Indians and Industries

Esteves's 157-page Apuntes para la historia económica del Perú (1882) marks the first formal and full economic history of Peru. To be sure, others had dabbled in history to score policy points—in the initial republic (sizing up the material costs of Spanish colonialism) or with Pardo and Cisneros (collecting statistics, grasping trends, drawing their needed lessons). Pardo worked from several crude studies of regional evolution; Copello and Petriconi forged a synthesis of the export age still relevant to historians.^[12] In some sense, Esteves was extending this tradition in his highly nationalistic retrospect—which makes still another pro-industrial tract from Peruvian experience. New distinctions and directions are also pronounced: its uncompromising national scope

[12] P. Macera, prologue to 1971 edition of Luis Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica del Perú (Lima, 1971); for prior histories, see Santiago Távara, Análisis y amplificación del manifiesto (Lima, 1831), and Pardo, "Partido de Saña" (1860). One can compare Esteves's work to other 1880s retrospects: e.g., the overseas A. J. Duffield, The Prospects of Peru: The End of the Guano Age and a Description Thereof (London, 1881)—highly pro-Pardo (including verbatim conversations with Pardo). Apart from the sarcastic tone ("Guanomakers" chapter surveys bird life), Duffield is notable for emphasizing the total lack of development during the "Guano Peruvian Republic."

(a turn from Lima altogether), its explicit strand of indigenismo, its policy-making withdrawal, its most discernible positivist influence, and its baldly anti-imperialist stance.

Little is known of its lawyer author, who apparently escaped the furies of the Pacific War by retiring to his study—and to history. The book, in fact, studiously ignores the impact of the war, even though its statistics range through 1880. We know that Esteves was a close "friend" of the liberal nationalist Químper—to whom his book is dedicated—and also a staunch admirer of Pardo (the only guano-age politician to escape his wrath) and of the Cuzqueño industrialist and politico Francisco Garmendia. The decade before we find Esteves as a none too active but perennial congressional deputy; he may have brushed up on statistics on the agricultural and commerce committees.^[13] In 1881, though overlooking wartime realities, Esteves was already looking to prospects of restoring the devastated country, and on very different footings.

Apuntes para la historia económica is no academic tour de force, one reason for its subsequent obscurity.^[14] Its intended and actual readers—the "nation"—seem equally mysterious. Much of the text runs over predictable themes: the shape of nineteenth-century agricultural, mining, commercial, and fiscal developments, spotty attempts to splice together workable statistics on these topics, motley colonial, archaeological, and scientific background materials. Esteves surveys such mildly controversial topics as labor systems and immigration (favoring "toleration" for free or indigenous workers); the efficiency of sugar, cotton, and wine growers (lauding Peruvian innovators, scorning Spanish business mentalities); the saga of guano consignment and sales (long, disjointed polemics on foreign and caudillo perfidy); railroads (for uniting the nation in Incan fashion, from north to south); the Dreyfus contract ("perpetual swindler of the fisc and his Jew-coterie"); silver mining (key

[13] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, dedication, 34, and ch. 8; Diarios de debates, vol. 1, Congreso ordinario de 1870, Oct. 1870 (and 1872-1876); e.g., Esteves voted against Dreyfus contract, yet he was hardly outspoken on any issue. In the preface Esteves lauds Mexico and France as exemplary builders from economic and military disasters.

[14] An "empiricism" noted by Macera too (prologue, 1971 reprint). Mallon, Defense of Community, 125, recognizes Esteves's perspective; all recent studies of indigenismo (Kristal, Davies, etc.) overlook the book. One contemporary reader was J. M. Rodríguez, citing Esteves in preface to Estudios económicos (1895). But this work became so lost that even César Antonio Ugarte, Bosquejo de la historia económica del Perú (Lima, 1926), fails to recognize it; in 1922 Ugarte became first formal Profesor de Historia Económica y Financiera del Perú.

to retiring Peru's paper bills); and nitrate policy (in support of Pardo's nationalizing course). The tone, however, remains restrained, though not as technocratic as the academic economic histories to follow (C. A. Ugarte's of the 1920s, for a dry instance). Much of the text, updated with Raimondi's discoveries, replicates that exploratory genre of Peru's boundless and untapped regional resources, as in forays into coming tropical products of the montaña (the Amazonian foothills of the Andes).^[15] The entire country receives coverage, with extensive chapters examining coastal and ("no menos importante") sierran domestic farming and pastoralism. Only the Lima economy remains conspicuously and significantly absent. Three topics, however, excite Esteves's real passions: imperialism, manufacturing horizons, and the Indian laborer. Together they construct a novel nationalist argument.

The principal aim of Esteves's historical synthesis, revealed from start to end, is to "awaken" Peruvians from despair over their own industrial potential:

There is no people that instinctively does not aspire to make themselves industrial; if any exists, it is only due to their powerlessness. . . . Nor is there any industry alien to a country, if the primary materials are found there to make it run. For this reason, they call "barbaric" those peoples who do not know how to adapt the wealth of their soils to its intended object, content with selling abroad the raw material. And for this reason they call "civilized" those peoples who best know how to give form, color, and substance to the products of nature. . . . Is Peru a country that can hope to join the ranks of factory nations? That is what we hope to demonstrate in the best manner possible.^[16]

Several idiosyncratic angles converge. First, philosophically, Esteves is turning the categories of European positivism on their heads. Instead of a dismal indictment of native or racial capacities—the usual interpretation throughout Latin America—they become here a scientistic call to evolve socially along the "industrial" path. The lingo of Comtean positivism had affected reformers since midcentury; here it was a new logic. Second, Esteves poses his industrial argument in overwhelmingly psychological rather than policy terms; he strives to disabuse the ren-

[15] Such topics surveyed in three large sections: 1, "Historia y porvenir de las industrias agrícola y manufacturera"; 2, "Historia y porvenir de la industria extractiva"; 3, "El comercio, su historia y porvenir en el Perú." Chapters cited below divide in three sections.

[16] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 35; in the preface Esteves similarly highlights "regeneration from past errors," "past locuras, " and the notion that "peoples are the only ones responsible for their own disasters."

tier mentality of Peru's fallen export-consumption society—the undermining of entrepreneurial spirit and faith worked by effortless riches. Although similar motifs pervaded works by Casanova, Cisneros, and Copello and Petriconi (their shared national or Saint-Simonian cult of trabajo), here intervention, protectionism, and tariffs escape mention. The book is striking in its lack of policy recommendations.^[17] Pardo-like, Esteves purposely steers clear of the stereotyped trade debates of the past, which had made no headway as industrial argument in the 1870s. Instead, the history overflows with vignettes of modest advances worked by Peruvian businessmen, farmers, industrialists—and past civilizations of "twenty millions"—when they put their minds and peoples to work. The most specific arguments are of a stark cost-benefit kind. Esteves thinks that by clearly demonstrating the profits to be had in manufacturing, his self-improving, self-interested Peruvians will heartily respond. Third, these psychological-positivist elements come together in Esteves's new conception of Indians as the keystone of Peru's industrial future. Once freed from "oppression," their true industrial and civilizing instincts will rise to the fore.

Finally, Esteves offers the related critique of static comparative advantage—that Peru as a whole is also capable of industrial diversification. Esteves confronts, with his pragmatic psychology, that ancient and pessimistic canard of natural advantage in exports: Peru as immutable país minero y agrícola. The message of industrial revolutions, and of Peru's peculiar nineteenth-century saga, is that all civilized countries can—"must," he now insists—industrialize. With his historical and entrepreneurial exhortations, Esteves was Peru's post facto Casanova.

But Peru is constrained by an outside factor: imperialism, a theme broached openly for the first time in Peru's economic literature. By his final chapter on world trade (an extended attack on British commercial "monopoly"), Esteves lets go with a striking historical and cultural critique of overseas influence. Peru's guano specialization nourished only European industrialization; at home it starved the true spirit of progress: "They have relegated to us the subaltern post of pliers of raw material." Esteves makes Peru akin to Ireland under the political economists' classic British "absentee landlords"—a country ruined by careless

[17] Precursors are not mentioned. Esteves broaches protectionism once (57), claiming it ineffective in early wheat trade); interventionism with silver mining was also unworkable. Positivism entered Peru by the 1860s (e.g., "Estudios sociales: Faz de decadencia," Revista de Lima 3 [1861]), but it is generally regarded (e.g., in Pike, Modern History, ch. 6) as post-1890 current.

control from abroad. "The statesman knows how the nature of industries influences the progress of peoples, and it is shocking how for fifty years we left industries on the other side of the seas—fertilizing them with our natural products and commerce, as payment for the artifacts that our own production had made possible."^[18] Latent or folkloric notions of "free-trade imperialism" (such as Copello and Petriconi's) now become overt, for in Esteves a long history of informal dominion lies behind Peru's barbaric specialization and deep sense of national impotence:

Why did England not use its cannons to take over America just as they conquered India? . . . By her moral preponderance she projected actions in the national interest, to forge more durable chains. And so it was more practical and fruitful to lend pennies to the caudillos of independence, and capture these republics after three centuries of domination, just like birds escaping from a cage. And without suffering any disturbance to her own liberty, she was able to bond them to her industries, through a commercial prowess. . . . And thus, invading with her subjects all the routes of commercial movement, she paralyzed the lax activity of the South Americans. In short shrift, our capital, shipping, and industries all fell into English hands.^[19]

Apart from passionate denunciations of British and French guano speculations, Esteves cites ominous cases of imperial perfidy in Peru. These, for example, emerge when discussing hopes to regulate montaña harvests of cinchona bark and promote its more profitable local industrial refinement into sulfate of quinine. Puno businessmen had apparently once attempted such a factory—only to see it sabotaged by the studious price manipulations of British export houses at Arequipa and Tacna.^[20]

Prior to the 1870s it was rare to hear such antiforeign sentiments—except in the losing cries of irate artisans—in a Peru so adoring of European ways and sway. The financial acrobatics of Dreyfus, the crash of the 1870s, and European displeasure with Pardo's reforms were awakening such elite antiforeign feelings. The Pacific War was also helping—the conflict Esteves brands a European "war of foreign interests against the guano and other riches of Peru."^[21] Yet with equal might,

[18] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, p. 156; pt. 3, ch. 3; pp. 154-56.

[19] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 155.

[20] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 66; cf. pt. 3, chs. 2-8, on guano.

[21] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 155. For British roles in Pacific War, see survey by H. Bonilla, "La dimensión internacional de la guerra del Pacífico," in Basadre, Reflexiones a la guerra de 1879, 415-36, or free-trade conspiracies in Amayo, Política británica .

the British, in their self-interested achievements, have shown the world the way to industrial society and commercial greatness. For example, Esteves's most concrete proposal is a crash program, like Elizabethan England's, to develop an independent merchant marine, out of British grasp, salvaging plans scrapped in the free-trader 1860s. But within a tradition, Esteves does not advocate autarky but greater autonomy. Unlike Químper, for example, he speaks favorably of "European or American capitalists" developing coastal irrigation and plantations, after the opening of a Panama canal that will only broadcast the benefits of world commerce.^[22]

The anti-imperialist edge of this work then merits attention less for theological reasons than for its novelty. Intellectual historians assume that such outward incriminating arguments, as opposed to positivist "self-incriminating" images of development, arrived late to Latin America, in the 1920s baggage of imported Marxism.^[23] But the detached comparative and social methods of positivism could assail Europe just as well. Peru, through José Carlos Mariátegui and Víctor Haya de la Torre, would excel in those "new" radical ideologies of anti-imperialism and indigenismo.

The industrialization proposal of Apuntes para la historia económica is singular in several ways. For Esteves, as for his predecessors, palpable experience rather than economic theory guides his sense of industrial possibilism. In one rare mention of Lima, the success of the Vitarte cotton mill in weaning Peru from British import dependence makes heady inspiration:

We ourselves are tributaries of that diligent nation to no small degree—as any look at the British imports to Peru show. . . . Thus we have paid out to England for cotton pieces alone almost double what we received for producing raw cotton. . . . The textile factory of López Aldana, in Vitarte a few miles up from Lima, is now responding to our way of doing commerce—so inconceivable and anomalous for a country of middling culture. Sr. Aldana has sparked an economic revolution in this field, which in the future will be worth many millions to Peru; in its first moments of action in 1876 it

[22] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 6; cf. Químper, Propuestas de los tenedores de bonos, 5, 12, who warns of British commercial path to empire (e.g., a Peruvian East Indies Company), but was most concerned with Peru becoming "Yankee territory." Elite anti-imperialism finds a (political) counterpart only in the liberal "Americanist" (anti-Spain) agitation of the mid 1860s.

[23] E.g., Hirschman, "Ideologies of Development," 4-12; Burns, Poverty of Progress .

provided as a practical result 108,738 pounds sterling, which before we spent on cottons imports.^[24]

More salient heroes are the oft-praised highland Garmendia (Lucre) and Terry (Urcón) woolens factories. The intriguing side of Esteves's industrial utopianism is his full shift from Lima—the occupied capital then lying in ruins. Such national concerns cropped up as early as 1860 in Pardo's visions of rural industry and were glimpsed too in the 1860s railroad genre—an idea consistent with cost factors, natural protection, civilist decentralism, and the imagined decadence of Peru's Europeanized capital. By the 1870s foreign and Peruvian geographers, naturalists, and technical advisers (the Raimondis, Martinets, and Paz-Soldáns) had opened up national vistas of problems and possibilities, and helped produce the beggar-on-the-mountain Peru, just as Fuentes had done for the capital in the prior generation.^[25] Now, in Apuntes para la historia económica, Lima's criollo or immigrant artisans merit no attention whatsoever as a source of entrepreneurial dynamism—a sharp move from the urban, middle-class industrialism of Copello and Petriconi.

There are two striking dimensions to Esteves's turn to rural industry: indigenismo and colonial precedents. Economic nativism is positivist inspired, part of his global effort to demonstrate just how indigenous to Peru are industrial capabilities and aspirations. It deepens the civilist "progressive vindication" of the Indian that we now know had begun before the war.^[26] To Esteves, industry is the true—and liberating—vocation of Peru's submerged Andean majorities.

Esteves's introduction to Indian industrialism unfolds during two long discussions of wool and alpaca production and export trades. In part, the terms of trade are at issue: the 1870s dive in wool prices makes

[24] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 26; the figures (simple fall in textile imports, 1875-1876) are doubtful for production.

[25] J. B. Martinet, La agricultura en el Perú (1877; rpt. Lima, 1977), sticks closely to coastal realms; although not part of a critical literature, it is notable for its Continental interventionist assumptions and its agrarian critique of "unproductive" wealth, extractive "lotteries," and elite "capital" flight. Here, Indians are dismissed as "muy poco industrioso" (88).

[26] Kristal, Andes from the City, ch. 2, which quickly deems 1870s civilist indigenismo an "exporter" ideology—not Esteves's perspective. Mexican positivism (Hale, Transformation of Liberalism ) rarely produced indigenista variants, for that country (unlike Peru) was fast erasing "Indians" in its Porfirian commercial expansion; Hale, however, underlines the "industrial" and liberal thread of Comtean positivism, which might have gone into the redemptive posture of an Esteves.

"no more pressing necessity in Peru than utilizing this wealth in the only manner possible: manufacturing."^[27] But more essential than short-term price instability is Esteves's long-term rediscovery of the "naturals'" informal weaving and spinning traditions—dating to Incan glories. A striking and patriotic reminder occurred amid the exigencies of war. During the initial Chilean blockades of southern ports, Indian artisans of Puno, Arequipa, and Moquegua rose to supply the army with their coarse cloths—cordellates, paños, jergas, and frazadas; soon enough "this demand had inspired a meticulousness of construction, to the point of comparing perfectly with the ordinary cashmeres we import from abroad at such exorbitant prices."^[28] The blankets of Paucarcolla district alone were now worth eight to ten thousand soles a year, profits that stay with improving village authorities. With but a touch of European direction, this "industria naciente" will keep on advancing.

Animated by his discoveries, Esteves is set to preach on Indians:

Such fabrication with the crudest instruments prove his mechanical talent, uncultivated only for lack of example. It is no difficult task to make the Indian into an industrial being; they enjoy gifts of imitation and patience, which are enough to transform them into useful workers, and their sobriety will keep them content with the most modest of salaries. . . . The largest part of our population, he must be made into its productive element. This is the mission that, sooner or later, only the woolens manufacturing industry can fulfill.^[29]

In part, this industrial indigenismo appears in dissembled contrast to the better-known creole city artisan, always shunned for lethargic work habits, high costs, and "immoral" living in general. Yet, if framed in a primitive positivist idiom, Esteves is trying to invert ingrained racist representations of the sleepy, sullen Indian (typical of earlier rail writers), who now holds the energetic answer to Peru's national reconstruction. Although Indians are obviously portrayed as simpler beings, it is not biological or cultural inferiority that isolates them from development, but white oppression: "What destroys their fine qualities, undermines their spirit, and mistreats their body are the endless persecutions by speculators during the republic's rare periods of peace and by the

[27] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 41; pt. 1, chs. 7-8.

[28] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 41; Hunt's analysis of 1876 census ("Growth and Guano," 95) finds 167, 778 self-styled rural "female spinners"—part-time artisans, at best.

[29] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 42.

militares who made them cannon fodder in the usual years of revolutions and combat."^[30] To be sure, the coastal literary and political critique of gamonal oppressions had been voiced before, most vociferously from the late 1860s Sociedad Amiga de los Indios. But here the "naturals" become a perfect economic metaphor for Peru's own hobbled development—an anti-imperial image to stick in coming decades.

The extensive chapters in Apuntes para la historia económica on rural economy come laced with "antifeudal" messages, in that perplexing composite of admiration and paternalism, coveted integration and exploitation, assimilationism and autonomy typical of turn-of-the-century city indigenistas. The notion of the Indian as "worker" is the shared modernist motif. Hoary and decadent "Spanish custom" allows white landowners and merchants to exploit the indigent and innocent Indian, as detailed in the ways petty traders and mestizos managed to swindle natives during the rise of the nineteenth-century alpaca trade. Indian producers are now the wiser. Indians require secure landed property and full freedom of commerce; the government must "extend them its public administration."^[31] The "naturals" must be protected from dangers of alcohol and coca. There are wider laudatory themes: admiration for the Incan agriculture, irrigation, and roads that united the whole Andes, supported its millions, and saved Europe from starvation with their "gift" of the potato. Tawantinsuyo could always inspire a distant adulation from Peruvian elites—usually in contempt of its living Indian relics—but here a thriving and ancient "industriousness" comes to the fore.^[32] Modern rural industry (unlike the obraje or republican landed exporter) was to emancipate the Indian—with the helping hand of progressive capitalists like Garmendia and Terry.

Like Copello and Petriconi, then, Esteves presents another version of the popular and liberal wellsprings of progress. National events and transformations were redefining the social problem in the eyes of Peru-

[30] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 42; cf. metaphor in Samuel Velarde, Los antiguos contratos y el contrato Grace (Lima, pam., 1887), which opens by comparing Peru's debt dependency to Indian "debt slavery" of Amazon rubber trade, followed by reconstruction focus on small national entrepreneurs. See also "abuse"-oriented Juan Bustamante, "Los indios en el Perú," in Tamayo, Pensamiento indigenista, 21-29, and documents of Sociedad Amiga, in Emilio Vásquez, La rebelión de Juan Bustamante (Lima, 1976), anexos.

[31] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 31-32, 42-44, 62.

[32] See Cecilia Méndez, "República sin indios: La comunidad imaginada del Perú," in H. Urbano, ed., Tradición y modernidad en los Andes (Cuzco, 1992), 15-41, on racist split perceptions of Incas and Indians; similarly, Walker, "Rhetorical Power."

vian elites. "Our revolts and anarchy," Esteves finally admits in that familiar refrain, "find no origin but the lack of occupation among the masses, who need work as the glue of order and morality."^[33] If fundamentally more hopeful, this lost treatise was an economic analogue of the literary-political indigenismo of disillusioned postwar intellectuals.

More difficult is fathoming authentic regional echoes of Esteves's decentralist call. One notable (but equally unrecognized) contemporary voice was Luis Carranza, whose incisive "Consideraciones generales sobre los departamentos del centro" (1883) takes us on a social tour of postwar Ayacucho, Huancavelica, and Apurímac. Carranza, a Huamangan physician turned journalist, migrated to Lima in the 1860s; became a charter member of the pro-Bustamante Sociedad Amiga de los Indios; a founder of the Partido Civil (in which he served as Ayacucho party chief); a Pardista congressman (like Esteves); and by the late 1870s director of El Comercio (whose owner, Manuel Amunátegui, was also among the Indians' celebrated "friends"). After the war Carranza created and led the prestigious Sociedad Geográfica de Lima, the new scientific beacon for greater Peruvian awareness.^[34] Carranza, the prototype of the provincial intellectual figures awakening almost everywhere after the 1880s, was obviously a less quirky figure than Juan Bustamante. In this essay it is the war—Carranza served as chief publicist while fighting with Cáceres's legendary Andean guerillas—that focuses the new interior vision.

Carranza, like Esteves, undertakes a retrospective as well as spatial voyage, around what he terms the late "Kingdom of Huano." His Limeño readers must grasp the true Peru left in ruins. His aim was in another economic history: to herald "the raza indígena del Perú —no inconvenience or fetter to national progress and greatness," but, with gentle guidance, its "latent force."^[35] To be sure, Carranza leaves us with distressful liberal-positivist images of the Indian—mired in "passivity," ignorance, disorder, drunkenness. But such degradation was produced

[33] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 156; for how disorders at least felt to anxious elites, see Bonilla, "War of Pacific and the National Problem."

[34] Luis Carranza, "Consideraciones generales sobre los departamentos del centro" (1883), in L. Carranza, Colección de artículos publicados por Luis Carranza, médico (Lima, 1885-1888), 3:48-84; other relevant essays include reviews of Raimondi's El Perú; travelogues of the United States; and varied studies of the evolution and archaeology of the Indian "race." For biography, see Tauro, Diccionario 1:283-84; Manrique, Las guerrillas indígenas, 25, 50-53; Vásquez, Bustamante, 156, 196; MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," table 1.

[35] Carranza, "Consideraciones generales sobre el centro," 68, 84.

by Peru's nineteenth-century commercial centralism, which enervated the Indian's natural "activity" and stamina of Incan and Spanish times.

Carranza, through his thick description of natal Huamanga, traces contemporary backwardness—"barbarity," in positivist lingo—to three factors: parish priests, political chaos, and, of most harm for the regions, the century's "revolución económica." In the mode of Amézaga's anticlericalism, Catholicism draws positivist fire for constraining the Indian's material wants and vision. Here priestly oppression is imaginatively conceived as the imposition of "comunismo evangélica" over vestiges of an Incan "sistema comunista," the latter suggesting the (more approving) categories of 1920s indigenista anthropology. Postindependence chaos, caudillos, and corruption had sparked endless local uprisings, devastated interior commerce, upset Indian political subordination, and—as Carranza himself could attest—hurried white flight from the sierra.^[36]

"Consideraciones generales del centro" lays most blame, nonetheless, on Peru's "revolución económica"—Carranza's special term for the commercial transformations of the guano age—and its "disastrous," "decadent," and disparate impact on regional possibilities. In Esteves or Pardo fashion, the colonial period reappears as a lost golden age of regional diversity and wholeness, guided by Spain's "indirectly protectionist system." Homeland Huamanga, for example, bustled in tocuyo cottons trades, fructiferous wheat-trading haciendas, productive leather works, and mines. The pueblo of Pacaisaca "formed a singular and vast establishment of looms," with a thousand busy workers "of both sexes." Together the three provinces under study once exchanged $2 million in wares from their obrajes, farms, and mines.^[37]

Provincial economies were thus wholly unprepared for the shocks of Lima's republican "libre competencia comercial." Within a few years their mainstays and markets lay abandoned to overseas competitors and factories. "For sparse populations like these, with generally poor soils, the loss of their returns (from local and coastal trades) brought sudden proportional falls in capital and population—and the provinces' intellectual and moral depression."^[38] Mass poverty, lack of work, and insecurity

[36] Carranza, "Consideraciones generales sobre el centro," 53-61.

[37] Carranza, "Consideraciones generales sobre el centro," 62-63; Ayacucho examples used parallel those heard in 1845 congressional debates (ch. 3, above) and remain of uncertain origin.

[38] Carranza, "Consideraciones generales sobre el centro," 64-65.

marginalized the Indian laborer; a modernizing coast schizophrenically split from Andean Peru. Such regional "disasters" amount to "the most serious that can affect a nation."

But Carranza cannot wax nostalgic for a colonial "commercial and industrial prosperity" built on "economic principles opposed to modern societies."^[39] Liberalism remains his civilist creed, just as it did in Pardo's admiration of colonial culture. The problem, in practice, was that liberalism had proven perverse to regions and peoples with such modest comparative advantages; history had inverted liberalism's decentralist populating and capitalizing pledges of the 1840s. And as history, Carranza got it right, for Peru's modern dualisms and regional left-behinds did incubate in this age of guano.

Rising here is a rhetoric of interior resentment. It was the kind that 1860s technicians and regional elites had hoped to assuage with railroad integration, as had Pardo and civilismo with their later decentralist politics. To Carranza, the Spanish kingdom's intendencies had at least upheld a de facto regional balance, with multiple "foci of wealth and culture," a more "solid and vigorous national vitality." In contrast, the kingdom of Huano, by "centralizing its fiscal riches in Lima," shrank the "industrial wealth of the interior" and paralyzed their entrepreneurial prospects.^[40] For with a kind of "brain drain" concept of human capital loss, Carranza tells how "all the useful and capable population fled to Lima, which quickly absorbed in its heart the most distinguished provincial families, our most enlightened men." Exaggerated commercial, credit, and agricultural development on the coast became "active cause of the rapid decadence of the rest"—a regional devolution not seen since the "fall of the Incas." Solutions, however, are but implied: will rectification of indigenous barbarity be achieved through the return of misti (white) entrepreneurs or through Incan-style reintegration of schools, roads, and authority?

This regionalism ends, Esteves-style, as a could-have-been postmortem on a squandered age of guano: "If only our fiscal wealth had been

[39] Carranza, "Consideraciones generales sobre el centro," 67; Pardo, "Partido de Saña"; Carranza does note some gradual agricultural replacements by the 1870s.

[40] Carranza, "Consideraciones generales sobre el centro," 68, 78. The sarcasm of the "kingdom" references parallels that of Duffield, Prospects of Peru, who contrasts the "Golden Age of the Incas" with the passing "Age of Manure"—a periodization that thankfully never caught on. For a modern take on trade, human capital, and uneven development, see Keith Griffin, Underdevelopment in Spanish America (London, 1969), chs. 2, 6.

used instead to create and promote great industries on our soil, the disaster would not have assumed today's crushing proportions"—that is, the national and military weakness that gave the war to Chile.^[41] Lacking the bitter edge, Carranza presaged González Prada's industrial and indigenista indictment.

Esteves then did not stand alone in the 1880s, but his Apuntes sobre la historia económica still stands out as the first economic analysis to encompass the Indian directly. Historians have aptly deemed the nineteenth century as the age of shrinking "Andeanness" in national consciousness, though Quechua peasants hardly shrank as the country's ethnic majority nor faded in poetic imaginations.^[42] Here and there Indians sparked controversies in the capital—during the 1855 abolition of tribute; in cursory and coercive ways in a scattering of railroad manifestos; in the quintessentially elite sympathies of the Sociedad Amiga de los Indios in reaction to the mid-1860s return of head taxes; in the scandalizing "terror" of Puno's 1867 Huancané uprising, which martyred Bustamante; and by the 1870s in the landed and clerical oppressions conjured up in the capital's civilist literary salons. But in the nineteenth-century economic calculus Indians were most conspicuous for their absence. Pardo himself selected a distinctive mestizo region for his exemplar of Andean developmentalism, and though he was progressively more attuned to Indians in later writings and politics, his thinking never progressed beyond the whitest of assimilationist clichés.^[43]

There is a genealogy and causality of denial and memory here, related to shifting regional concerns. Above all, a strategic angst was always the mother of Peru's developmental imagination. Peru's remarkable indigenous quiescence between 1827 and 1867—a full half century without rebellions—had kept Indians off official and economic worry lists in the capital. National rediscovery must have traveled the railroad lines themselves and the tracks of the new national census-takers. And by the early 1870s localized ethnic tensions were again heating up between expansive regional elites and communities, to be fought out later by awaken-

[41] Carranza, "Consideraciones generales sobre el centro," conclusions, 79.

[42] Alberto Flores Galindo, "In Search of an Inca," in Steve Stern, ed., Resistance, Rebellion, and Consciousness in the Andean Peasant World, Eighteenth to Twentieth Centuries (Madison, 1982), 193-210; Kristal, Andes from the City .

[43] Davies, Indian Integration , chs. 1-2; MacEvoy, "Manuel Pardo," 187-94, which analyzes Pardo's most focused writing, the tame 1867 essay "Algunas cuestiones sociales sobre los disturbios de Huancané"; Vásquez, Bustamante , anexos. However, Gen. Medina, who chaired the Sociedad Amiga, was also a leading civilist.

ing provincial intellectuals. But until the strategic and regional shocks of 1876-1881, a national amnesia prevailed. Only the ruin of the coastal economy by guano collapse and war, the frightful mobilizations of darkhued Andeans in the conflict, and the utter white defeat (at the hands of Chile) put Indians, in varied ways, into Peru's developmental imagination. And only then could developmental thought assume its modern social and national forms.^[44]

Along with economic explorations of the countryside and the Indian, Apuntes para la historia económica marks a milestone for rescuing the lost and related colonial obraje. Esteves's historical survey of obrajes, long scorned by liberal republicans as symbolic relics of inefficient and oppressive colonialism, is the first positive word on their achievements in the critical tradition (and almost the only word since the initial republic). The obraje woolens plants of Cuzco and Huaraz, despite their regressive, forced-labor regimes, managed to clothe Peru's common folk, revealed native manufacturing predilections, and overcame both Spain's imports and capricious anti-industrial policy. To Esteves the viceroyalty "was for manufacturing industry the golden age in Peru, for during the republic these obrajes, the embrión de fábricas , vanished as soon as freedom of trade in our ports brought a flood of imported textiles from the other nations of Europe."^[45] To be sure, imported cloth was cheaper and appealed to Peruvian "vanities," but this history had consequences: "We buried beneath the debris of the oppressive obraje the idea of nationalizing factory industry. . . . Without awareness of what was going on in the world, except needing to dress up in the latest cuts of Paris, we considered it a locura [folly] to bring factories to our wool-producing provinces."^[46]

This remark shows insight into the liberal trivialization of industry in the early republic, which politically linked the industrial idea with retrograde obrajes and artisans. But now Esteves brings in his most exemplary entrepreneurs: "against the current," Garmendia and Terry established their rural factory centers, which Esteves takes us through in

[44] Following trends analyzed in Gootenberg, "Population and Ethnicity," 141-53; see Jacobsen, Mirages of Transition , pt. 2, for finest study of conflicts; Tamayo, Historia social e indigenismo , for case of "awakening" regional intellectuals—in Puno as well.

[45] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 33. His use of notion "embryo of factories," so common in the Mexican writings, is uncanny; for fine analysis of concept (and of colonial obrajes), see Richard Salvucci, Textiles and Capitalism in Mexico: An Economic History of the Obrajes, 1539-1840 (Princeton, 1987), ch. 2, "Embrión de la Fábrica?"

[46] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 33-34; for typical liberal view, see Távara's 1831 Análisis y amplificación del manifiesto , 46-49: Távara could even call for freetrade destruction of the obrajes as an Indian "emancipation" measure.

detail. (Francisco Garmendia's 1859 Lucre factory was, in fact, built literally on the debris of a defunct obraje.) These "firm patriots" proved beyond a doubt "the possibility for implanting a woolens textile industry in Peru." They sacrificed enormously for the war efforts. Here, perhaps, were the sort of notables needed back in the Andes.

In a didactic tale Esteves reveals his personal relation with the now-deceased Garmendia. Esteves had in fact served with Garmendia (and the Terrys) in congress; sometime in the early 1870s, as he tells it, the two had together presented a legal brief to Peru's supreme court itself pleading for government support. In what was surely a precocious case of the new economic legalism, the misguided judge demanded further "proof" of Peru's industrial potential—"whether Peru has the advantages for being a manufacturing country, or should continue as to now exporting its raw materials."^[47] To Esteves, Garmendia's thriving mill was the living verdict on industrial possibilities.

Following these temporal and exemplary excursions, chapter 9 of Apuntes para la historia económica , entitled "Woolen Manufactures," simply renders the argument in its technical and capitalistic form. Harking to Casanova's intricate cost-profit calculations, the calculus has clearly tipped from coastal cottons to sierran wools. Tapping Genoese records and accounts from giant Central European factories, Esteves presents arithmetical page on page on machinery, labor, transport, and wool costs to prove the "advantageous conditions that Peru enjoys for becoming a manufacturing nation"—even without the latest technology. Using their cheap and abundant Indian workers, national capitalists could reap up to 3.3 million soles on initial investments.^[48] The judge, if still around, might have been pleased.

Perhaps Esteves sensed that such felicitous cost and production conditions would outflank the contentious issue of tariff protection, fully ignored in the book. Especially during the 1870s crisis Peru's coastal elites had proved unmoving on both free trade and their clamors about costly labor shortages. Esteves's answer was to look to the forgotten highlands instead. He applauds the arrival of railroads to the "rich and productive department of Junín" (i.e., Pardo's Jauja)—spur to this "economic revolution, which will resolve if not all, then most of our current

[47] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 35; Basadre has a fine oral biography of Garmendia's experiments (Historia 3:1293-95); Diarios de debates, 1870-1873. Garmendia, recall, was Pardo's vice president; he died in 1873 while buying new machinery in Italy.

[48] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, pt. 1, ch. 9, "Manufactura de lanas"—which taps Chemnitz.

problems and somber future." The hyperboles of the 1850s lived on. He envisages southern Indian pastoral zones of Puno (the country's poorest traditional region) as the future industrial heartland of Peru. Other discussions in Apuntes para la historia económica argue for the industrialization of the tropical quinine trade; new silk industries ("to give our agriculture novel sources of wealth"); the production of gin from sierran barley (though the factories must guard their product from susceptible natives); coal mining (for fantasized factories); Amazon hat and wood exports; concerted use of Moquegua clays and porcelains; and the gamut of domestic food industries. In one particularly prophetic aside, Esteves ventures that coca leaf (now mere colonial Indian "abuse") must eventually find, by the miracle of "modern chemistry," more "profitable uses."^[49]

The closing pages of the Apuntes para la historia económica follow an unruly fiscal analysis of Peru's lost guano opportunity and an unbridled assault on British commercial hegemony. Here Esteves conjures up a veritable "new world economic order"—or at least foretells the global dissemination of consumer industry that indeed was to mark the twentieth century. Esteves rhetorically demands, "Should we continue with the commercial despotism to which we are subjected?" His answer, by now, is pat: "The progress of all nations resents the monopoly that the British have established over a third of the globe." Only industry will impart genuine and lasting value to Peru's bounteous natural treasures. Without hinting how it should come, Esteves imagines an imminent turning point in world economic history:

Then will arrive in the world a moment of economic transition—that will establish on a fair basis its commercial order. Industry, escaping the grips of its present tyranny, will go on to settle in all the corners of the globe. There will be a just and regular distribution of riches. The popular masses will be carried away by this current of work, to a society in its natural seabed of equilibrium. This is the future that belongs to us.^[50]

With this retrospect of nineteenth-century experience, Peru's utopian developmental discourse had broached its modern form.

[49] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 48, 55, 60-61, 88, 92-93, 73, 75. Silk "agro-industry" projects (dating from Sarratea's time) were common; see, e.g., Luis Sada, Proyecto de asociación para introducir y generalizar en el Perú el cultivo de la morera y del gusano de seda (Lima, pam., 1870), cited; Mörner, Notas sobre Cusco, 16, for similar 1872 Mangelsdorff beer factory and regional barley crops. Lissón, Sociología del Perú, 63, also lauds coca's promise: "que la ciencia moderna viene haciendo en gran artículo con sus potencias aplicaciones." Prophetic indeed.

[50] Esteves, Apuntes para la historia económica, 156-57.