipa in mind, was prominently displayed and quoted in Lima dailies. Tejeda's message, like Silva Santisteban's, was unabashedly repressive: a blast against restrictive guild institutions, influence, and ideas. Inscribed in the "industrial" liberation idiom of Saint-Simon, guilds came across here as the bastion of Peru's

[7] "Unos artesanos," Comercio, 29 Nov. 1851; M. F. de Mendiola, "Estado de los artesanos en Lima," Correo de Lima, 16 Oct. 1851; or Basadre, Historia 5:2045-47, on early (unlinked) mutual aid.

[8] Gootenberg, "Artisans and Merchants," chs. 1, 4 (artisan decay); Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión, ch. 4 (proletarianization); Bustamante, Apuntes y observaciones, 31-32, 82-83 (protection and school of arts calls); Comercio, 7-12 Jan. 1850 (as guild partisan); see Nils Jacobsen, "Civilization and Its Barbarism: The Inevitability of Juan Bustamante's Failure," in J. Ewell and W. Beezley, eds. The Human Tradition in Latin America: The Nineteenth Century (Wilmington, Del., 1989), 82-102.

most archaic illiberal values—rank medieval "monopolists." "Industrial power" was shackled by feudal bonds to the state. And if artisans could not fully accept free markets and free trade—one and the same cause—they had no one but themselves to blame for their poor performance and political plight.^[9] Tejeda was on track to becoming a leading civil politician (eventual chair of the civilist congress), and his work, though a gross exaggeration of residual guild powers, codified the elites' negative representation of native crafts. Liberal-democratic spokesmen forever pictured artisans as hopelessly lazy, insolent, trivial, and untalented. In the writings of the 1850s guilds appeared to be a major obstacle to economic or moral change, never a potential wellspring of progress.

By 1862 the state had formally rescinded its last sanctions to guild prerogatives, though by then Lima's motley mix of craftsmen, putting-out workers, building trades, and servicers of import luxuries seemed better represented by their mutual aid movements than by impotent guild masters. Rooted in a covert politics of the 1850s, in 1858 artisans chartered the Sociedad Democrática de Callao—on the eve of the year's protectionist rampage. In 1860 the Sociedad de Artesanos Auxilios Mutuos emerged (as did a murkier sympathetic Sociedad Amiga de las Artes), with an explicitly and fully apolitical mission, followed by a myriad of analogous self-help, educational, savings, burial, and cultural fraternities. These associations seemed to spread in tandem with each failed quest to affect government policy. Their politicking bans, to be sure, were meant to safeguard artisans from internal dissension and exploitation from above.^[10] And because mutual aid posed no direct challenge to Limeño high society and economy, it was smoothly absorbed as part of the city's modernizing scene, touted, for example, by observers such as Fuentes. On tariff issues, however, the stock response remained Silva Santisteban's. Free-trader faith was simple toward artisans: no quarter to their quaint but seemingly incorrigible protectionist beliefs, which eventually would be "eradicated" through heavy doses

[9] Tejeda, Emancipación de la industria, melding Jovellanosian, Benthamite, and Saint-Simonian liberalism; Ballon, Ideas en Arequipa, 96-102; reproduced in Lima's Intérprete del Pueblo, Mar. 1852; or J. Espinoza, "Artesanos, gremios y maestros mayores," Comercio, 20 Oct. 1852. The imported "antifeudal" discourse of such works affects historians' perceptions of Peruvian elites, too.

[10] Sketchy survey of mutual aid and covert politics in Basadre, Historia 5:2045-47, "El mutualismo obrero," and covert politics. For typical apolitical stance, see Reglamento de la sociedad tipográfica de auxilios mutuos (Lima, pam., 1868), art. 73: "Es prohibido en las reuniones tratar asuntos ajenos de su institución, a menos que alguno amago internacional amenace nuestra existencia política"—a reference to Spanish invasion experience.

of "sane" political economy. No opportunity was lost to delegitimize guild privilege, politics, and protectionism. If educational tactics failed to root out monopolistic thoughts, liberals suggested the abolition in toto of Lima's urban artisan question—by their forced (or economic) march into rural export pursuits, where labor was needed.^[11]

Apart from frontal assaults, however, genuine and more promising attempts were made to convert artisans to laissez-faire. Most often these campaigns revealed the political cracks and contradictions in the facade of Peru's liberal-democratic purists. This was a romantic Jacobin alternative, if bereft of popular base. One example of utopian laissez-faire was Francisco Bilbao's El gobierno de la libertad (1855). Bilbao, the famed Chilean radical, had fled for safety to Lima after organizing Santiago artisans in an abortive 1851 democratic-liberal revolt—going well beyond the popular economic discontent brewing in Peru. In Lima the pan-Americanist Bilbao hooked up with Enrique Álvarez, the precocious (and short-lived) social revolutionary; together they aspired and conspired to carry the popular fervor of the 1854-1855 anti-Echenique rebellion into deeper realms: to bring "el pueblo al poder." Such urban tumult seemed catchy across the Andes in the period 1845-1855: the tragic "socialist mirage" of revolutionist-liberal artisans in Bogotá (which ended up in a true starvation march of vanquished artisans into the countryside); the anti-aristocratic and protectionist panderings (1848-1855) of the Bolivian caudillo Manuel Belzú, husband of the Peruvian feminist critic Manuela Gorriti; the crushed Chilean Jacobin rebellion of Bilbao's own Sociedad de Igualdad; and the final offensive of protectionist gremios in Lima. (Hobsbawm once classified such events as the most delayed and distant wave of Europe's ideological upwelling of 1848, and the same ideas, and even some refugee artisans, were occasionally at work.) But the losing outcomes for Andean artisan politics stemmed as much from the coeval wave of European manufactured exports, which made artisan democratic alliances so precariously problematic.^[12]

[11] Silva Santisteban, Breves reflexiones sobre los sucesos con la importación, 1-10; for typical anti-"monopoly" rhetoric, see Baldomero Menéndez, Manuel de geografía y estadística del Perú (Paris, 1861), 145: "El Perú no es ni podría ser nunca, a nuestro juicio, un pueblo industrial. Los que desconocen esta verdad y no les importa que se grave notoriamente a la mayoría de la población para favorecer unos pocos y sostener un monopolio perjuicialismo a los intereses públicos."

[12] Romero, Sociedad de Igualdad, with many Chilean parallels to Lima artisan thought; Robert Gilmore, "Nueva Granada's Socialist Mirage," HAHR 36 (1956): 190-210; Burns, Poverty of Progress, 106-10 (Belzú sympathizer); E. J. Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital, 1848-1875 (New York, 1975), 4. For Peru, see Jorge G. Leguía, "Las ideas de 1848 en el Perú," in Leguía, Estudios históricos (Santiago, 1939), 113-54, finding a lot of "socialists" among liberals; Amézaga, Perú liberal pt. 2, chs. 6-7.

Everywhere, in short, beleaguered traditional artisans wavered between the attractions of liberals' libertarian prospects and the fading corporatist prestige of conservatives. Ultimately, both sides in liberal-conservative conflicts abandoned inconvenient artisans. The artisans' organic-democratic aspirations did not neatly fit into the dichotomies of liberal-conservative discourse, which, if anything, defined a multivalent "culture clash" between elite and folk. Bilbao, who reputedly swayed budding rojos such as Ulloa and Cisneros before Castilla kicked him out, illustrates the disjuncture. Bilbao's role, like that of other Chilean exiles in Peru, was to pioneer certain Continental categories in Peruvian democratic discourse (such as "czarismo o el populismo") and a populist program of universal education, free association, progressive pan-Americanism, and "the people to power" (a romantic notion of direct representation). Along with Bilbao came fresh translations of Fourier and Proudhon. But part and parcel of Bilbao's universalism was a hopelessly utopian, internationalist, and popular version of free trade: "Commercial liberty is solidarity with the land, fraternity with the climate, the reciprocity of production in alliance with nature."^[13] "In the government of liberty," Bilbao promised, "the freedom of commerce is a fact, by which the country ensures its production geared to what nature, topography, and climate decree." Few of Lima's urban and nativistic artisans bought this bucolic naturalistic scenario, which sounded suspiciously similar to Silva Santisteban's ravings about the country life.

About the same time, the future bohemian gadfly Fernando Casós, the most visible liberal spokesman of the 1854 revolution, listed artisans among the dispossessed. The war did enjoy a popular-democratic backing in its civil armies and mass revulsion against Echenique's venal guano "consolidados" clique. Casós, in his galvanizing manifesto, singled out the country's meager efforts to save its degraded artisan class: "The arts, in such a fashion, have been caught in the rapid flight that depletes them. The government has not founded a single school, a single workshop, or taken any measures of improvement." But Casós's primary stress was on the primacy of commerce, "whose élan vital stems but from liberty." Casós's partner in agitation, J. C. Ulloa, in his antimilitarist broadside,

[13] Francisco Bilbao, El gobierno de la libertad (Lima, 1855), v, vii, 32-33: for generational contexts, see Raúl Ferrero Rebagliati, El liberalismo peruano: Contribución a una historia de las ideas (Lima, 1958), 23-32.

condemned not just Echenique but also (with a little help from Proudhon), a congenital corruption of elites. In Peru, Ulloa reports, "commercial questions" unfortunately had smothered other pressing economic and political debates, though he hastened to celebrate loudly the freetrade triumph: "the commercial code of Peru is more liberal than that of the most civilized nations of Europe." Even the accused and deposed president Echenique could express more (or more vague) concerns for artisans in his own war pronouncements—notwithstanding the fact that more than anyone else, Echenique had played the free-trader nemesis of the guilds during their tariff debacle of 1851. Soon liberal manifestoes questioned Castilla's military buildup, suggesting that these funds would be better put into popular education and "fomento."^[14] (Casós's career illuminates some later liberal paths and deviations; as the purest of Peru's civil libertarians, he tried with Cisneros to impeach Castilla during the congress of 1859 and led the national propaganda barrage against the Dreyfus contract; in 1872 Casós, as titular head of the military junta against Pardo's ascension, turned on the insufficiently pure civilistas and later exposed plutocratic sins in Los hombres de bien . Ulloa had the constancy to stay with libertarian free trade, except in the business of guano, for the rest of his career.)

Perhaps Juan Espinoza's populist Diccionario para el pueblo: Republicano democŕtico, moral, político y filosófico (1855) best exemplifies the confounding messages being sent to artisans. Espinoza, a former Uruguayan soldier (and later Revista de Lima essayist, mid-1860s nationalist, and civilista founder) exalted property-owning artisans in the political arena.

[Artisans] form the middle class of society between the proletarian and the rich; in republics, they support on their robust shoulders the rich landlord, the military man, the official, and everyone who wants to place themselves on top; the artisan of Paris, as in Lima, is the one who dresses and shoes the people, builds the houses . . ., and defends the country. But they don't form associations to make their force and value felt.^[15]

[14] Fernando Casós, Para la historia del Perú: Revolución de 1854 (Cuzco, 1854), 91; J. R. Echenique, El General José Rufino Echenique a sus compatriotas (Lima, pam., 1858), 20, 110; Ulloa, Perú en 1853, 16; La Actualidad: Periódico Político y Literario (Lima), 1855, p. 7. Basadre, Historia 3: 1047-55, 1100, and ch. 66, "La revolución popular y liberal de 1854."

[15] Juan Espinoza, Diccionario para el pueblo: Republicano democrático, moral, político y filosófico (Lima, 1855), 66 (artesanos), 26-27 (aduanas), 330 (concurrencia industrial), 447 (fábricas), 783 (protección a la industria). For political activity concerning artisans, see J. Espinoza, Comentarios a la constitución anónima de la sociedad del orden electoral (Lima, pam., 1853), and 1860s "Hijo del pueblo" group, below.

But apart from assaults on autocracy, the mainstay of Espinoza's self-help entries were incessantly paternalistic (and exceedingly abstract) lectures on the elementary evils of guild restriction and the horrors of protection: "that ignorance of the people in not understanding their true interests." "Patriotism resents it," ran another definition, "but experience and economic principle teaches that not all peoples who want to can become manufacturers." In an earlier incarnation Espinoza had been busy exposing the peoples' real interests, penning public diatribes (cribbed from Tejeda) against the "antique and barbaric routine of guild organization," and calling on the lowest strata of artisans (and the police) to overthrow this class oppression.^[16] There were few takers, as artisans had no other protectors left to speak of.

Liberal understandings of economic "monopoly," so central in these writings, were wholly at odds with the artisan one. Craftsmen, rather than demonize tariffs, railed against foreign imports, startling wealth concentrations, and dwindling national opportunities as the "monopolistic" threat to their livelihoods and liberties. "Foreign" was the artisan adjective instinctively linked to monopoly, in a semantic struggle seen since the 1820s.^[17] Peru's radical liberals engaged in much wishful thinking about artisans. But both sides seemed stuck on the reefs of popular protectionism.

Another key political contradiction in the budding democratic thought of the 1850s was between the romantics' glorification of civic voluntary associations and a "middle class" (the operative antiauthoritarian concepts in José María Químper's initial writings on El principio de libertad ). Yet liberals simultaneously needed to exclude even voluntary guild association from their progressive recipe, as in Químper's assertion that "workers' associations were, in effect, no other than the ancient corporations." "Nada de gremios" was his pat slogan, and Químper was already adding socialism to imagined threats to free markets.^[18] Such disassociations left liberal representation of the artisan uncannily abstract, an import category of social theory, with no flesh-and-blood working hijos del país worthy of the name. Only in the mid 1860s would some begin finding usefully progressive associations in Lima's apolitical mutual aid societies, and later even in some mobilizing

[16] Espinoza, Diccionario para el pueblo, 477; Juan Espinoza, "Artesanos, gremios y maestros mayores," Comercio, 20 Oct. 1852.

[17] See Gootenberg, "Artisans and Merchants," ch. 4, for deeper long-term analysis.

[18] José María Químper, El principio de libertad (Lima, 1856), A. Tauro, ed., 1948, 63, 67-68, 71-77 ("Libertad de industria y de comercio"), 82.

ones. As elite constitutional, religious, and liberal-conservative struggles heated up in the late 1850s, led by the liberals of El Constitucional, Francisco de Paula González Vigil, in his two 1858 classics (Importancia de las asociaciones and Importancia de la educación popular ), abstractly tried to heal this breach with a new utopian socialist twist, although he was still troubled by guilds.^[19] In the main, however, these works were legalistic calls for free political parties against despotic caudillos, for a bourgeois business ethic, for broadened education, for the love of work against "laziness." All such theorizing avoided specifying why Peru's hypothesized "middle class" found such paltry work and lowly civil status in the export society of the 1850s. (Químper was another liberal who went to work for the Prado regime; by 1872 he was resisting the civilist movement, and in the 1880s he spearheaded efforts to block the Grace contract as an imperial—and civilist—humiliation for Peru.)

We know little about these thinkers' direct relations, if any, to the artisan class. They generally appear in their writings as an honorable category of social theory, fit for conversion to the liberal republican cause, when properly cleansed of their market deviations. But craftsmen and shopkeepers, who always clung to their humble democratic beginnings, seemed—at least in their few extant public writings—unable to shake off their modest protective and nationalist notions. The brothers José and Pedro Gálvez talked to artisans from the 1850 Club Progresista and would organize them in the 1860s; Espinoza tried to win electoral partisans in 1853 (and would also try later); Vigil actually advised mutual aid societies on proper associative principles and recruited guild leaders (such as Mariano Salazar y Zapata) to fight for Castilla's 1857 constitution against reactionary attacks.^[20] But the general conclusion holds that Peru's most progressive liberals of the 1850s were more concerned with establishing elite civil institutions than with extending citizenship and opportunity to lower orders. They were at most top-down "traditional modernizers."

[19] Francisco de Paula González Vigil, Importancia de las asociaciones and Importancia de la educació popular (both 1858; rpt. Lima, 1948); see El Constitucional (Lima), 1858, and role of J. G. Paz Soldá. Basadre, Historia, vol. 3, ch. 49; 6:2857 (González Vigil); 7:2755 (Químper).

[20] "Programa del sr. Domingo Elías, para cuando suba a la presidencia," Comercio, 15 Oct., "Desarrollo del programa del club progresista," 6 Nov. 1850—with stress on "associations" and school of arts; Espinoza, Sociedad del orden electoral; El Hijo del Pueblo (Lima), 22 Feb. 1864; Basadre, Historia 6:2857; see Trazegnies, "Genealogía del derecho peruano," on traditional modernizers.

Conservative thinkers, by contrast, were not interested in republican, protectionist artisans at all; in this regard they were unlike traditionalists elsewhere in the Americas (notably Mexican nationalists such as Lucas Alamán) or Peru's bygone Gamarrista caudillos. Peru's classic antirepublican statement by "Pruvonena" (a.k.a. José de la Riva Agüero, 1858) was unrepentant in its contempt for the "colored people," "plebes," and "anarchists" who had "inverted the social order" since 1821 and despised volatile Gamarra-style sierran populism. It made no issue at all of commercial change. Fuentes, a less hysterical sort, could at least rigorously present artisans, quantitatively and colorfully, as part of Peruvian reality, though he hardly partook of their political feelings. The archcon-servative Bartolomé Herrera, the most active midcentury ideologue, negated "popular sovereignty" in terms at least as philosophical as the liberals' rarefied "people" and directed his struggles into ever narrower religious realms, Peru's obsessive conservative cause (though in relative terms the Peruvian church was barely besieged). In economics he only hinted at a divine interventionism.^[21]

Conservatives thus presented but a shadow of a corporatist project from which to attract antiliberal resentments. When their thoughts did turn to commerce, they seemed to embrace free trade with little hesitation—on the grounds that without European influence and aid (and, in the mid 1860s, without undivine intervention), Peru would sink into a native barbarism worse than that before Pizarro's salvation in 1532. Their unbridled Hispanicist worship of Europe inhibited economic nationalist thinking. Not incidently, and in striking paradox, Peru's major conservative caudillos proved more blatantly liberal on trade and laissez-faire than did their strong-state liberal political adversaries, though this was also a vestige of their stronghold in the socially conservative south. This pairing worked itself out from the Echenique-Castilla rivalry of the 1850s through the Piérola-Pardo conflicts of the 1870s, with the conservatives blasting utopian rojos, liberals, and protectionists in the same breath. Openings to artisans would develop instead out of liberal currents and civilist practice and from a shared patriotic revulsion to reactionaries willing to turn Peru back to Spain in the mid 1860s.^[22] In

[21] José de la Riva Agüero [Pruvonena, pseud.], Memorias y documentos para la historia de la independencia del Perú y causas del mal éxito que ha tenido ésta (Paris, 1858), 2 vols., passim, 602; Bartolomé Herrera, Escritos y discursos, comp. J. Leguía (Lima, 1929), 2 vols., Trazegnies, Idea de derecho, 90-99, 130-35; Amézaga, Perú liberal, ch. 5; Jeffrey Klaiber, La iglesia en el Perú: Su historia social desde la independencia (Lima, 1988), esp. ch. 3; on Mexican economic conservatives, see Potash, Mexican Government and Industry .

[22] E.g., Perú y la influencia europea (1862); for conflation of difference, see Gonzalo Portocarrero, "Conservadurismo, liberalismo y democracia en el Perú del siglo six," in Adrianzén, Pensamiento político, 85-98; Ulloa, Piérola; see Daniel Gleason, "Ideological Cleavages in Early Republican Peru, 1821-1872," Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 1974, for clerical focus; Ballon, Ideas en Arequipa, 277, for first Catholic (and, logically, southern) artisan clubs (1880s).

any case, the artisans themselves, still pining for their substantive republican equality, evinced little interest in hierarchic conservative causes.

By and large, then, the artisans of the 1850s were simply lectured to about wayward habits, never grasped in concrete terms (Fuentes aside), and demobilized in republican politics. If they expressed ideas of their own, these rang out in the prepolitical—or perhaps antipolitical—form of mob actions, such as the 1855 rampage against aristocratic property or the protectionist riots of 1858. There was, indeed, a "culture conflict," even between sympathetic elites and the folk.

The Renascence of Artisan Politics, 1859-1876

Yet attitudes began to shift perceptibly toward recognition of the flesh-and-blood national artisan after the 1858 riots. Apart from a shock wave against liberal complacencies, the protest revealed that Castilla's liberal order had a harsh, repressive underside, until then limited to the general's immediate or constitutionalist rivals. To be sure, most comfortable Limeños likely concurred with the bitter free-trade polemics of Silva Santisteban and the congress. And the only immediate impact on thinking was a rush to fill San Carlos academy's Public Chair of Economics and Industrial Legislation. (The cátedra was awarded not to Silva Santisteban but to Felipe Masías, whose exceedingly abstract free-trader economics text of 1860 became the standard.) A few years later a government prize was announced for an essay on the unignorable "social problem." The winner, an anti-industrial tract called "Means to Stimulate the Peruvians to Useful Work According to the Current State of Society and Conducive to Public Order," says a mouthful about Peruvian elite sociology in its title alone—though the author conceded that his proposed education drive might at least propel a demand for nationally made pencils.^[23]

[23] Tomás L. Saanpperé, Memoria sobre los medios de estimular a los peruanos según la situación actual de la sociedad al trabajo provechoso y más conducente al orden público (Lima, pam., 1867), sec. viii: predictably, "La industria fabril, en la casi totalidad de sus ramificaciones, no sólo no existe al presente, sino que, con mucha dificultad se aclimitara entre nosotros, en términos de impedir cuando menos, la importación de productors extrangeros" (29). Masías, Curso de economía (1860), in very abstract (antiphysiocratic) vein, does argue that "industria fabril" produces value (chs. 3-4); ch. 5, "Industria fabril en grande y en pequeño: Cual de estas dos formas es preferible," hypothetically deals with reformist priority theme.

But other voices came forth, too, infiltrating broader elite concerns about the extravagant use of guano by Peru's militarist regimes and their fitful pace to full civil rule. By the end of the decade a form of industrial populism was in gear, born from liberal disenchantment with Castilla, electoral organization, anti-Spanish patriotism, a revived artisan politics, and new peoples' notions of technification. The first audible salvo was the radical satire of the La Zamacueca Política (a "Periódico político, popular y joco-serio"), whose premier issue, not by coincidence, hit the streets a week after the artisan jacquerie. Intermittently repressed by the authorities, the conspiratorial Zamacueca was organized by a shady group of dissidents under José Lecaros (and the artisan organizer Salazar y Zapata), men who broached no limits in their antagonism to the Castillan order. But it also seems to have lured liberal purists dismayed with Castilla's harassments of congress; Ricardo Palma, the budding costumbrista writer, secretly honed his talents composing political portraits for the Zamacueca (which took its name from an infamously plebeian Afroperuvian dance).^[24] In an obvious move to spur a popular following, the paper wholeheartedly embraced the artisan cause.

Here, too, the craftsmen appeared as Peru's progressive but degraded "middle class"—but they were now portrayed with none of the studied ambivalence and abstraction of earlier liberal theorizers. The Zamacueca openly defended artisan violence, seconded their calls for tariffs and prohibitions, and publicized the plight of "political prisoners" held since the riots. It condemned state contracts to foreigners, demanded the long-promised school of arts and guild reorganization, damned Castilla for guano giveaways (such as the Gibbs contract), and distributed artisan pamphlets. Column after column bristled with sharp and irreverent barbs against free-traders such as Silva Santisteban, whose particular corpus was summarized in a critical review as "pedantic, trivial, false, in

[24] La Zamacueca Política, Jan. 1859-Aug. 1859; Basadre, Historia 5:2045, for (unlinked) career of Lecaros; 4:1775, Palma role. With guild leaders, Lecaros had formed militias for Castilla in 1854 and 1857; with his 1858 Sociedad Filantrópica Democrática, he was implicated in artisan riots but rehabilitated by San Román in 1862. Zamacueca was unceasing in charging Castilla with "betrayal" of 1854 liberalism; artisans wrote of supporting "Dr. L." in elections ("Artesanos," Commercio, 22 Dec. 1858).

poor taste—and simply an excuse for repression."^[25] On the political style of Castilla, the paper offered, for instance, this lively protest song:

On the eve of elections
to the pueblo he promised
that their industry would be respected
And with his lances and battalions
these were the obligations
now left broken
     Let's say today,  Cacha-bota  [untranslatable pun],^[26]
     satiated and conceited
     when dealing with guano
     his soul gets so excited.^[27]

This was not the most graphic of the guano-oriented social verse of the times, a form pioneered in José Sanz's 1856 mock epic "La Huaneida."^[28] Another Zamacueca poem, called simply "The People," made guano liberalism, greedy foreigners, a parasitic aristocracy, and militarism the amalgamated foes of the masses:

And what to do, if this is industry
what's it left for us?
Paris, London, and Brussels
in exchange for our guano
send us a thousand trifles
of poorly gilded copper,
gloves, perfumes, laces
make-up, false jewels [etc.],
and twenty thousand other pieces of junk
that goad on our pathetic women.
     On this road we follow
     and the pass we traverse;

[25] See esp. "Los artesanos: Folleto del sr. Silva Santisteban," Zamacueca, 29 Jan.-12 Feb. 1858 (his pamphlet was published simultaneously in El Comercio ); "Los artesanos," 8 Jan. 1858, "Presos políticos," 19 Feb. 1859, "Progreso del Perú," 2 Apr. 1859, "Artesanos," 9 Apr. 1859.

[26] This Peruvian slang actually carries a sexual connotation; it may be roughly translated as "boot-fucker" (pers. com., E. Falco, Stony Brook, May 1992).

[27] Untitled, Zamacueca, 16 Feb. 1859; these weren't only ones disturbed with Castilla's words to guilds; "Promesas hechas a los artesanos," Comercio, 18 Jan. 1859, by chiefs of Lima political "clubs."

[28] Basadre, Historia 4:1889-91, discussed guano as poetic social genre; among works, Felipe Pardo's "Pueblo que no trabaja y come huano" and "La huaneida" criticized "el porvenir lejano contemple en el bulto colosal de huano."

     with this sort of government
     we're on the short path to hell.^[29]

One gets the "joco-serio" flavor here. (By the 1870s bombastic satirical journals would become a lasting hallmark of Limeño political culture.) But the mercurial Zamacueca is a serious source for assaying the attitudes of a disaffected portion of the elite, its iconoclastic followers, and their special new romance with restless, flesh-and-blood democratic artisans. Their most frequent target was a sort of opportunistic and entreguista militarism, which radicals blamed for Peru's economic uncertainties and for the predicament of national industry and artisans. During the years of the republic, "sixty-one thousand" had died for the sins of the militarists, eighteen thousand under Castilla alone. Castilla had only made a "mockery of republicanism." The Zamacueca shows the direct imprimatur of Lima artisans (in their comunicados, for example), no longer at the mercy of other's hopeful interpretations. The Zamacueca fired away at corrupt oligarchy three decades before González Prada codified his similar vein of defiant working-class nationalism in the 1880s. By August 1859, when the Zamacueca declared itself in open rebellion against the state, Castilla ordered the subversives out of business for good.^[30] In this climate, legalistic purists in the congress were expelled the next year after plotting Castilla's overthrow; Luciano Cisneros, Palma, Vigil, and Ulloa stood among them.^[31] Surely not by coincidence, a far more sober but parallel elite critique of high guano society and militarism began appearing in the Revista de Lima, which shared some of the cast.

Was there any new economic argument here? Theirs was a highly partisan one, a literal gut translation of artisan views. It posed a fundamental sociopolitical argument: Peru's blind adoration of foreign products had spawned a skewed distribution of wealth and power, protected by the oppressions of a squandering, self-serving militarism. In their formal riposte to Silva Santisteban's take on the artisan problem, the Zamacueca defended the high quality and ample quantity of local labor, estimating guild membership at an optimistic twenty thousand; they

[29] "El pueblo," Zamacueca, 27 July 1859. "Viva el pueblo" was a common refrain in paper (as in the 1858 riots).

[30] "Los catorce gobiernos son la causa verdadera del malestar permanente," Zamacueca, 14 May 1859; and 18 June 1859, 3 Aug. 1859.

[31] Basadre, Historia, vol. 3, ch. 49; the paper often mentioned and clearly identified with this liberal group; Comercio, 17 Jan. 1859 (first repression), Aug. 1859.

mocked the notion of independent craftsmen marching off to rural exports (lands were already owned by the rich, and real men cannot painlessly abdicate their skills and memories); they read political economy and European economic history as a protectionist parable. The reasoning was so artisanal that the Zamacueca rejected even modern industries in favor of craft revival:

In vain does Sr. Santisteban try to prove that the country cannot establish grand factories, large-scale manufacturing. For no one asks for textile factories or the prohibition of foreign cloth; so why muddle the issues? The import of handicrafts [obras de mano ] is the unwanted one. For unable to compete here with foreigners, with expensive labor, it is clear that our artisans are perishing. . . . There are a thousand ways a rich nation can promote the arts and industry.

If Sr. Santisteban misses in our writings technology and science, it's because we speak so that the people can understand us.^[32]

This, then, was not comparable to the full-scale developmentalism of Casanova, Pardo, or Cisneros. Rather than an economic discovery, the Zamacueca marked the first political rediscovery of Lima's simple artisan, plus a fresh kind of social critique of the regime. Yet by the end of the decade it would be hard to dismiss a progressive and popular role for liberal "technology and science."

The 1860s saw increasing efforts to legitimize or exploit from above the artisan cause, though this populist turn (and its relations to topsy-turvy elite politics) is hard to untangle. These began with the return of banished liberals under San Román (1862) and would culminate in the civilista election in 1872. By then the elite image of the hopeless artisan had been thoroughly replaced by the artisan as cornerstone of productive civil progress. One should not overstate the elite democratic impulse, for the "artisans" who acquired new meanings remained reified; few in number and close to creole urban culture, artisans made a convenient stand-in for an imaginary "people."

One early and recognized literary example was Trinidad Manuel Pérez's 1862 "proletarian theater" piece, La industria y el poder, which was profusely dedicated to the now combined Society of Artisans of Lima and Callao. (Pérez, a well-known figure in Limeño literary circles, was founder of the 1870s El Correo del Perú, a journal in the lineage of the Revista de Lima and a forum for Palma, Gorriti, and the young

[32] "Los artesanos: folleto del sr. Silva Santisteban," Zamacueca, 5 Feb. 1859 (and all Feb.-Mar.); for parallel radical view, "Los artesanos," Comercio, 3 Jan. 1859.

González Prada, among others.) The play unabashedly romanticizes the virtues of a suffering working class, offering simple artisan characters who protect "liberty" against the endless transgressions of corrupt "opulent society." Interestingly—in the aftermath of security roundups after the 1858 riots—the plot involves unfair charges of "conspiracy" against the young "hijo del pueblo" Andrés. Pérez earnestly deals with Limeño guilds as they were, not as fanciful "industries." In a hopeful final scene a "minister" (secretly related to an artisan) emerges as their "defender," saying something about artisan aspirations for political familiarity and legitimacy. In short, the play formally embodied the guilds' old "honorable artisan," though it was obviously influenced by contemporary European social drama. Unappealing to Lima's critics, La industria y el poder nevertheless went through two more editions and pleased sympathetic audiences well into the 1870s. After one documented 1865 performance of "political significance," the author was "crowned" by artisan leaders.^[33] This transformation from the 1850s liberal representation of retrograde artisans was more than a turn in literary fashion.

More portentous still were tangible efforts to revive moribund artisan politics and recruit craftsmen to emerging civil causes—efforts linked to the nationalism engendered by the Spanish war and to liberal activists in the Prado regime. The newspaper El Hijo del Pueblo (1864-1868), one such forgotten attempt, was actually directed by shining liberal lights such as Espinoza, Vigil, and even Silva Santisteban himself. Its prospectus was dedicated to "the moral progress and enlightenment of the masses." The paper was linked to Colonel Francisco Bolognesi's new mutual aid society of the same name, specializing in peoples' education, rule of law, workers' savings, and popular moralization (for example, guild juntas to hunt out artisan wife-beaters).^[34] Here one no longer detects the customary guild-bashing and not a single lecture on free trade. Instead, the pages of the Hijo del Pueblo featured patriotic exhortations (quite effective during the emerging conflict with Spain) and

[33] Trinidad Manuel Pérez, La industria y el poder (Lima, 3d ed., 1876); Comercio, 11 Dec. 1865; analyzed as "proletarian theater" in Basadre, Historia 3:1385-86, 4:1891. For Castilla's post-riot jailing of "foreign" elements in artisan "conspiracy," Comercio, 27 Dec. 1858.

[34] "Prospecto," El Hijo del Pueblo (Lima), 22 Feb. 1864, and Juan Espinoza, "¿Qué son los hijos del pueblo?" 20 Feb. 1868; unfortunately, the sole extant copy (BNP) is in deplorable condition; also La República: Revista Seminal Política y Literaria (Lima), Ulloa's nationalist paper aligned with "Hijos del pueblo," 20 Mar. 1864; Constitución reglamentaria de la sociedad los hijos del pueblo (Lima, pam., 1864). For Bolognesi, Jorge Basadre, Peruanos del siglo xix (Lima, 1981), 25-27—i.e., the popular martyr of 1879.

campaigns for massive artisan electoral societies (as in February 1868) against the military Balta regime, which threatened, among other things, Pardo's national guano company. Of their common foe in the army, the paper confides to artisans, "The military do not protect either agriculture or industry—only themselves."^[35] By then an organized Hijos del Pueblo election club was attracting hundreds to its meetings in efforts hailed by parallel publications, such as Ulloa's 1864 paper La República . All this ferment was doubtless part of the failed bid of Manuel Ureta, the obscure forerunner of Pardo's civilista party. In a phrase, some "sons of the nation" were looking to the "sons of the people" for aid.

One October 1866 gathering is colorfully documented in the Lima press. It followed artisan protests of their overlooked role in the patriotic dos de mayo defense of Callao against Spain (led by the liberal martyr José Gálvez, designed by the engineer Malinowski, and ensured by Bolognesi's artillery)—ignored in contrast to the highly publicized December 1865 popular sacking of foreign warehouses in the port. "More than 300 known and honorable artisans" met in the San Francisco convent to debate upcoming congressional elections: "a powerful social class intervening with full deliberation and knowledge," according to El Comercio . Protests were raised against "all the caudillos who, to climb to posts, laud the artisan, and offer a thousand promises they never think to fulfill; worse, arriving to power, they forget and deprecate the man of the people who served as their stepping stone."^[36] The meeting of this renamed Club Progresista, hosted by the jurist José Gregorio Paz-Soldán (rector of San Marcos and long-time liberal kingpin), came out in favor of the presidency of Colonel Prado—the military reformist joined by would-be civilists Pardo, Gálvez, Químper, and Cisneros. Vague on other issues, Prado embraced artisan national militias (as Pardo would in 1872) and even tried to restore a sort of officially sanctioned guild system—to the dismay, no doubt, of allies Espinoza and Tejeda.^[37]

The Hijo del Pueblo appears remarkably similar to the political clubs, protoparties, that had once courted artisans at the start of the export era.

[35] "Un artesano," Hijo del Pueblo, 20 June 1868; Basadre, Historia 4:1583 (war artisans), 1718 (Ureta bid).

[36] "Candidatura del Col. Prado," Comercio, 12 Oct. 1866; see Dean, Cuestión de saqueo, for contrasting event.

[37] In the 1850s Paz Soldán was editor of the opposition journal El Constitutional, link between liberal initiatives; Mariano Prado, "Reglamento de policía municipal," pt. vii, "De los gremios," Peruano, 4 June 1866; also 17 Feb., report on war role of Sociedad Tipográfica de Auxilios Mutuos.

The galloping civil pretensions of elites must have inspired the artisans' own political hopes. Why this happened in the mid 1860s seems fairly clear. Apart from social changes within the artisanry (discussed below), intensified electoral competition and nationalist politics loomed central. By 1863 municipalities and municipal politics, long suppressed in Peru, had been revived and made the natural arena for Lima guild influence. The 1860 constitution, Castilla's great political compromise, gave "masters of workshops" (even if illiterate) the vote, as the system bypassed the closed elite electoral colleges of the past. Notables would now need the support of the "middle class" of guano expansion, such as it was, and just as liberals had hoped. In a still constricted and centralist regime, urban craftsmen made an indispensable constituency, and civil groupings swiftly moved to exploit them and their budding and highly mobilizable societies.^[38]

Equally decisive, no doubt, were the heady political events of 1864-1866, which brought artisans into a new nationalist mainstream. Peru's "Americanist" liberals (a group with roots in official 1850s pan-Americanism), among them Ulloa, Casós, Tejeda, Pacheco, Cisneros, Lissón, and Márquez, were already activated with Maximilian's Mexican adventure and assumed a vanguard role when Spain moved against Peru in 1864. They excited a gathering wave of popular republicanism and antiimperialism throughout the two-year affair. Liberal nationalist legitimacy only soared during the "popular and national revolution" of 1865, led by Colonel Prado against the "treasonous" president Pezet, while Peru's antirepublican conservatives offered up apologetics (or worse) to Spain. The dramatic repulsion of the Spanish fleet at Callao on 2 May 1866—during which many sons of the pueblo offered their services and lives against "European transgression"—made for patriotic links between liberals and popular nationalists.^[39] The old artisan na-

[38] On electoral change, Basadre, Elecciones y centralismo, 22-32; Vincent Peloso, "Electoral Reform and Social Conflict in Mid-Nineteenth Century Peru" (paper presented to AHA, 1989); all papers reveal enhanced electoral organizing of artisans; by the mid 1860s authorities charged activism (and corruption) was out of hand (Peloso, 14-15). For a general appreciation of artisan republican politics, see Salvatorre, "Markets and Popular Protest," 20-26.

[39] Basadre, Historia, vol. 4, chs. 64-69 (and many links of core liberals), vol. 3, ch. 52 (Americanist liberals); see, e.g., Hijo del Pueblo, Apr.-May 1864; Comercio, 15 May 1866; Lissón, La república en el Perú . Propaganda on both sides was intense: liberals in emergency papers such as El Perú and El Estandarte Rojo, El Mercurio (1864 alone), conservatives in El Tiempo, El Proceso Católico . MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," ch. 3, on Pardo shift.

tional creed was enhanced, well beyond submerged economic ideals, at a moment of crunching economic pressures on Peru. One suspects that these events—along with Pardo's frustrating term as Prado's reforming minister—affected emergent civilist thinking on the social question, widening their search for real citizens.

Another critical milestone in artisan (and official) thinking was the establishment, and burgeoning visibility, of Lima's Escuela de Artes y Oficios, which also opened in 1864. Vainly promised time after time to guilds since the mid 1840s, in many respects the school reflected the most benign facets of artisan thought and official conciliation. The school's pedagogic mission harbored a built-in antiprotectionist bias, hopes for cheaper labor, the state assumption of decrepit guild training and quality-control functions, and a stress on technical skill in petty crafts, modeled on fine European training for the backward hijos del pueblo. Superseding forced craft production in Lima's panopticon penitentiary and the (now money-losing) military mechanical training at the Bellavista naval foundry, the Escuela de Artes was meant as a controlling welfare response to the social problem. It was not preparation for an industrial future.^[40] But it inadvertently opened a new stage in Peru's growing scientific fascination—a move to technical populism.

Peru recruited Julio Jarrier, the eminent Chilean pioneer in technical education, to design the vocational programs of the school, which opened at an initial cost of $295,000. At a dramatic public inaugural in December 1864 Castilla himself clarified the aims: "The growing decadence of indigenous industry is making competition impossible. Resort to the protectionist system, condemned by economic principles, has no part in remedying the evils that such conditions inflict on our obreros. But one after another have had to abandon their occupations, sterile now for the individual and society."^[41] Among the dignitaries present was a certain Argentine liberal, Domingo F. Sarmiento (the dean of Americanist education), who lectured on how Mexico and Peru have never "retained" their mining riches. Educated, Anglo-Saxon California and Australia, in contrast, were truly developing.

Commitments to the school proved serious. It opened with a class of

[40] A. Gutiérrez de la Fuente, Exposición que hace la h. municipalidad de Lima al supremo gobierno (Lima, pam., 1863), 17-18 (prison crafts); Noboa, Memoria de hacienda de 1864 , 25; "Reglamento orgánico de factoría de Bellavista," Peruano , 11 Jan. 1867; idea dated from the 1849 artisan campaign, and even Silva Santisteban heartily endorsed it: Breves reflexiones sobre los sucesos con la importación , 35, 49-50.

[41] "Escuela de artes y oficios," Comercio , 10 Dec. 1864.

forty-seven, for seventeen annual graduates, with steam-powered workshops for mechanics, foundries, furniture makers, carpenters, cart makers and the like, using the latest in imported craft tools. In 1866 fifteen scholarships were added for "sons of honorable artisans." An official report glowed, "The progress this institution brings will show in the magnificent masters of workshops that come out, who spread throughout the republic's territory, will powerfully affect the arts, now so backward in Peru."^[42] In 1869 Mayor Pardo pledged even more "stimulus to the working class," creating a parallel municipal Escuela Industrial, with seven workshops for some four hundred students in day (and adult evening) classes. He instituted complementary civic prizes for workshops with growing employment, the youngest masters, and highest literacy, awarded that year at a festival presided over by Fuentes, Cisneros, and the El Nacional publisher Andrés Avelino Aramburú, fast becoming the civilista point man to artisans.

By the early 1870s two campuses were necessary in the capital, and as Cisneros had suggested, congress dictated their expansion in "every province of Peru," a working sign of the new national imperatives. President Pardo ordered the first workshop-school opened in Ayacucho, as part of an innovative Indian assimilation program, along with his fourfold multiplication of primary students nationwide. By the late 1870s the budgets of the Lima schools alone exceeded those of the country's six universities combined.^[43] By then congress was wondering aloud whether national benefits warranted such "huge costs."

Major political figures were involved, such as General Manuel de Mendiburu, the 1870 director (and notable republican historian), and Carlos Lissón, volunteer teacher, publicist, and sociologist of the nation. Each year the school mounted public exhibitions and artisan prizes. The academy, bent on instilling pride, was virtually a barracks in its quest for social order. Student life was fully regimented, replete with military-style salutes and dire prohibitions on complaints, reading, obscenity, and "jokes"—about as fun as Casanova's bygone factory. But deploying an apt military metaphor, one enthusiast wrote in 1872, "The European monopoly of national industry has been mortally wounded; several years

[42] "Memoria de gobierno, policía y obras públicas," Peruano , 23 Feb. 1867 (and 10 Jan. 1866); Manuel Pardo, "Memoria en que el alcalde de municipalidad da cuenta de sus trabajos de actual corporación," in López, Pardo , 461, 482, 491 (1870).

[43] Hunt, "Growth and Guano," 110; Diarios de debates, 1876, 140-41; "Exhibiciones industriales," Patria , 17 Feb. 1872, speaks of foreign models in a "jardín de aclimatación."

will be needed to abolish it completely, and extirpate a monopoly which formed under the careless shadow of our governments."^[44] "Monopoly" was taking on the signification of the artisans over that of the liberal political economists.

The material impact on the Lima artisan sector is harder to detect, given the scattered, noncomparable, and often indecipherable statistics from the 1870s. At a minimum, some 734 (taxed) manufacturing workshops operated in 1873, employing (three years later) some 6,519 working artisans and workers (almost half remained in the clothing trades). These figures were still down from the late 1850s. But these data conceal substantial numbers of poorer craftsmen exempted from tax rolls and (given the sorry lack of business records from the mid 1870s) excludes the expansive impact of post-1874 currency devaluations (estimated at 40 to 70 percent), much commented on at the time. In the crisis year of 1876 unemployment remained very high, gauged at 23.4 percent in an active urban labor force of 34,000, one-third of Lima's population.^[45] Therefore, a strong case cannot be made for any immediate artisanal revival linked to the school of arts, something noted by contemporary observers. However, global numbers hide significant qualitative changes in the artisanry. Occupational heterogeneity increased (in new guilds such as bookbinders and brewmasters); more specialized crafts exchanged inputs (such as processed chemicals); mechanized "first-class" shops (many of them immigrant-led) took larger shares of business; and there was a rapid adoption and spread of small machinery (sewing machines, power tools, and the like, as touted in ubiquitous newspaper ads for their sale and use). The latter was a noteworthy shift in a sector that had traditionally eschewed all technical innovation, and enhanced productivity may account for some of the labor-force stagnation (for example, given the scores of independent cigar makers made obsolete by cigarette-rolling contraptions). For the first time, middle-

[44] Reglamento interior de la escuela nacional de artes y oficios (Lima, pam., 1867), 6-7; J. F. Ezela y Carassa, "Escuela de artes e oficios," Patria , 14 Apr. 1872; "Memoria leída por el Gen. Mendiburu director de la escuela de artes y oficios al abrirse los exámenes públicos del año . . .," Patria , 12 Apr. 1872; Patria , 20 Nov. 1872; Lissón, Sociología del Perú , 69-74.

[45] Rough calculation from 1871 "Patentes" tax (Peruano , Mar.-Apr. 1873); not comparable to 1830-61 patentes series in Gootenberg, "Artisans and Merchants," chs. 2, 4; Hunt, "Growth and Guano," table 13 (labor force analysis of 1876 census), 92-93; cf. later sectoral study (1885) by Bollinger, "Rise of U.S. Influence," tables 3, 5. Clarke, Peru and Creditors , 53-54 on exchange devaluations; or Gootenberg, "Price Levels in Peru," table 8.

class consumers were beginning to turn to nationally made goods. Moreover, craftsmen worked alongside a wholly new network of true factories, big and small.

Less material but more important, then, was the impact on artisan and public consciousness: with such visible official concern, the School of Arts helped relegitimate the "honor" of skilled trabajo in Lima and broadened imaginings of the future. It spurred other forms of worker consciousness: for example, Manuel T. Figueroa, chief maestro of the workshops (and himself an amateur inventor), used the post in 1878 to form the Confederación de Artesanos Unión Universal, Peru's first syndicalist confederation.^[46]

By the early 1870s, indeed, a visible workers' movement was underway in Lima. Apart from its marked craft flavor, it reflected a nascent artisan proletarianization in expanding putting-out workshops (130 workers in Cohen's cigar workshop alone, for example), in the new mechanized factories (such as López Aldana's Vitarte), and in the gangs of workers formed in public works during the Balta regime. Organizationally, it evolved fitfully from Lima's earlier network of apolitical mutual aid societies; by 1873 experienced craft leaders (such as those of the Sociedad Fraternal de Artesanos) were loudly decrying political initiatives by their members, which were strictly against the canons and customs of mutual aid. Repoliticized workers soon forged their own intellectual organs, such as El Artesano (1873) and, revealing of the transition in consciousness, José Enrique del Campo's El Obrero (1875-1877), linked to the printers and the Sociedad de Artesanos (sometimes denoted as "socialist," though del Campo was also a civilista founder). Aramburú, Pardo's staunch supporter in the semiofficial civilista El Nacional , donated his time and services to start the artisan press.^[47] The papers even worked to organize societies in Cuzco and Arequipa, well beyond the city sights of previous artisans.

A major popular concern was the galloping inflation of food and housing costs since the mid 1860s, part and parcel of Peru's larger fiscal instability. Municipal authorities, led again by Mayor Pardo, responded with a flurry of schemes, including plans for worker-organized housing projects, based on principles of mutual aid. The popular Lima Caja de

[46] Basadre, Historia 6:2858.

[47] Gabriel Corante, "Discurso pronunciado por el presidente de la sociedad fraternal de artesanos," Patria , 2 Jan. 1873; Basadre, Historia 5:2045-48; Basadre, Peruanos , 47; MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," table 1.

Ahorros, initiated as well by Pardo, was a notable success in social insurance and workers' savings. Artisans expressed civil ideals in demonstrations against the idleness that had left large numbers dependent on the revived national guards, controlled by the same civilistas, the republican alternative to a conservative and costly army. More and more, the idiom belonged to a working class and less to segregated entrepreneurial crafts.^[48] A smattering of true wage strikes even occurred, starting, symbolically enough, in 1872 with the action of construction workers tearing down the ancient walls of colonial Lima; in 1875 a dock strike was reported in Callao. One opposition charge was that now President Pardo, having used the peoples' militias in the bloody days of July 1872 (resisting the Gutiérrez coup), could not put the masses down.^[49] Alarm in the commercial press was matched by the elation in the workers' own.

Apart from an explosion of new mutual aid, philanthropic, savings, and educational groups, by 1871 craftsmen had patched together a makeshift confederation of trades. The significantly named La Republicano was the forerunner, by all accounts, of the syndicalist confederation of 1878—starting point of Peru's modern workers' movement in the decade after the Pacific War.^[50] The ferment was international as well as local in origin. For example, Peruvian editions appeared of overseas progressive works, such as Fernando Garrido's Historia de las asociaciones obreras , advocating proletarian cooperativism and industry; by 1875 the stock of artisan and worker ideas had been enriched far beyond their own traditions and experience, as the syndicalist title of their union suggests. Unlike the provincial city artisans of the 1840s, and much like the civilistas themselves, the workers soon sought nationwide connections. For example, in Cuzco, Trinidad María Enríquez (the first Peruvian woman to attend university) organized the town's artisans and new working-class night schools and in 1876 instigated the election of a Cuzqueño carpenter, Francisco González, to the congress itself. In fact,

[48] Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión , chs. 3-4, on social issues; M. Pardo, "Memoria de director de Sociedad de Beneficencia Pública" (1868), in López, Pardo , 403-61; "La cuestión subsistencia," Patria , 7 Apr. 1873.

[49] "La huelga de obreros," Patria , 3 Sept. 1872, 19 Dec. 1872; the only precedent—rumored strike of bakery peones in 1859 (in wake of artisan riots)—"Crónica de la capital," Comercio , 11 Feb. 1859.

[50] Peter Blanchard, The Origins of the Peruvian Labor Movement, 1883-1919 (Pittsburgh, 1982), chs. 2, 4; Rolando Pereda Torres, Historia de las luchas sociales del movimiento obrero en el Perú republicano, 1858-1917 (Lima, 1982), 37-44; we lack solid study of associations, often mentioned in press of mid 1870s.

two civilista-supported artisans had already sat in the congress, one (the silversmith Manuel Basurto) defeating the wealthy liberal ideologue Francisco García Calderón for his post!^[51]

Not much is known about artisan thinking before the dislocations of the war. (Afterward, anarchism became rife, firing new nationalist-activist intellectuals such as González Prada.) What is now known is that from the top, among Pardo and his closest civil advisers, a sense of possibilities in workers' politics emerged, picked up while Pardo headed the Beneficencia and toyed with while he was mayor in the early 1870s. Historians are divided on whether this turn reincarnated a traditional coercive "clientalism" or marked a deeper shift in Pardo's thinking, toward a needed "social element" for the citizenry of a practical republic. (This ideal of popular integration, at least, is traceable to his disappointment with Prado's militares and the oligarchic congress that stymied his fiscal project in 1867.)^[52] Whatever the root, artisans and workers came in droves. Recruited through their workshops and civilist electoral clubs, artisans figured prominently among initial civilist founders (signatories of the 1871 manifesto of the Sociedad de Independencia electoral)—including the jeweller Ignacio Albán, president of the Society of Artisans. By one count, at a critical civilista rally at the Odeón theater (May 1871) some 35 percent of those present were identifiable as "artisans," the largest social group. In August 1871, during the dramatic, fourteen-thousand-strong inaugural march on Acho by the civilista campaign—the first mass demonstration in republican history—guild banners and leaders were again out in force. Afterward Pardo lauded the way in which "the disillusionment and political indifference of the laboring classes has been replaced by a vital enthusiasm of individuals and society."^[53]

Other studies show how, if in "prepolitical" fashion, artisans and street people came to defend the regime in the riots that averted and followed the military coup after Pardo's victory in July 1872. Pardo's nemesis in office, the free-trader, social conservative, and pro-army Piérola, soon also framed himself as the man of the "people," but this was not an appealing ideological blend for artisans. Surely in the 1870s (if ever)

[51] Basadre, Historia 5:2094-95; MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," 223; the same García Calderón of Diccionario de legislación .

[52] MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," 218-37, for this fresh perspective and superb data, esp. table 1, "Relación de los firmantes del acta de fundación de la Sociedad Independencia Electoral," and table 2, "Relación de artesanos, jornaleros y peones asistentes al Odeón."

[53] Manuel Pardo, Patria , 7 Aug. 1871.

artisans alone could not have formed a unified "movement," given their occupational complexities and anxieties, separations, and competitions with proletarianizing workers and Lima's new factories. They were not free of elite manipulation, nor did they hold to a single economic perspective.^[54] But it was a nascent politics, based on real-life artisans and stubbornly consistent with their long-standing republican ideals and sectoral hopes. By 1872 elite liberalism had ceased to represent just a teasing hypocrisy to the artisan; its liberationist promise was up for grabs.

At least in the larger realm of economic ideas, attention to artisan perspectives, interests, and potential had become respectable again by the early 1870s. The major Lima papers, such as Ulloa's La Patria and Aramburú's and Chacaltana's El Nacional (the civilista mouthpiece), routinely began to carry features catering to the literate artisan public, including manuals on technical subjects and mutualism. The race for artisan readers became so fierce that free-trade La Patria was forced to condemn its civilist competitor in 1872 for dangerous pandering to "vulgar, popular" ideas, such as Pardo's notion of raising tariffs to meet the fiscal emergency and, worse, to satisfy a (rumored) protectionist petition from Lima's workshops as well. "As a general rule, one can't flatter the people without being enslaved," went their swipe against El Nacional populists. El Correo del Perú (Pérez's new literary forum) called for greater public protection and vigilance over workshops and for a turn to workers' savings as development funds. Petty protectionist measures crept back in; for example, in 1873 decrees granted privileged military supply contracts to the upland Terry and Garmendia factories, a practice hotly condemned since the 1840s. An attempt was made to lower iron duties in the name of Lima machinists.^[55]

The decade before an elite cult of civilizing technology and science had risen hand in hand with the railway projects, immigrant engineers, and nationalizing mechanics. In the early 1870s a perceptible shift occurred in this thinking—triggered by the living example of the school

[54] Basadre, Historia 6:2857-59; Giesecke, Masas urbanas y rebelión , ch. 4 ("prepolitical" heterogeneity), ch. 5 (1872 civilist manipulations). Giesecke speaks of a civil "protección paternal" that escapes control.

[55] See, e.g., Patria (liberal anticivilist): "Una fábrica nacional," 2 Jan. 1872; "Aumento de grávamenes aduaneros," 15 Nov.; "La cuestión social en Europa y América," 20 Nov. (quote); "La protección mutua," 28 Nov.; 19 Dec. 1872; "Economías mal entendidas," 10 Mar. 1873; "Protección a la industria nacional," 28 Mar. 1873. Correo del Perú , 14 Apr. 1874.

of arts, by receptive artisans, and by positivist-civilist campaigns for popular and practical education. Instead of the previous faith in magical, technological prowess from above, these prophets advocated an activist, populist, and mechanical creed, in line with artisan standards and crossing, to varying degrees, into economic heterodoxy. Technology would happen when the people got involved. Two such writers, the Jacobin positivist Mariano Amézaga and the tinkerer and pensador José Arnaldo Márquez, reveal the emerging forms of popular mechanics.

Mariano Amézaga, a San Marcos philosophy professor, is best remembered as a radical positivist and frenetic university reformer of the late 1860s and early 1870s, a promoter of national educational works, heir to the Bilbao democrats of the 1850s. Later, a fanatical anticlericalism moved Amézaga to an anticivilist stance—a González-Prada-like repudiation of the party as a "shameful financial oligarchy of guano," and one of the paradoxical founts of the Piérolist black legend of civilismo.^[56] But early on, as a prolific essayist for Pardo's El Nacional , Amézaga mainly extolled the virtues of popular vocational education. His vision was both more social and more laissez-faire than the civilist center.

Amézaga vaunted popular education as a panacea for "making a nation of Peru," preaching a creed of "trabajo" for the "sons of the working class." In his initial writings he condemned the "shameless" use of guano monies; the one proper use was diversion into primary education: "Is it just disdain for the masses, for our descamisados , among our leaders of instinctive despotism, on which we pin our country's destiny?" The people were the lonely ones "working the workshops."^[57] Only mass education, including women's education, would "abolish castes" and forge a real "citizenry" capable of resisting the caudillos. Here was an activist shift from the elite notion that steam engines alone would drive Peru's technical and social revolutions. At the same time, Amézaga shared in the official school-of-arts discourse of base Peruvian craftsmanship, complaining that "industry cannot prosper because our obrero lacks initiative and industriousness; he limits himself to observing the rote practices at his grasp. There isn't the lowliest foreign worker who isn't superior."^[58]

[56] H. Amézaga, Perú liberal , 197-99; Basadre, Historia 5:2121; Mariano Amézaga, Perú: Galería financiera (Valparaíso, pam., 1873). See also F. C. Coronel Zegarra, La educación popular en el Perú (Lima, 1872).

[57] M. Amézaga, Problemas de educación , 19 (Tauro, comp.); concerns comparable to ethics explored in Safford, Ideal of Practical , ch. 2, "Learning to Work."

[58] M. Amézaga, "Escuelas municipales," Nacional , 12 Apr. 1869.

By 1870, however, Amézaga was formulating a decidedly social critique of the school-of-arts' welfare formula. In a heated commentary on the institute's annual report, he blasted the idea of willy-nilly educational expansion without commensurate opportunities for work, so lacking in jobless Lima. Graduates of the school, mainly from indigent families, lacked capital to start their own workshops and were already drifting into serving as mere oficios (assistants). Society was losing. Amézaga's solution was a system of provincial, state-supported workshops, to employ the minted masters as technical emissaries across the Andes. A craft reversal of Silva Santisteban's forced bucolic decentralism, here was the argument that railway demonstration effects were not enough for technological dissemination.^[59] "It's not necessary to examine the impact of such an industrial revolution on the country," contended Amézaga in his precocious turn to the interior, even to the Indian, as industrial material. Because Andean agriculture was only a seasonal form of employment, Amézaga metaphorically paired "the native and the craftsman" as complementary "rudimentary fellows," needful of each other's services.

Despite his plea for state-sponsored workplaces, Amézaga's critical edge began to chisel at the proto-industrial promises of the school of arts as well. In a sharp rebuke of technical policy, Amézaga deemed the entire enterprise misguided, even misguidedly protectionist. What cried for priority was Peru's new academy of scientific agriculture, both in terms of immediate funding and in Peru's long-term and logical material evolution. "The constant plaint of national artisans that imports of overseas manufactures crushes them makes in fact lucid proof that other countries have better facilities and minds for manufacturing and industry—just as we have tremendous advantages over them in exercising la industria agrícola ."^[60] Peru needed agricultural development first. Much like the theoretical liberals of the 1850s, Amézaga ardently wished to go to the people with his practical revolution, so long as they dropped their protectionist errors. But in contrast to the 1850s, a far more tangible and autonomous national artisan was taking shape in the liberal imagination. As Amézaga approvingly noted in an 1870 tract celebrating Lima's new bibliotecas populares: "Our artisans of today are not those of past ages.

[59] M. Amézaga, "Escuela de artes y oficios," Nacional , 16 Mar. 1870. The unemployment critique was not unique: see "Memoria de ministro de gobierno, beneficencia y obras públicas" (1876), in Diarios de debates , 1876, 140-41.

[60] M. Amézaga, "Instituto de agricultura," Nacional , 3 June 1870; and "Escuela de comercio," Problemas de educación , no. 16; see Luis Sada, Bosquejo de la organización de la escuela nacional de la hacienda normal de agricultura (Lima, pam., 1863), for goals.

New ideas ferment in their minds and very favorable movements in their activities."^[61] In short, they were almost useful citizens.

In contrast to Amézaga's still ambivalent popular mechanics was the timely appearance of the 1874 periodical El Trabajo , directed by José Arnaldo Márquez—Peru's best-known nineteenth-century educator. Here a science for the people fully met popular aspirations and revealed the sea change that had occurred since Zamacueca Luddites of 1859. Márquez, a "bohemian" writer published in the Revista de Lima , is remembered for his translations of Shakespeare, social poetry, Americanist politics, and youthful travels in the United States (and journals thereof), which left a visible Pardo-like democratic imprint. Márquez was also (among other trades) an amateur inventor; in 1873 he patented an automated typesetting machine in New York, only to spend the rest of his life fruitlessly chasing his rights in international courts. (His saga as an innovator was matched only by that of Peru's autodidactic clockmaker of the 1860s, Colonel Pedro Ruiz Gallo, and his imaginary airplane.) Most important, Márquez, an intimate Pardo ally, was director of the 1873-1877 El Educador Popular , a popular and secular teaching aid central to Pardo's educational drive and a source of grave political struggle with Peru's conservative church. During the Pacific War the peripatetic Márquez crisscrossed the globe as Peru's chief diplomatic courier, later penning critical histories of guano and nitrate finance.^[62] His career promoting artisan industrialism, overshadowed by the clerical controversies, is less renowned.

El Trabajo , as the name suggests, resumed the elite self-critique of unproductive reliance on guano prosperity: "We are poor" again announced the premier issue in August 1874. "The exaggerated financial speculations of the past years have made the question of production the one impossible to ignore. Guano does not exempt us from the obligation to produce." Indeed, guano could no longer produce any miracles, as demonstrated by the 50 percent deficits suffered since 1871 and the calamities attendant on Peru's failed 1872 European loan bid, which

[61] M. Amézaga, "Bibliotecas populares," Nacional , 21 Feb. 1870; "Guttenberg" was key to "democracy."

[62] Milla Batres, Diccionario biográfico , vol. 6, needs three separate entries; Pike, Modern History , 136; Basadre, Historia 5:2104-11, 6:2973-77, 3:1808 (Ruiz Gallo); J. A. Márquez, Recuerdos de viaje a los Estados-Unidos de la América del Norte (Lima, 1862). Besides getting the name right, this last work brims with invidious comparisons to "atraso" of Peru: J. A. Márquez, La orgía financiera del Perú: El guano y el salitre (Santiago, pam., 1888).

paralyzed the civil government, public works, and private banks.^[63] But rather than address the anxious elite, whose financial apparatus was collapsing around them, the paper turned instead to Lima's lowly artisans and their production. El Trabajo 's masthead read, "The weekly of sciences, the arts, and the industrial classes." If inadvertently, Lima's motley industrial classes, from school of arts alumni to guild masters and migrant industrialists, were among the few beneficiaries of fiscal instability. (Peru's sinking exchange rates boosted sugar exporters, too.) In ideological terms, El Trabajo was a peoples' version of the nationalizing engineers' club of the 1870s.^[64]

El Trabajo featured the usual array of pieces on technical and industrial education, reflecting the local boomlet at the school of arts. But it also openly extolled, in contrast to the school and Amézaga, a protectionist and interventionist line to stem the crisis. Márquez called for a "Banco Industrial," a new mortgage institution whose interest would be paid in craft goods, not profits, and a program of state-supported workshops.^[65] This was a craft version of Casanova's and Cisneros's industrial idea, recast with Continental cooperativism, and was the popular antipode of the exporter elites' agrarian, mining, and nitrates mortgage banks. "We'd have a preventative measure to avoid the near future disaster that all can now clearly see." To Márquez, unemployment was a "tragic waste when the creation of workshops is where these thousands of industriales will find honorable bread." El Trabajo entertained a number of progressive causes. It vaunted feminism in the workplace ("women as an element of riches"), employment for the handicapped, and a gamut of unheard-of social services for workers. It was antimilitarist. It taught the latest and most diverse lessons of political economy (Ricardo among the favorites) along with artisans' lessons on being the good spouse.^[66] Its scope was national as well as artisanal, for example when projecting the full-scale mechanization of Peruvian agriculture and the scientific exploitation of untapped Andean resources and mines.

One surprising innovation of Márquez's mouthpiece, distinct from

[63] El Trabajo (Lima), Aug.-Dec. 1874; "Prospecto," 12 Aug. 1874, "Somos pobres," 29 Aug. 1874.

[64] Asociación de ingenieros , discussed in ch. 4, above.

[65] "Banco industrial," Trabajo , 5-12 Sept. 1874. This was not an entirely new idea: Silva Santisteban (Breves relexiones sobre los sucesos con la importación , 52) had proposed artisan "Banco de habilitación" in 1859; "Carpentería," "Costura," Trabajo , 5 Sept. 1874.

[66] Un artesano, "Deberes de esposo," Trabajo , 7 Nov. 1874; Ricardo, "Diccionario de economía política," Oct. 1874; "Fomento a la industria," 6 Dec. 1874.

artisan traditionalism and Amézaga's agrarianism, was its spirited campaign to promote capital goods industries. Artisans (and Lima's prospective factories) had always counted on imported and duty-free tools, though precedents for protection existed in the imaginary projections of the foreign railroad contractors of the 1860s and the engineering professionals of 1872. El Trabajo 's editorial of October 1874 called for the "Iron Industry of Peru": the "mother industry" that for the United States and Britain had formed "the principle of their grandeur and superiority."^[67] Márquez conceded that although protected ironworks would inconvenience workshops that imported all their tools, in the long run the entire country would benefit. For this lofty aim honorable artisans would surely sacrifice. Machines, Peru's educator proclaimed, were the "schools" of the "niños del pueblo," a new twist on the old technological slogan. The industry would develop using the iron ore, coal reserves, and recently discovered La Brea petroleum deposits of the north. In just a slight departure from Ricardo, stiff tariffs were essential for employment as well as learning purposes: "Free importation itself makes consumers prefer imports. But what is really preferable—that the country spends the same or a little more on the purchase of a machine made in the country, as new as an import; or that competition ruin our factories, to fire our workers and apprentices, who for lack of work just fatten the ranks of vagrancy?"^[68]

Citing the ore studies of Alfredo Duval, this campaign was likely inspired by the early 1870s expansion of several Lima-Callao foundries and repair shops (e.g., Straton's and White's); skills spawned in the course of railroad construction (several engineers, such as Backus and Johnston, opened industrial shops in Lima); the long-standing example of the state's Bellavista machine shops; or, perhaps, Márquez's own frustrated career as tinkerer. The idea itself was not all that bizarre, considering the wide demand for tools, machinery, and trained resident mechanics triggered by Peru's expanding coastal plantations and haciendas of the early 1870s. Only the politics of the scheme—the sugar planters were already Peru's most zealous free-traders—was left unresolved. Patriotic artisans, Márquez's target audience, were not likely to go it alone, if at all. El Trabajo continued its cry for restrictions on machinery imports.^[69]

[67] "La industria de hierro en el Perú," Trabajo , 10 Oct. 1874; "Importación de maquinarias," 10 Oct. 1874.

[68] Trabajo , 10 Oct. 1874.

[69] See, e.g., Sánchez, Historia de una industria , ch. 2; papers carry many ads for these shops; Asociación de ingenieros; an attempt registered ("Protección a la industria nacional," Patria, 28 Mar. 1873) to change duties for machinists.

Above all, El Trabajo was trying to rescue the age-old moral emblem of Lima's artisan class—el artesano honrado with his amor al trabajo —as a national ideal for breaking the spiral of Peru's crisis. Discernible here were the first inklings of a developmental politics. As contexts changed, this politics contrasts with Pardo's and Cisneros's elite "productivity" formulas of the 1860s. By the mid 1870s trabajo rhetoric had even entered the dry but now civilist Memorias de hacienda and was reaching far corners of the country, such as Puno (which had a paper of the same name).^[70] And in El Trabajo one senses ever realer artisans embraced not because of their productive potential alone but because they had been the one group in urban Peru least tempted by a chimerical export bonanza. A new economic nationalism, a sense of national integrity, a productive morality, could not derive from foreign models as liberal nationalism had. "Proverbial is the love for arts and mechanics that dominates the sons of Peru." The paper awarded hardworking craftsmen with special public recognition. It appealed to the national "capitalist class" to support their "honest" productive endeavors materially. It advanced a plan to the Beneficencia Pública, Pardo's upper-crust welfare agency, to purchase large numbers of sewing machines, printing presses, and technical manuals to provide "honorable and moral work" for the destitute (presumably, these machines would be of Peruvian make and Márquez design). Proud craftsmen, rediscovered as useful citizens, wrote to the paper in glowing tones: "El Trabajo, which is the teacher of the artisans, should necessarily guard our interests as well."^[71]

Economic Independence?

The most compelling of the 1870s diversification projects was Juan Copello and Luis Petriconi's Estudio sobre la independencia económica del Perú (1876).^[72] This book released an extended new na-

[70] See, e.g., Elguera, Memoria de hacienda de 1874, 15; El Trabajo (Puno), 1876, was an apparently unrelated "progress" oriented paper.

[71] "Señores r.r. de 'El Trabajo,'" Trabajo, 10 Oct. 1874; "El trabajo y la industria," 21 Nov. 1874; "Enseñanza industrial," 12 Dec. 1874. This was not a wholly new idea, since the municipality had already broached it: "Casa de trabajo para mujeres pobres," Patria, 26 Mar. 1872.

[72] Juan Copello and Luis Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica del Perú (Lima, 1876), rpt. 1971, with an insightful prologue by Jorge Basadre.

tionalist critique of the passing guano boom—from which historians took their normative periodization of the export age as "the fallacious prosperity." It also presented the most far-reaching and cogent plan yet for a Peruvian industrial future. First published in March 1876 as a popular-policy series in the newspaper El Nacional, this book, unlike other writings of its class, has enjoyed historians' rediscovery a century later. Nearly all modern historians of Peru mine Copello and Petriconi's argument for "economic independence" as the lodestone of dependency interpretations of the republican era—not a far-fetched reading. This work also inspires invidious comparisons with civilismo: that is, by sidestepping this type of thoroughgoing response to the crisis, the civil exporter elite inexorably led Peru to its multiple national catastrophes of the late 1870s.^[73]

Rather than deconstruct the entire 111-page, 48-chapter book, already a classic of historiography, this section will instead reappraise its social, political, and intellectual contexts—its origins and innovations. Four facets define the originality of Copello and Petriconi's contribution: as extension—and synthesis—of developments in elite and popular thought; as direct reflection of the reality of the fiscal and commercial collapse of the mid 1870s; as expression of Lima's novel micro-industrialization; and as sociological sign of Peru's nascent immigrant "middle class." These aspects then shed light on their central industrial argument. But the major departure of Estudio sobre la independencia económica was its vision of a complementary and working civil politics of development.

Copello and Petriconi, first of all, were not the isolated visionaries—"voz solitaria"—usually depicted.^[74] Their work shows its incubation in the milieu of Lima's emerging nationalist and popular mobilizations. Its principal themes parallel the policy ideals of Pardo's wing of civilist politicians—a firmer liberal state, national diversification, popular productivity, imagined industrialization—but with the added virtue of long vistas. Copello and Petriconi, neither politicians nor ministers, were the rare Peruvian thinkers who enjoyed the rich luxury of standing outside the nitty-gritty, quotidian politics of crisis. But their work was still

[73] E.g., Yepes, Perú 1820-1920, 103-5; Bonilla, Guano y burguesía, 169-71; Tantaleán, Política económico-financiera, 150-51 (as "pre-plan de desarrollo"); Amayo, Política británica, 158, and so on. Bonilla finds this work utopian, as Peru had no "internal markets" to develop.

[74] Yepes, Perú 1820-1920, 103; Macera, "Historia económica como ciencia," 39; see also weighty analyses in Basadre, Historia 5:2123-24; 2260-63.

steeped in policy questions. Their publisher, Aramburú's El Nacional, was the active civilista organ, publicizing varied defenses of Pardo's beleaguered efforts and closely engaged in the stormy national mid-1870s debates over stalled railroads, rising intervention, export monopolies, immigration, and fiscal, banking, and educational reform. The work's populism was akin to the integrative variety espoused by leading civilista publicists, such as Aramburú and Márquez, by party builders Monti and García y García, or by El Nacional itself. And Juan Copello probably even knew Pardo personally, having worked under him as chief physician of the main municipal orphanage during Pardo's energetic reign at the Beneficencia.^[75]

Nor was this work the antithesis of civilist export promotion. Like all serious thinkers, Copello and Petriconi strongly recognized the developmental value of new exports, such as nitrates and sugar, relating their prospects to lessons gleaned from the fading guano experience. Diversification required guidance, hardly a shocking notion in writers of the times. By the 1870s economic "nationalism" belonged to no single party or faction in Peru: nationalism was the mantle of all economic discourse. The trenchant and deafening 1869-1871 debates over the Dreyfus contract, for example, revealed its universal currency. While Pardo's hijos del país emotively decried the "denationalization" of guano trade and finance and painted themselves as the true and only national interest, pro-Dreyfus forces were just as adamant in their nationalist goals and credentials: the contract would strengthen the state's freedom of action, release national "productivity," and loosen the grip of forces "enslaving" the national interest.^[76] Social critiques of civilismo—even charges of "oligarchy"—were equally commonplace.

In power, Pardo's program was bound up with the contours and turns of the economic emergency and splintered and constrained by the sundry groups vying under the civilista umbrella, from sugar barons and merchants to artisans and anticlerical firebrands. Pardo placed understandable weight on short-term stabilization: budgetary gaps, credit

[75] For sense of Aramburú's populism, see his Asesinato de Pardo; Stewart, Meiggs, chs. 5-7 (on Nacional debates); MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," ch. 4.

[76] See, e.g., Refutación de las acciones interpuestas judicialmente por los nacionales con motivo del contrato Dreyfus (Lima, pam., 1869); Cisneros, "Negociado Dreyfus"; Amézaga, Galería financiera; and J. A. Torres Paz, La oligarquía y la crisis: Disertación leída en la sociedad jurídica-literaria en la sesión del 29 de agosto de 1877 (Lima, pam., 1877). The last is a positivist polemic against Pardo's "pseudo-civils," "popular harness," and banker "oligarchy."

sources, tax collection, and bank confidence. Each improvised solution ran up against heated opposition—from planters resisting export levies, to bankers blocking emission restraints and unified currency, to foreign creditors protesting the nitrates takeover, bond default, and new guano contracts. His medium-term goals—fiscal and administrative decentralization, streamlined and modernized bureaucracy, educational expansion, military cutbacks, resolute state action in the economy—moved ahead, despite the political fireworks sparked among the church, army, and conspiring Piérolist conservatives.^[77] Pardo's long-term missions—national educational and technical renovation, an enlarged participatory citizenry, the integrative communications revolution—would have taken many years to mature even without the unrelenting economic and political shocks.

The impasse was real enough, especially after the stalled 1875 Rafael contract, and was exceptionally difficult to pass in the simultaneous process of civil democratization, which exposed the regime to explosive obstructions and charges. Even the most rudimentary steps—budget deadlines, revenue tariffs, banking controls—faced uncompromising opposition from the 1872, 1874, and 1876 congresses, from within the party's motley ranks, and from Piérolist and military cliques unconstrained by the niceties of republican rules. In four years Pardo faced some thirty-six attempted uprisings. Long-term objectives were challenged from a resurgent laissez-faire lobby in agricultural and mining futures.^[78] Within this maelstrom Copello and Petriconi's project marks an attempt, within the culture of civilismo, to reformulate a stable social basis for the regime. Their stated intention was to move the buffeted "government and people" from the "road of inertia" to a "road of work."^[79] And moving beyond Cisneros's and Pardo's original visions, the unsaid aim was to forward a working politics of recovery, built on restored commitments to the developmental long term. This program

[77] See MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," esp. 221-27, conclusions; Ulloa, Piérola; Ugarteche and San Cristóval, Mensajes de presidentes, 1872-1876; Bonilla, "Crisis de 1872."

[78] Diarios de debates, Sept.—Oct. 1872; Sept. 1876; for Pardo defense in liberal idiom, Lo que se ve y lo que no se ve: Ojeada sobre los principales actos económicos del gobierno civil (Lima, pam., 1874). For new export liberalism, José Manuel Osores, Conferencias sobre materias económicas dadas en el club literario por J. M. Osores (Lima, pam., 1876): the crisis was fiscal alone, and Peru was "essentially to be agrarian, in our fathers' footsteps"; railways were a misguided waste of capital on nonexport regions. Also Casós, Minería y agricultura.

[79] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, "Al benévolo lector," ch. 48, conclusions.

revolved around a mediating "middle class," an inclusive smallholder ideology, and an activist state. It reflected emergent realities and was certainly geared to the civil vanguard and its tentative popular organizations. Whether civil leaders fully absorbed (or could act on) Copello and Petriconi's critique is harder to say.

Second, the reality that Copello and Petriconi best fit was the dismal one of Peru's crashing economy and soaring social stresses. They open their book with a lucid declaration: the collapse of the monoexport regime by 1875—Peru can no longer import "everything"—had for the first time made its alternatives more than academic. Guano sales to Britain slid from around £2 million annually (1865-1869), to £1.75 million (1870-1874), to £1.27 million by 1875, depletion barely compensated by fitful nitrate and sugar exports. Financial panic hit harder. After three years of tenuous overseas credit and mounting insecurities in local finance markets, in 1875 Dreyfus suspended—defaulted on—Peru's mammoth £35 million foreign debt, contributing to a major international debt crisis. There were few prospects for recovery in the long depression that soon gripped the world economy. Pardo's new Rafael contract would never get off the ground, and his early stabilizing strides vanished. The pivotal native bank, Banco Nacional del Perú, collapsed; panicking bankers called in some 30 million soles from planters, paralyzing crops and investments; rail building ground to a halt; and Pardo's nitrate monopoly and tightened budgets could not close Peru's gaping fiscal deficits. Thousands of workers from abandoned public works and militias streamed into Lima, swelling city tensions.^[80] The free-fall in imports drove the crisis home to well-off Limeños. In 1870 Peru (largely Lima) could consume £1 million in English textiles (and £446,000 in motley goods); by 1876 imports had fallen more than 60 percent to £360,000 (and £180,000 sundries). Visionaries were not the only ones watching the age of guano end in a bust.

The second but positive reality pressing on Copello and Petriconi was Lima's novel process of "microindustrialization"—which suggested one palpable alternative to import shortages. By the mid 1870s, with fiscal bills, a weak new silver standard, and bullion flight sending Peruvian exchange rates plunging, profit opportunities were finally, if inadver-

[80] Elguera, Memoria de hacienda de 1876; Greenhill and Miller, "Peru and the Nitrate Trade," evaluate responses; Camprubí, Historia de bancos, pt. 3; Bonilla, "Expansión comercial británica," table 3. Maiguashca, "Reinterpretation of Guano Age," ch. 7, and Marichal, Century of Debt Crises, ch. 4, both suggest recovery until world crash.

tently, to be had in import substitution. Not much is known about these industries. Small mechanized workshops expanded at breakneck speed, and fabricantes rapidly appeared on the tax rolls. A coterie of modern factories appeared—in beer, cotton, glass, candles, soap, cigarettes, ice, soda, machinery, construction materials, noodles, confections, and all sorts of foodstuffs. By the late 1870s, apart from its ever more noticeable artisan workshops, Lima had twenty or more genuine "factories" (twelve definitively established in the decade). A savings Sociedad Industrial Peruana formed in 1873, offering 200,000 soles in small shares.^[81]

Carlos López Aldana's Vitarte cloth mill, first reusing Casanova's discarded machinery, employed more than a hundred workers and specialized in agricultural sacks and coarse cottons for coolies and laborers. According to one estimate, it shaved about 600,000 soles from the import bill in 1876. (López Aldana was also a founder of the civilista party, along with Manuel Amunátegui, owner of El Comercio's struggling paper works; the Cuzco industrialist Francisco Garmendia became Pardo's first vice president.)^[82] "José" Cohen's automated tobacco plant (soon expanding into printing) likely employed the most workers. Two of Meiggs's engineers, Jacob Backus and J. Howard Johnston, set up soda and ice factories; before 1879 they had already opened their famous brewery, which found a conspicuous home in the La Perricholi house, vacated since the days of the Tres Amigos factory (where López Aldana had worked in 1849). All of this activity unfolded without formal promotional and tariff policies or sure shifts in Peru's terms of trade; it came by dint of new technology, new entrepreneurialisms.

Such modest successes must have inspired beliefs in industrial possibilities—just as for the generation before a few flagrant failures had paralyzed all elite interest in industrialism. The mania for companies was so legendary that Limeño literary magazines poked fun at "pequeña in-

[81] Basadre coined "microindustrialización": "Prologue," Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, vii-viii; see Geoffrey Bertram, "Alejandro Garland: The Ideologist of 'Desarrollo Hacia Afuera,'" typescript, Oxford University, 1974, notes (factory foundings); Bollinger, "Rise of U.S. Influence," surveys, chs. 1-2 (tables 3-5); J. Fred Rippy, "The Dawn of Manufacturing in Peru," Pacific Historical Review 15 (1946): 147-58. "Patentes," Patria Jan.-Feb. 1872, 30 Jan. 1873. Clarke, Peru and Creditors, 53-54, and Carlos Boloña, "Tariff Policies in Peru," D. Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1981, 58 (devaluation).

[82] Luis Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica del Perú (Lima, 1882), 26; Sánchez, Historia de una industria, ch. 4; MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," table 1 (affiliations); Patria, 20 Mar. 1873 (Garmendia obituary).

dustrias." One budding young writer, Manuel González Prada, trained in chemistry, decided to start one himself—a starch factory—and was doing very well until the war. A manufacturing trademark law was passed, portending the complexities of competition. Civilista finance reports stopped denouncing a bogey of fictional industries; by 1876 ministers instead lauded "the considerable improvement in many national industries," noting by name their favored textile factories. A deeper sign of attitudinal shift comes from the ubiquitous newspaper ads for Lima factory products. The decade before, advertisers spoke only of the "finest products of London and Paris" and vehemently denied covert selling of any locally made counterfeits. Now merchants proudly advertised their wares from "industrias nacionales" and "peruanas." Citations at the "National Exhibitions" boosted sales.^[83]

Timidly still, some factory owners were beginning to press for the political recognition and support of their sector, rekindling protectionist debates. Pardo's 1872 tariff, ostensibly for fiscal reasons, raised duties 5 percent on competing manufactures, extended their range, and then concertedly surcharged textiles. Ministerial reports became noticeably evasive about hallowed principles of free trade. One factory magnate (Cohen) publicized his cheap cigars as the consumers' best "solution" to impending tariffs.^[84] In a published 1878 petition to congress the wide-ranging businessman Emilio Prugue called for high tariffs and technology patents for his new candle, soap, and sulfuric acid factory. Besides offering employment for a hundred female workers, a steady stream of chemical inputs for a "multitude" of budding factories, and a sophisticated accounting of effective protection, Prugue hoisted the nationalist banner: "It is only equality we seek . . . and a national industry making the republic independent in one of its necessities. Riches have been lost, and are still lost to Peru, as shown in the manipulations of guano that took our capital off to Europe—instead of distributing them among the workers and to the advantage of the government. . . . Industry is

[83] "Pequeñas industrias," Correo del Perú, 10 June 1877; Elguera, Memoria de hacienda de 1876, 30; ads for products and machine imports found everywhere; "Exhibiciones industriales," Patria, 17 Feb. 1872; 17 Apr., 12 May 1873; cf. "Industria nacional," Comercio, 4 Jan. 1875, with earlier ad for "Almacén de Ferrai," Comercio, 11 June 1865, when "se garantiza además que ninguna de las crinolinas se venden en el almacén son fabricadas en el país." Kristal, Andes from the City, 111 (González Prada).

[84] Patria, 21 Sept. 1872 (Pardo speech); "Aumento de gravamenes aduaneros," 15 Nov. 1872, "Fábrica de cigarros puros y de papel," 17 Apr. 1873, "Ingresos aduaneros," 26 May 1873; free-trade Patria follows issues religiously. For shifting 1870s "Memorias," Dancuart, Anales de hacienda, vol. 9.

progress, wealth, and the general welfare."^[85] Industry and "independence" were already paired. However modest these strides, "industry" was no longer just a figment of imagination.

Fourth, Copello and Petriconi even reflected a novel "class" (and cultural interest) in Lima, one that civilistas were working hard to promote. At least one critic has recognized this facet in branding the pair as typical "petty bourgeois" dependency thinkers.^[86] In an interesting fashion, they were. Mobile and practical thinkers, both were naturalized Italian immigrants—just like the majority of Lima's new petty industrial entrepreneurs. (Juan Copello, a Genoa-trained physician, arrived in Lima in 1846, opening a corner drugstore and practice; he became the pioneer of blood transfusion in Peru, sometime professor of history of medicine, and author of arcane medical texts. While with the Beneficencia under Pardo's directorship, Copello served in the campaign against the yellow fever epidemic and worked for the Lima orphanage, with its children's workshops—all excellent schools on the city's social disparities. His partner Petriconi leaves us no trace.)^[87]

Lima's pioneer factories of the 1860s and 1870s were not founded by the flor y nata of Limeño society.^[88] The majority of founders bore names such as Rosello, Vignolo, Prugue, Ravettino, Chiappi, Suito, Risi, Zolezzi, Kieffer, Pouchon, Freund, Schmitt, Spinckmoller, Schroeder, Malborg, Field, Ashford, White, and Cohen—middle-class, urban European immigrants all. In a country that had seen little "white" immigration, such men quickly filled the upper ranks of small commercial life in Lima. With comfortable craftsmen, they made Peru's "respectable" (if minuscule) middle class, sandwiched somewhere between the hijos del país and hijos del pueblo. Italians alone owned some 450 small enterprises in Lima-Callao by 1873, in a European community approaching 10,000. Some, who initially thrived off the superior prestige of Euro-

[85] Emilio Prugue, Protección a la industria nacional: A los honorables representantes del congreso de 1878 (Lima, pam., 1878), 4-5. Prugue shared nationalism other ways: "Fábrica de velas esterinas," Patria, 12 May 1873, advertises that his "candles aren't broken, like those that come from Europe."

[86] Bollinger, "Bourgeois Revolution," esp. "Origins of Dependency Theory in Peru" (34-36), at least conveys long lineage of thinking in Peru.

[87] Basadre, prologue to Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica; Milla Batres, Diccionario biográfico, vol. 1; "Patentes," Peruano, Apr. 1873, Dec. 1885; Fuentes, Movimiento de poblaciones, 249; Janet Worral, "Italian Immigration to Peru: 1860-1914," Ph.D. diss., Indiana University, 1972, ch. 2, p. 143.

[88] Gilbert, Oligarquía peruana; after 1900, Prados became first major family diversifying into factories (158-61); detailed survey of foreigners in crafts and commerce is "Datos estadísticos," Patria, 20 Apr. 1872.

pean goods in their corner pulperías, moved to replace those products with locally made substitutes (likely drawing on overseas models and connections). For varied reasons, exclusionism among them, by the 1880s Peru's nascent import-substituting industrial sector had become virtually synonymous with upwardly mobile "Italians," especially those connected with the postwar industrial Banco Italiano.^[89]

Copello and Petriconi clearly shared an affinity here, and not with Lima's traditional race-conscious upper class. "Juan" Copello (né Giovanni) was a committed member of the city's Sociedad Italiana de Beneficencia y Asistencia (founded in 1862), serving an Italian colony of five to seven thousand. Key chapters of their book, not surprisingly, vaunt voluntary and skilled white immigration to Peru, "quality" people, as the sine qua non of trabajo. Industrialism, they argued, enhancing mobility, would draw even more.^[90] So fixated were they on European talent (in their own ethnic blinders) that Copello and Petriconi barely noticed Peru as Indian country—a turn that would occur only after the 1879 war.

In this obsession they shared the values of Pardo's wing of civilists. Immigrants were a realization of that democratic "middle-class" social category waiting to be filled since the 1850s and sought out in their political mobilizations of the early 1870s. Like Pardo since 1860, they vigorously opposed the subsidized import of low-skill forced labor (coolies or contracted agrarian colonists), the object of ongoing campaigns by coastal exporters. In 1873-1874 civilistas halted the coolie trade, at its horrific peak in the Balta years, and instituted instead their Sociedad de Inmigración Europea. Inspired by Pedro Gálvez, and with activist Aramburú on its board, this state-subsidized venture went largely after skilled artisans. By 1876 more than three thousand had arrived, mainly Italians, at the considerable expense of 600,000 soles. Despite initial hopes, though, immigration remained an overwhelmingly urban phenomenon; it was particularly worrisome for men like Copello and Petriconi, for by 1875 joblessness bedeviled new arrivals.^[91]

[89] Worral, "Italian Immigration," chs. 2-3, 6; for perceptions of immigrant business acumen, see A. J. Duffield, Peru in the Guano Age (London, 1877), chs. 1-2; Quiroz, Domestic and Foreign Finance, ch. 3.

[90] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 18, 20, 43-45 (esp. pp. 85-87); Worral, "Italian Immigration," 142-44.

[91] For hopes, see poem "A los inmigrantes," Correo del Perú, 1 Mar. 1874; "Inmigración europea," Patria, 8 Jan. 1873; Juan de Arona [Pedro Paz Soldán], La inmigración en el Perú: Monografía histórico-crítica (Lima, 1891), chs. 8-9, 13-14; Pardo, "Inmigración vascongada" (1860).

Copello and Petriconi also stood apart from Peru's traditional artisan class. Their proposal is steeped in European smallholder ideology, principally that of Sismondi. It adopts a popular idiom, much like Márquez's, but still harbors a bias against guild protectionism and skills. They talk above, not for, both elites and artisans. All in all, the Estudio sobre la independencia económica provides a unique "middle-class" perspective on Peru's changing social problem—one highlighted in the 1870s with incipient workers' organizations, civilist populism, and the new entrepreneurialism. As a politics of development or path beyond policy "inertia," it placed their imagined middle class in the middle ground of a unifying national program, one capturing at least the creole citizenry. Even a certain professional bias slips in here, for their book reads like the anatomy, diagnosis, and prescription for an ailing economy—as medicine to break its mortal addiction to imports.^[92]

Copello and Petriconi's Estudio sobre la independencia económica introduces itself without ambiguities:

With the frankness that comes from deep conviction, we have proposed the promotion of national industry [their emphasis] as the only means to solve, little by little, the commercial crisis that we now face, resolve the problem of economic independence, and with it, all of the problems of our political existence. To convert this sad and agonizing present into a future full of prosperity. . . . Our ideas are not founded simply on the healthy principles of economic science. But they derive from the factual experience of all nations, including Peru itself—that the backwardness of economic activity from a fleeting and fictional wealth (unlike the industrial kind), has created a false and trying present, and a perilous future.^[93]

Most of these themes sound familiar—the precariousness of guano dependence, the commercial roots of Peru's crisis, the pragmatic inspiration of imagined ways out, and even their Panglossian pledge to resolve "all" social problems. The argument, however, is taken yet further. Copello and Petriconi boldly turn timeworn liberal discourse on its head: it was commercial growth, not manufacturing, that has now proved "artificial" for Peru.^[94] The involved analysis following their

[92] Many notable economic and social thinkers are suspected of medical analogizing—e.g., Quesnay (and physiocracy in general) and Comte.

[93] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, "Al benévolo lector," 3-4. The book is built around forty-eight pithy chapters, which we cite separately.

[94] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, ch. 1; Cisneros, less absolutely, pioneered this tactic.

switch becomes part revisionist economic history, part structural stabilization program, part infant-industry argument, part protectionist formula, and part broad political vision for the productive, social, and democratic transformation of Peru.

Introductory chapters of Estudio sobre la independencia económica form a didactic economic history of the guano age, which is unmistakably nearing its end. For theory Copello and Petriconi cite Sismondi and Pradier-Foderé: the former, the early French social critic of laissez-faire and noted defender of independent small producers and artisans; the latter, the French legal adviser to civilista administrators, rationalizing apostle of state sovereignty and liberal social trabajo.^[95] The rest, the bulk, was Peru's own experience, beginning in 1846, the decisive year when guano gained its place as the nation's dominant export (and coincidentally, the date Copello himself landed in Lima). In the time-honored way, Copello and Petriconi illustrate Peru's secularly deeper commercial imbalances, fueled by reliance on guano incomes, manufactured imports, and foreign finance. Imports quadrupled in the export age but brought only a "fictitious" commercial florescence to Lima. Every manufactured good became an imported "fictitious necessity." Greater Peru, as often observed, had barely benefited from the bonanza. Yet one point is clearer than ever: Peru's collapsing export capacity can no longer sustain such a system. Production must radically increase, overseas consumption radically decrease. To Copello and Petriconi, Peru needs to recover its lost diversity of "1846."^[96]

The departure from most civilist reformers was Copello and Petriconi's tally (and political sense) of the economic and social costs of the guano boom. None of the relished improvements or resources of the country—the banks, railroads, large plantations ("latifundia"), migration, foreign loans, and so on—"served anything" when they excluded the people from work and progress. In countryside and city the boom has "destroyed small property . . . [and] left the poor and oppressed with a lack of economic life." It aggravated wealth distribution, the basis for

[95] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, 5, 10; they "corresponded" with Pradier-Foderé and claim slogan "independencia económica" his (stress on legal protection for industry also obvious influence). Fuentes translated two of Pradier-Foderé's works; see Trazegnies, Idea de derecho, 224-29, for role in Peru. On Sismondi, see Winch, "Emergence of Economics," 547-48, esp. former Smithean positions and historicism.

[96] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 2-4, 9, p. 101; plays on "fictitious" and 1846 comparisons recur through book.

true "pueblos prósperos," and left oppression in its wake, as in the case of coolie "slaves." The country's export saga had exposed "the thorney terrain of abstractions and theories, as a field strewn with practical facts peculiar to Peru."^[97]

The foremost cost—even costlier than concentration of power—was subversion of Peru's "economic independence." Nationalist plaint more than anti-imperial slogan, to Copello and Petriconi this soon meant one thing: the loss of Peruvian manufacturing skills. Guano's "prosperity was fictitious because it has evidently been at the expense of our industry and our economic independence—to the point of imperiling even our political sovereignty."^[98] Ultimately, only foreign merchants and foreign industries prospered from Peruvian wealth. Their attractive dependency motif, sounded in the title Estudio sobre la independencia económica, is not by itself very clear: for what industry did Peru really have to forfeit?

At heart Copello and Petriconi were imagining, stressing what Peru might have had, had it steered a different course since 1846. They meant a loss of potentialities, a "lost opportunity," to use Shane Hunt's pithy summation of the guano age. Here Copello and Petriconi set out to redraw the lessons of history. There is much talk (but little glorification) of artisans and guilds. True, they confess, Lima's artisans appear slothful, dissolute, disorderly, and ill trained. But rather than the cause of artisan misfortunes, these traits were the results of years of underemployment, official neglect, and elite condescension. Peru must immediately foster the artisans' output of shoes, clothing, furniture, and other necessities—that is, revive the languishing basic crafts, and ingrained "habits of laziness" will dissolve. They point to the advances of the school of arts, which must be "continued, completed, perfected." Likewise, Copello and Petriconi take an unorthodox slant when conjuring up the early factory experience: "Perhaps the paper factory, and the cottons factory then established would have prospered—if only they had received the decided protection of the law."^[99]

For Copello and Petriconi, Casanova's foiled optimism made him, if omitted in name, the prophet of guano-age misfortunes:

Is it not a total shame that our sole factory for newsprint, started by Sr.

[97] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, 9-10, 24, passim.

[98] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, 16, passim.

[99] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, pp. 36-37, 49, and chs. 19, 32; Hunt, "Growth and Guano," pt. 6—economic model of lost entrepreneurial potential.

Amunátegui, has failed, when with a little protection, this product whose consumption is so wide, could have supported five or six factories in Peru? Isn't it a shame that there exists only one cottons factory [Vitarte], when with modest promotion, we could sustain perhaps fifty factories for myriad textiles, as cotton is so essential to everyday life? Is it not disgraceful to export our fine wools in huge quantities, for a terrible price, and in huge quantities and inflated prices (and to the benefit of foreign industry) we buy woolen clothes, blankets, drapes etc. Is it not a shame . . .^[100]

The litany of unmet industrial "shame" goes on.

What of the drives to reform economic policy since the 1860s, and the myriad proposals in play at the peak of Peru's crisis? Copello and Petriconi remain skeptical, while taking readers through several chapters' worth of outcomes from past reformist and developmental schemes. Ever larger loans, promotion of coastal plantation crops, austerity budgets, wider taxation, the nitrate monopoly, national bank projects, sales of national property, fiscal decentralization, colonization plans—none proved sufficient to ward off the present disaster. Theirs was an absolutist hindsight. Even railroads are deemed a "beautiful theoretical principle"—yet they have brought the country to its knees financially and are proving at best an uneconomical mode of transport.^[101] Certainly, Peru must continue apace with its agriculture, mining, and other primary exports, which have a sure role in balancing trade. But without expanding domestic markets and drawing natural resources into manufacturing demand, the same errors will recur. Nitrates, for example, would end up as fictitiously profitable as guano (something Chileans had the historical pleasure to learn).

For Copello and Petriconi, promotion of industry was not a deduction of dogma but a conclusion arrived at from the kind of distanced, hindsight analysis unavailable to overwhelmed and politically entrenched policymakers. But they were not simple Cassandras: again and again they speak to the "immense utility of this economic and commercial crisis—that can open the eyes of thinking men, to present dangers, and future hopes."^[102] They spoke to the civilist government.

The specific industrial proposal of the Estudio sobre la independencia

[100] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, 32-33.

[101] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, pp. 8-9, and chs. 4-8; on railways, see Diarios de debates, 1876 (89-90), official confirmation of long-term losses.

[102] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, ch. 10; quote is chapter title.

económica builds on three cornerstones: the social "organization of work," a critical rundown of potential industries, and open protectionism. Copello and Petriconi variously term their plan the "well-organized protectionist system" or "well-understood protectionism." All three elements find clear national precedents. (Even their terminology, for example, sounds suspiciously like Cisneros's "protectionism intelligently applied.") But they could not gloss over the known flaws of indiscriminate protectionism or the predictable objections of liberal critics, confronted head-on in a gamut of contrapuntal chapters. In Peru's grave condition, free trade becomes the tried and "utopian" option.^[103]

Tariffs assume a "necessary" role as justified from their reading of Peruvian as well as British, U.S., and French economic history. Theirs was basic raison d'état: "all nations strive for economic independence." Given Peru's virtual collapse, compelling examples discussed were the recent U.S. and French resort to protection as a reconstructive tool following their civil war crises.^[104] As usual, Copello and Petriconi confronted the practical difficulties of any protectionist platform: contraband, price inflation, rising labor costs, forfeited public revenue and loans, foreign market retaliation, and so on. But they shed the bashful technocratic stance of Cisneros in their clearly political appeal. And like all industrial pundits, they must convince skeptical readers that Peru enjoys all the "advantages"—hidden resources and latent skills—to become a manufacturing nation. But for Copello and Petriconi the final punch, one unavailable to past thinkers, was the simple fact that Peru's once imagined commercial crisis was now ever too real. Already overseas commerce was paralyzed, export capacity sliding, inflation rampant, incomes falling, customs revenues drying up. Already Peru was defaulted, disgraced, and deprived in European credit markets.^[105] In short, the "opportunity costs" for protection—the alternatives to be sacrificed—looked exceedingly low by the mid 1870s.

In this they were right. These are the difficulties (along with wars) that typically drive countries to protectionist regimes. Their utopian

[103] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 14-22.

[104] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 13, 15, 23, and pp. 32, 104; ch. 28 is titled "Conclusión: Podemos y debemos proclamar francamente el sistema proteccionista y llevarlo al cabo con decisión como lo hacen todos los gobiernos." The 1870s saw return of defensive protection worldwide: see Peter Gourevitch, "International Trade, Domestic Coalitions, and Liberty: Comparative Responses to the Crisis of 1873-1896," Journal of Interdisciplinary History 8 (1977): 281-313.

[105] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, esp. chs. 28, 46.

strain, however, was nonrecognition that these very depression conditions were those that also typically impede protectionist successes.^[106] Peruvian consumption was already compressed. But Copello and Petriconi shared in fantasies that industrialism would spell a brisk expansion, with few painful, long-term trade-offs of the sort politicians were unwilling to risk. More appealing, and more within the parameters of civilista thinking, was their array of social (and political) supports to the recovery process.

The second underpinning of Copello and Petriconi's program, the "well-organized" part, was the promotional package to complement protection. Tariffs alone would not do. These also included measures heard or seen before: enhanced technical training, modest government subsidies ("protección directa"), technology prizes, import of foreign experts (as Garmendia had done), migration of "quality workers" (their personal obsession), industrial exports, development of oil, coal, and iron reserves, and sustained public works. Agriculture and stiff agrarian protection were not overlooked in the scheme—though the Peruvian peasant (i.e., Indian) merits a single bland mention. Many of Copello and Petriconi's suggestions fall in the ambit of civilist cultural change: founding economic societies, shifting the "middle class" into scientific pursuits, establishing a periodical of Peruvian industry—since "saber es poder." "Perfecting" new civil institutions was their watchword. Here their most novel proposal was a coordinating "Ministry of Fomento" to oversee complementary economic activities and to avert chaotic promotion—the office that civil engineers would achieve in the next generation.^[107] Although government officials must help orient Peru's drive to independence, the spotlight (à la Pradier-Foderé) remains on free enterprise, individual incentives, and small-scale initiatives.

At one point Copello and Petriconi summarize their imaginings as "restrictive laws as far as foreign commerce and industry are concerned: liberal laws for national commerce and industry."^[108] This was another perceptive grasp of Peru's national predicament—one of excessive liber-

[106] See Thorp and Bertram, Peru 1890-1977, for analysis of adverse policy cycles in modern "open economy."

[107] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 11, 29-32, 37, 63-65; p. 64 offers the only mention of Indians, though critique of "land monopoly" throughout suggests views. Cisneros had called more vaguely for promotion board.

[108] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 34-35, passim; Basadre, Historia 5:2260, grasps them as liberal thinkers, despite their protectionism.

alism in the external sector and of imperfect competition, shallow markets, constrained labor, concentrated wealth, and state privilege on the domestic scene. Intelligent protectionism must develop the internal markets it shelters. The authors repeatedly proclaimed this basic liberalism in promoting "association" and rejecting coercions, monopolies, and concessions. Estudio sobre la independencia económica is no socialist manifesto; rather, it is a fresh expression, for Peru at least, of a small-scale national capitalist ethic.

The third crucial element of "well-organized protectionism" is its selection process for prospective industries, the same thorny dilemma addressed by Cisneros. Thoughtful selection, not planning, is the chief function of Copello and Petriconi's watchdog Council of Promotion. Chapter 39 is devoted solely to Peru's motley range of existing and envisioned industries. Its new, palpable level of detail surely reflected the differentiation of Lima manufacturers around them. The Estudio sobre la independencia económica isolates three branches of manufacturing, each related to spheres of imports, technology, or consumption. First are sheer luxuries and capital goods, from silks and medicines to heavy agricultural machinery. These are not worth protecting since the market is puny and Peru could never perfect their production in the short run. Copello and Petriconi obviously were not of the Peruvian tinkerer persuasion. Next are the simple industries where independent producers, largely artisans, had managed to hold out—as in leather goods, beverages, alcohol, candles, soap, furniture, hats, tobacco, and clothing. Expansion here will lighten the import burden, lend employment, stimulate national agriculture, and build on and better extant local skills.^[109]

The third pivotal line comprises "those new industries that we could introduce easily, and surely master, and that use gifts of our primary materials, and on a large scale." This proposal targets big and basic factories for mass consumption, using imported capital equipment, in the popular necessities that still accounted for the bulk of Peru's import bill. They discuss, for example, varied classes of cotton textiles, linens, woolens, pottery, glass, and such natural and chemical inputs as dyes, coca, plaster, and sulfates. Prugue's petitionary factory earns an exemplary citation. They also point, Pardo-like, to potential growth areas in low-wage rural zones with raw materials, riding the national current opened by

[109] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, ch. 39 ("On the existing arts . . .") and passim.

"theoretical" railways.^[110] Puno wools seem most amenable to industrialization. Similar promotional distinctions are drawn for agricultural and pastoral pursuits. These were the protectionist categories defined by Peruvian reformers since the lessons of the late 1840s; protectionism demanded high selectivity. A small and undeveloped country such as Peru, Copello and Petriconi conclude, "cannot make everything."^[111]

Theirs was not exactly artisan protectionism and populism of the kind hailed by the Zamacueca or Márquez. But significantly, Copello and Petriconi were the first to include a bolstered artisan sector as a pillar of their national program. Their ideas echoed the new urban popular politics, the evident progress of vocational arts, people's productivity calls, and their own upwardly mobile backgrounds. The first generation of diversification writers, from Casanova to Cisneros, had easily written off "backward" artisans for more efficient and abstracted large-scale factories. Copello and Petriconi were not only more identified with those left behind by free trade but were alert to the self-organized production potential of workers.

This is not to find Copello and Petriconi uncritical of existing guilds. They rebuked, for example, wasteful luxury crafts and partook of creole zeal for the moral overhaul of a debased Peruvian worker. Their conceptions, too, bespoke both the implicit threat to "public peace" in Lima's economic chaos and joblessness and the civilist ideal of order.^[112] They purposely attach a ghastly chapter on possible worker "revolts" (after all, this book followed the Paris Commune—as well as Lima strikes and Pardo's worker militias).

Factories per se do not spark worker unrest, they argued, but dearth of work and public recognition do. A guided "bienestar material" (material well-being) would serve a coveted "bienestar moral." The entire Estudio sobre la independencia económica rings with reactive Sismondian chords of a just and stable social harmony. Development was in the common good of all national classes and demanding of active social integration.^[113] Here lies the advance on Cisneros's and Pardo's rarefied

[110] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, 75, 68.

[111] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 23, 36-37.

[112] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 19, 21.

[113] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 19, 21, 44-45; the Velasco regime, of course, is seen as Peru's modern activist, corporatist, integrationist, nationalist experiment. In terms of their "middle-class" developmental politics, Copello and Petriconi presaged aspects of the 1920s APRA movement.

standard of trabajo, which (at the time) lacked a unifying civic culture of development. In this proclamation urban investors, craftsmen, and immigrants could read themselves into a political scenario; Copello and Petriconi tailored what we might now call a "social pact." It was prescribed not just as an economic remedy, but also to heal the discordant class paralysis of original civil ideals.

In this vein, the chief function of their projected Council of Promotion was to act as "intermediary between the industrial classes and the executive, charged with applying the promotion laws of the congress, and enforcing their decrees." It was imagined as twelve men, chosen by the president and "notable for their enlightenment, independence, and social position." Under this directorate's apolitical investigative-selection process, planning was not left to guilds, whom experience showed inept at deciding industrial policy.^[114] If the institution has a Continental corporatist ring, it was alien neither to Lima's more traditional guilds nor, for that matter, to Peruvian landed elites. Again, one senses here a response to Peru's deadlocked crisis politics.

Despite these vagaries of social control, the striking social message throughout the Estudio sobre la independencia económica remains its attention to small-producer participation and ideology. It reflected aversion to the large-scale projects and social marginalizations of expansive liberalism—that is, plantation mentalities. The authors dub their message "the organization of work by the initiative of the people," though a people not lacking tutelage. In the end the industrial plan rests on the decentralized activities of democratic "sociedades industriales," modeled after Italian experiments, to be formed in "every section" of Peru.

As they closed this work, Copello and Petriconi returned to emphasize these social requisites and spurs to industrialism: "We have faith in the economic plan expressed, but with a single condition: that there exists the open, faithful, and energetic cooperation of the pueblo, who organize work, and of the public authorities called forth to protect and foster it " (their emphasis).^[115] This was the economic analogue of the social underpinnings of civil rule evinced by the regime. In the abstract, others (even Cisneros, in his own way) had assigned workers a role in renovative development; men such as Márquez were energetically addressing real workers. Copello and Petriconi pass by a range of inspirations, from the

[114] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, chs. 29-30, p. 57.

[115] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, 100-101; see MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," ch. 4, for civilist "social" turn. Infatuation with U.S. example was common; ironic (and equally common) was Chile as developing exemplar (88-89).

"good government" of the republican United States to the dreams of Continental syndicalism. (Emergent German statism and classic French étatisme merit no approval.) But above all was the authors' own fixation, redolent of artisan and immigrant thinking, on the principle of "honorable work." To Copello and Petriconi, unleashed human capital was the true productive solution demanded by Peru's societal crises—"la verdadera riqueza." If "a program of trabajo humano " were adopted, it would "not only, in a few years, bring us to our desired economic equilibrium, but to a real and progressive prosperity, that would make Peru into one of the richest and most powerful nations of America."^[116]

Of course, Peru never became that. Its officials could barely confront the commercial choices of the 1870s. The escalating pressures of unremitting crisis, felt on every front, were not opportune for putting into practice any pensive policy—much less ones that implied long-term and social change. Peru's harried leaders of the late 1870s continued to bicker over the need for such elementary reforms as banking controls and export taxes, splitting into confounding rivalries between Pardistas, Pradistas, and Piérolistas, as the export economy sank beneath them. The simpler rush to nationalize and exploit the nitrates of the desert south, if a "national" policy of sorts, directly brought on the crushing 1879 war with developing Chile.^[117] Peru—as a military, economic, and, most of all, national entity—was woefully unequal to the contest, and the victors would demolish or rob whatever relics remained of the "fictitious prosperity." Yet societal crisis had at least triggered deep and original currents of alternative thought—something that Peru never lacked in its age of guano.

[116] Copello and Petriconi, Estudio sobre la independencia económica, 101-3. See similar official statement in Elguera, Memoria de hacienda de 1874, 15: the "agent" of "productivity," of even Peru's fiscal balance, is "man."

[117] On late 1870s policy paralysis, see Baltazar Caravedo M., "La economía peruana y la guerra," in Basadre, Reflexiones a la guerra de 1879, 75-124.