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.