Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Von der hinteren Coverseite

Aus dem Klappentext

Auszug. © Genehmigter Nachdruck. Alle Rechte vorbehalten.

Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840-1880

University of California Press

Guano is the dried excrement of seabirds. Just off the Pacific coast of Peru, the right mix of natural conditions—the fertile depths of the Humboldt current, the billions of tiny fish it spawns, the millions of gulls on their trail, the arid specks of land called the Chinchas—left, over the millennia, staggering offshore deposits of bird dung. Literal mountains of it. Rich in unleached nitrogen and phosphorus, guano is the best natural fertilizer known to humankind. Ancient Peruvians, masters of American agriculture, recognized the magical properties of the substance known in Quechua as huanu —knowledge lost, like much else, under the Spanish Conquest. It was left to another world conquest—the English scientific, agricultural, and commercial revolution—to rediscover guano's value in the early 1840s. Shoveled down chutes by coolies into waiting clipper convoys and spread across the fields of England, France, Australia, and the southern United States, Peruvian bird droppings excited one of the busiest global commodity trades thus seen in history. For republican Peru, the next forty years became its legendary "age of guano."

The guano age (1845-1880) is not much remembered for its fertile ideas, much less for its lasting economic progress. Instead, it has become the historical paradigm for a fleeting "boom and bust" monoexport experience. The penurious and revolving caudillo governments of Peru

soon strictly monopolized world trade in guano; it became their commercial gold mine, though made of baser stuff. Over the full four decades Peru shipped out some eleven million tons of manure, which fetched more than $750 million (pesos/dollars) on world markets, a mind-boggling sum in nineteenth-century terms. For Peru, it was a rags-to-riches story: stylish living for citified elites, bloated budgets, millions in fancy imports, a purchased political peace, unlimited access to London credit. In the late 1870s guano reserves inevitably ran down. Saddled with Latin America's largest foreign debt, Peru was unprepared for the crash. It was riches to rags, with nothing to show in persisting economic advance. Peru's historian Jorge Basadre, following Cassandras of the time, aptly dubs the entire episode the "fictitious prosperity."1

The Peruvian guano age had caught the fancy of economists in particular as a font of many lessons or formal models. With rising interest in Third World development, Jonathan Levin first presented guano as the classic case of the deleterious "enclave" economy. Guano was isolated from Peru's domestic development. The trade was financed and exploited by foreign firms, and the beds were worked by insignificant gangs of imported laborers; any remaining revenues were "remitted" abroad through government malfeasance and the elites' lavish orgy of importation. Any growth potential bypassed Peru's immobile quasi-"feudal" society.2 Several years after Levin, Shane Hunt, in a trenchant quantitative and conceptual exercise, dispelled this image. Guano engendered a "rentier" economy, much like that of contemporary oil emirates. The problem with guano was no longer its separation from Peru; the government (and its native contractors) managed to retain an impressive 71 percent of final sales and disbursed its benefits in a fairly rational and dispersed fashion. However, guano still proved a great "lost opportunity" for development. Exchange rate distortions, undiscriminating free-trade import policies, and huge, risky state invest-

Jorge Basadre, Historia de la república del Perú, 5th ed. (Lima, 1963), vols. 2-4, La prosperidad falaz, 1845-72: the name derives from policy critiques of Cisneros and Copello and Petriconi explored below. Until the 1860s the Peruvian peso and U.S. dollar shared monetary value and sign; where relevant, they are used interchangeably (i.e., until the post-1862 sol conversion and devaluations).

Jonathan V. Levin, The Export Economies: Their Pattern of Development in Historical Perspective (Cambridge, Mass., 1960), ch. 2, "Peru in the Guano Age." For economists, Levin's was a key developmentalist critique of neoclassical and Keynesian growth formulas, but historians were unduly influenced by his shaky social grasp of nineteenth-century Peru (e.g., "feudalism," lack of markets, etc.).

ments stymied possibilities for national entrepreneurs, diversification, and gains in domestic productivity.3

Other scholars contest time-honored allegations that Peru lost this chance through the sheer perfidy of overseas firms and imperialists. Peru resisted fitful British pressures to open the trade and drove hard bargains with its major foreign consignees, such as Antony Gibbs and Sons, marketing contracts then fully nationalized by the 1860s. Others argue that Peruvian governments, initially wasteful of windfall resources, had acquired a reforming vision and responsibility by the 1860s. The reforms, however, proved futile in the world economic downturn of the 1870s and the crushing Pacific War with Chile (1879-1881). Recent studies also locate scattered signs of diversifying growth in the guano age: investments in modern coastal sugar and cotton plantations, a spread of markets and modernity to the central highlands region, a consolidating legalist bureaucracy and a viable national finance system.4 No single explanation, in short, accounts for Peru's stalled nineteenth-century development. But with little glitter in guano, and a dismal outcome, it attracts few seekers.

The most cohesive and influential conception of the period, however, is the broader sociological one offered by recent neo-Marxist and dependency historians of Peru. The failures of independent Peru, the failures of

Shane J. Hunt, "Growth and Guano in Nineteenth-Century Peru," Discussion Paper 34, RPED, Woodrow Wilson School, Princeton, 1973; an abridged published version appears in R. Cortés Conde and S. Hunt, eds., The Latin American Economies: Growth and the Export Sector, 1830-1930 (New York, 1985), 255-319 (we cite detailed 1973 version). Hunt's was part of a larger movement correcting "enclave" models of underdevelopment; yet, indicative of sparse research on the guano age, in two decades no one has tested or challenged the new model.

W. M. Mathew, The House of Gibbs and the Peruvian Guano Monopoly (London, 1981); Mathew, "The Imperialism of Free Trade: Peru, 1820-1870," Economic History Review 21 (1968): 562-86; other works by Mathew; Juan Maiguashca, "A Reinterpretation of the Guano Age, 1840-1880," D.Phil. thesis, Oxford University, 1967 (Maiguashca's and Mathew's unpublished writing are widely recycled by later historians); Nelson Manrique, Mercado interno y región: La sierra central, 1820-1930 (Lima, 1987); Manuel Burga, De la encomienda a la hacienda capitalista: El valle del Jequetepeque del siglo xvi al xx (Lima, 1976), ch. 6; Fernando de Trazegnies, La idea de derecho en el Perú republicano del siglo xix (Lima, 1980); Alfonso Quiroz, Domestic and Foreign Finance in Modern Peru, 1850-1950: Financing Visions of Development (London, 1992), ch. 2. For recent surveys of economic history, Christine Hünefeldt, "Viejos y nuevos temas de la historia económica del siglo...