This book is a collection of 17 studies about Peruvian history in the second half of the nineteenth century. Focusing on Lima and especially on the capital’s social and educated elite, most deal with intellectual, political, and cultural history. Aside from the epoch and the city under investigation, the articles are very heterogeneous in character. This makes the book a kind of reader in current trends in historiography pertaining to nineteenth-century Lima.Five articles are dedicated to an intellectual history of Lima’s upper classes: a chapter on the lawyer Francisco García Calderón, a discussion of liberalism in the 1850s, an essay on ideas of sovereignty, an analysis of nineteenth-century Peruvian historiography, and an exploration of the memory of the battle of May 2. The main focus of the book is political history, with chapters discussing the creation of departments and provinces, primary-education policy in Lima, and conflicts between church and state. In my view, the most interesting articles describe the exclusionary policies of Lima’s middle and upper classes. Using census data from 1876, Jesús Cosamalón shows that, unlike the poor in Santiago de Chile or Mexico City, Lima’s lower class was highly stratified along racial lines. As a result, Lima’s social structure was more closely linked to racial background than in other Latin American capitals. Race therefore played a crucial role in the policies of inclusion and exclusion among the political parties of the middle and upper classes: class was not only an economic issue. Carlos Aguirre employs similar arguments. By referring to contemporary discourse on criminality, he shows that in the second half of the nineteenth century, the educated classes created an image of lower-class criminality that was then linked to racially mixed or “dark” people. This was the image that drove authoritarian exclusionary measures planned at establishing greater control over the lower classes. Finally, Gabriella Chiaramonti demonstrates that in the 1870s, congressmen proposed and discussed laws restricting the right to vote to a relatively small, educated elite, which eventually came into effect in the 1890s.While these three contributions analyze political exclusion, other articles use culture as a starting point to examine the exclusionary practices of Lima’s middle and upper classes. Paul Rizo Patrón describes the ways in which the people enriched by guano fortunes attempted to integrate themselves into the European nobility. Similarly, Cristina Mazzeo holds that the main goal of a guano trader named Francisco Quirós was to stop being a merchant and become an hacendado instead. Francesca Denegri describes how the changing style of women’s clothes during this period was used to create a distinction between rich educated “whites” and the rest of Lima’s inhabitants. In the only article that focuses on early-twentieth-century history, Carlos Gálvez analyzes the ways in which less-wealthy people tried to conform to aristocratic, or at least upper-class, norms of death and burial.Many of the articles recap their authors’ previous research, while some present interesting new case studies. Most of the articles form part of current historiography trends in their analysis of nineteenth-century Latin American nation-states from a political and intellectual perspective, asking the question of why the realities of Peru’s political system differed so much from the ideals of its republican founders. The historiography of the last two decades has answered that political culture is related to, but not dependent on, economic and social structures; consequently, we must examine political culture to understand the nation-state. This explains why the concept “citizenship” gained so much importance and the concept of the “liberal revolution” replaced that of the “bourgeois revolution.”While most of the articles form part of this revisionist view of the nineteenth century, the title and the introduction of the book defend the concept of bourgeoisie. Carmen Mc Evoy makes the point that bourgeoisie is not only an economic concept but also a cultural one. From a cultural point of view, she argues, a bourgeoisie certainly existed in nineteenth-century Peru, characterized by a high level of education, moral values, and republican political commitment. But even if one were to accept that the concept of bourgeoisie has no economic implication at all, the articles collected in this book testify in great detail to the fact that the education, moral values, and political commitments of Peru’s middle and upper classes were not as similar to European bourgeois culture as Mc Evoy appears to think. The comparison she makes to the German Bildungsbürgertum, for example, does not work. Although I do not agree entirely with Mc Evoy’s interpretation, I nevertheless believe that the book is a good starting point for the study of the political, intellectual, and cultural history of Lima’s elite in the second half of the nineteenth century.
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Sep 8, 2023
Open Access