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United States and Canada

Gootenberg views the numerous civil wars of the period as struggles over trade policy between nationalist caudillos, backed by limeno merchants and northern hacendados, and liberal caudillos, supported by Southerners and foreign interests. Nationalists won primarily because they controlled Lima with its "elaborate administrative, financial, and military apparatus" (p. 75). Merchants were key supporters because they supplied the state with "short-term loans, customs, and tax bonds" (p. 104). These were the only dependable sources of income for Peru's military presidents, who could no longer borrow abroad. For merchants, however, this was a double-edged sword: caudillos supported protectionism, but demanded increasing sums of money in the 1840s. The state eventually exhausted its merchant-creditors and forced them to turn to liberalism and foreign interests to make money and "to help restructure Peru's unruly relations of State to society" (p. 113). Peruvian merchants supported the sale of guano on consignment because it restored Peru's credit abroad and freed them from predatory caudillos. Merchants remained on good terms with the state and managed to reap instant fortunes through the consolidation of the internal debt in the 1850s. Gootenberg has written one of the few truly innovative works on early republican Peruvian history. He replaces assumptions based on little research with bold and innovative conclusions based on an impressive array of primary sources. He brings coherence to a understudied and chaotic period and revises important aspects of early nineteenth-century economic history. We now know substantially more about Peruvian merchants, commercial policy, and caudillo politics. The boldness of the book is both its strength and its weakness. The purported theoretical contribution is unclear because of the difficulty of judging to what extent the failure of protectionism facilitated the acceptance of liberalism. Peru is not the best test case, because guano could only be marketed effectively by large foreign merchant houses with established contacts in European markets. I am also unconvinced that trade issues alone caused civil strife, and that all non-Southern elites were protectionists. Planters and miners sought markets for their products wherever they could find them, and Southerners were not just free traders but devout Catholics opposed to secular intrusions on ecclesiastical prerogatives. I also wonder to what extent the debate over the abolition of Indian tribute, a crucial source of government revenue, influenced conflict between Lima and the provinces. Despite these reservations, this is one of the best books in recent years on Peruvian history, and a valuable contribution to nineteenth-century commercial and financial studies.