Abstract
Abstract This essay examines struggles over a water drainage tunnel as a window into the politics of mining, infrastructure, and national development in early twentieth-century Peru. It argues that the Peruvian mining elite operated as an organized network of entrepreneurs, mobilizing capital, environmental technology, and the power of the state to challenge the rising hegemony of US interests in Peru's copper corridor. Unlike the classic literature on nineteenth-century mining in Peru, which has presented Peruvian mineowners as a struggling bourgeoisie, this study focuses on this group's innovations and dynamism in the wake of the copper bonanza. It also studies its discursive strategies, which appealed to preexisting skepticism of free trade and anxieties about foreign influence. Altogether, this essay contributes to the literature on US imperialism and capitalist penetration by centering local actors and studying US hegemony as a contentious and contingent process.
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