War Of The Pacific Research Articles

Los vencedores: Historia del pueblo mapuche en la época colonial

Los vencedores: Historia del pueblo mapuche en la época colonial

Military conquest and sovereign debt: Chile, Peru and the London bond market, 1876–1890

As a result of the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), Chile conquered Peruvian and Bolivian territories rich in nitrates and guano. We conduct econometric tests for structural breaks in the time series of the government bonds for Chile and Peru between 1876 and 1890 in order to examine the effects of the changes in resource endowments on the investors’ perceptions of the risk premia of Chilean and Peruvian securities. Our results reveal that investors were extremely pessimistic about the prospects of Chilean, and especially Peruvian debt prior to the war. Early Chilean victories that anticipated the transfer of the richly endowed provinces to Chile caused significant increases in the price of Chilean securities. But such was the low regard with which investors viewed the Peruvian government that the fall of Lima caused an increase in the price of Peruvian bonds on the hope that Chile would assume some of the responsibility for them. Endowments, reputations, and the countries’ financial conditions figure prominently as the driving forces behind the investors’ behavior.

William F. Sater, Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884 (Lincoln NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. ix+442, $60.00, $29.95 pb; £46.00, hb.

William F. Sater, Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884 (Lincoln NE and London: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), pp. ix+442, $60.00, $29.95 pb; £46.00, hb.

El atributo amazónico del Perú. La construcción de una soberanía 1903-1942

Starting from the premise that borders are constructed rather than historically given, this article describes the process that, following the War of the Pacific (1879), turned civil and governmental actors in Peru to claim their own space in the Amazon, successively disputing territories with Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, and Ecuador and which, in the final analysis, appears to have been successful. This was a complex process that, in addition to demonstrating how Peru discarded the thesis of utis possidetis iuris, which it once supported, for the thesis of fait accompli, more appropriate for the de facto occupation of disputed space.

José Martí's “Evening of Emerson” and the United Statesian Literary Tradition

Revising a century of interpretation that has emphasized the identification of José Martí with Ralph Waldo Emerson, this essay draws on Martí's unpublished and published manuscripts about Emerson to reveal Martí's keen sense of his difference from the New England bard. When we read Martí's 1882 eulogy to Emerson alongside contemporaneous essays about the Chinese Exclusion Act and the War of the Pacific, Martí's epiphany – which he calls the “evening of Emerson” – comes to suggest the evanescence of Emerson's influence. Martí here glimpses his contribution: a creative resignification and translation of Emerson and US culture more broadly in order to arrive at a distinct version of nuestra América. Although Emerson's influence persists, as he provides the phrase “our America,” Martí's interpretation transposes the phrase to a minor key and reveals the perspective of the Latin American migrant who presciently observes the threat of imperial expansion.

The creolization of imperial reason: Chilean state racism in the war of the Pacific

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 El Nuevo Ferrocarril, 30 January 1881, no. 153, p. 2. Hereafter cited within as NF, followed by date and page number. References to this newspaper were collected in the library of the Museo Nacional Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna in Santiago, Chile. All translations from Spanish are my own. 2 The Atacama Desert, lying between the 23rd and 26th parallel on the Pacific coast, had formed the diffuse borderlands between Peru, Chile and Bolivia in the aftermath of Independence. The discovery of nitrate and other mineral deposits, coupled with the global recession of the early 1870s, transformed the Atacama into a valuable territory. The War of the Pacific broke out when the Bolivian president Hilarión Daza levied a tax on a Chilean-owned nitrate mining company, in violation of an 1874 treaty. Peru, which had signed a mutual defence treaty with Bolivia in 1873, refused to pledge neutrality, and so Chile declared war on Peru as a response to its ‘secret alliance’. 3 For centuries, Spanish colonizers and creole elites had been able to gain control of the Mapuche-dominated Araucanía. It was only in 1883, as Chilea was still embroiled in the War of the Pacific, that the region was finally brought under state control; as in the United States and Argentina, this campaign was made possible by the genocidal combination of state armies, railways and firearms. Easter Island, in turn, was claimed by Chile in 1888. At this time, Easter Island was the only South Seas island to remain unclaimed by a European power. Since then, the island has carried mainly symbolic significance for the Chilean nation, captured in the image of the moais (ancient Rapa Nui sculptures), which today decorate everything from Chilean tour guides to advertisements for airlines and telephone companies. 4 At a victory ceremony after the war, the politician Miguel Luis Amunátegui stated that ‘our sailors have given us the empire of the Pacific. Our soldiers have occupied the capital of Peru’. NF, 27 March 1881, p. 3. 5 Shortly after the War of the Pacific the President José Manuel Balmaceda turned against British interests in an attempt ‘Chileanize’ the nitrate industry. However, members of the Chilean oligarchy, in alliance once again with British capitalists, overthrew Balmaceda in the Civil War of 1891. See Zeitlin and Vitale for discussions of the warring factions and interests within the Chilean state at this time. 6 The commercial exhibitions of the nineteenth century were key instances in which Latin American elites enacted an analogous strategy of consumption as a sign of ‘civilization’. Studying the case of Venezuela's Universal Exhibition of 1883, González Stephan shows how elites were eager to transmit their ‘avidity and ability to consume the products of metropolitan industries’ to offset the stigma that came with specialization in ‘raw material’ production (2006: 228). The importance of ‘civilized’ consumption as a strategy of legitimation for Chilean elites only increased after the War of the Pacific, and is explored in Orlove and Bauer (1997). 7 Hereafter as VIM. 8 ‘Zambo’ is a term that has been used in Latin America since Spanish colonial times to refer to racial mixing between black and indigenous people. 9 See Ricardo Donoso's Donoso, Ricardo. 1925. Don Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna. Su vida, sus escritos, y su tiempo: 1831–1886, Santiago: Imprenta Universitaria. [Google Scholar] biography of Vicuña Mackenna. 10 See Pinto, 1998 Pinto, Julio. 1998. Trabajos y rebeldías en la pampa salitrera, Santiago: Editorial Universidad de Santiago. [Google Scholar]. 11 Frazier's Frazier, Lessie Jo. 2007. Salt in the Sand: Memory, Violence, and the Nation-State in Chile, 1890 to the Present, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar] study also documents how workers themselves, identifying as Bolivians, Peruvians and Chileans, forged a class solidarity in the 1907 strike that has been sidelined by nationalist memory (122).

Civic and Ethnic Conceptions of Nationhood on the Peruvian–Chilean Frontier, 1880–1930*

AbstractUsing Hans Kohn's classic distinction between the Western, political, or civic model of nationalism, and the Eastern, genealogical, or ethnic model, this article analyses the process of nationalism during perhaps the most contentious border dispute in South American history: the Peruvian–Chilean frontier after the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). This article argues that while Kohn's modular dichotomy remains analytically useful in isolating the principles arbitrarily used by Chilean and Peruvian political elites in their official national projects, it underestimates the ways in which various sectors of local society responded to, rejected, or renegotiated these projects.

Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879 – 1884

Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879 – 1884

REPRESENTING ‘INFORMAL EMPIRE’ IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

This article proposes an approach to media imperialism from the telegraphic news agencies’ point of view. Since the mid-nineteenth century, in fact, Western imperial interests were reflected in the geographical expansion led by the first international news agencies. The War of the Pacific (1879–83) in South America provides an entry point for investigating both the notion of the British ‘informal empire’ and the role of the first telegraphic news agencies in the South American region. The history of the news agency business in the subcontinent from the 1850s onwards helps contextualize the conflict between the South American republics of Bolivia, Chile and Peru as news agencies, newspapers and other information practices of the time revealed this event in Europe and the rest of the world. By the end of the war, Reuters and Havas (the British and the French news agencies), numbered their own casualties as a consequence of their confrontation in an extra-European region.

The fiscal impact of the War of the Pacific

In the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), Chile defeated Peru and Bolivia, and acquired territories that contained vast deposits of sodium nitrate, a leading fertilizer. Chile’s export tax on nitrates later accounted for at least one half of all government revenue. We employ a multi-country model of export taxation in order to simulate the potential government revenues that Bolivia, Chile and Peru could have earned under the counterfactual scenario that Chile did not conquer the nitrate-rich provinces of its adversaries. Our results are that Peruvian and Bolivian government revenues could have been at least double their historical levels. We estimate that, over the remainder of the nineteenth century, Chile’s earnings from nitrates would have fallen by 80%.

Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879-1884 by William F. Sater

Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879-1884 by William F. Sater

Lágrimas andinas: Sentimentalismo, género y virtud republicana en Clorinda Matto de Turner (review)

PELUFFO, ANA. Lagrimas andinas: Sentimentalismo, genero y virtud republicana en Clorinda Matto de Turner. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, 2005. 307 pages.Ana Peluffo's reading of Clorinda Matto de Turner offers an important and carefully researched contribution to Hispanic studies's growing body of work on nineteenth-century feminine and domestic culture. Peluffo's thesis is simple and compelling: it argues that Matto deploys sentimental discourse throughout her novels and essays as a didactic device, as a methodology for communicating her advocacy of gender and racial equality as an integral component of an idealized, modern Peru. The author situates Matto's sentimental discourse between the patriarchal boundaries of Lima's conservative social and literary scene, on the one hand, and Manuel Gonzalez Prada's masculine discourse of indigenous empowerment on the other. In doing so she distances herself from the popular idea that Matto was the devoted follower of Gonzalez Prada's charismatic indigenist movement; instead, Peluffo argues that the masculinization of both conservative and liberal ideologies in the era following the War of the Pacific (1879-84) provoked Matto's subversion of these patriarchal codes as the only discursive option available to a feminine narrative voice. Accordingly, she posits that Matto's female figures and highly lachrymose style invert traditional narrative models of femininity in order to create a hybrid discourse that promotes feminine and indigenous empowerment through charitable authority and affective bonds with the reader.This monograph differs from much of the bibliography on Matto in that Peluffo considers the writer's many different narrative modes-in her novels as well as in her fragmentary collections of biographies and journalistic essays-in order to trace the common threads of the author's methodology. Although the text begins with Matto's most well-known work, the novel Aves sin nido (1889), Peluffo's essays break away from the common critical tendency to address that text in isolation. Lagrimas andinas studies not only the author's other two novels, Indole (1891) and Herencia (1895), but also several little-known texts from Matto's collections of neoromantic tradiciones and biographical essays, Tradiciones cuzquenas, leyendas, biografias, y hojas sueltas (1884), Bocetos al lapis de americanos celebres (1889), and Boreales, miniaturas y porcelanas (1902). Indeed, one of Peluffo's most unique chapters explores the complex negotiations of the hybrid genre of the nineteenthcentury biographical perfil, examining the interaction between the writing subject and the subject of writing. Peluffo proposes that autobiography and biography intersect within Matto's essay on Francisca Zubiaga de Gamarra, a well-known soldier of the wars of independence known as La Mariscala. The essay underscores the complex discursive negotiations necessary for creating a feminine writing subject, as it suggests that Matto's reflections on this historical figure reveal the frustrations and difficulties of Matto's own life, a perspective that in turn implies that history is inexorably bound to the present, and that a writing subject inevitably writes (about) herself.In other chapters dealing principally with Matto's three novels, Peluffo explores issues of authority and female subjectivity as they enter into Matto's vision of a utopian, modern Peru that might resolve the Indian problem and gender inequities still plaguing the nation as it recovers from war and a lingering colonial mentality. …

The Anonymous Lima Census of 1860

The Anonymous Lima Census of 1860

Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910

Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810-1910

Chile en el Perú: guerra y construcción estatal en Sudamérica, 1881-1884

This article analyzes the role played by the Chilean state during the War of the Pacific, 1879- 1884. It highlights the performance of its bureaucracy in the construction of a political network in Peru and also discusses the impact of the latter in Chile´s state making process. Between 1881- 1884 the Chilean State unfolds to a foreign territory and by doing so improves its administrative skills. This reasoning will lead it to explore its authoritarian nature in Peru, where the absence of the State and of civil society allowed its political and ideological predominance.

Racial Conflict and Identity Crisis in Wartime Peru: Revisiting the Cañete Massacre of 1881

This article subjects the historiography and evidence of the massacre of Chinese immigrants in the Cañete valley by Afro-Peruvian peasants, led by women during the War of the Pacific, to critical analysis in light of recent discussions of the nexus of race, culture and nation. It validates the motives of the peasants who carried out the massacre by examining the event as an aspect of racial and cultural identity formation. The study highlights the self-serving character of contemporary evaluations, and it gives attention to the cultural tensions and ambiguous meanings present in the massacre which illustrate the character of national identity projects in late nineteenth-century Peru.

Navies in Modern World History (review)

Reviewed by: Navies in Modern World History Christopher M. Bell Navies in Modern World History. By Lawrence Sondhaus. London: Reaktion Books, 2004. ISBN 1-86189-202-0. Illustrations. References. Bibliography. Index. Pp. 336. $39.00. Surveys of modern naval history seldom stray very far beyond the competition between dominant naval powers (Great Britain, the United States) and their competitors (principally France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union). This book adopts a somewhat different approach. To highlight the variety of roles that navies have played in the modern world, Lawrence Sondhaus employs a series of case studies covering both great and minor [End Page 285] powers since the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Each chapter examines a single navy over a period ranging from a decade to nearly a century. The focus throughout the book is on the evolution of naval policy and matériel in peacetime, but the author also examines how each of these services recruited, trained, and educated their personnel, and how well they met the challenges of war. The book begins with overviews of the British and French navies during the nineteenth century, a period characterized by unprecedented technological advances. As the leading naval and industrial power of this period, Britain had little incentive to force the pace of naval innovation: its superior resources enabled it to meet all of the qualitative and quantitative challenges that emerged in these years. The French navy, on the other hand, embraced technology as a means to undermine Britain's predominant position at sea. During the 1840s-1890s, France repeatedly took the lead in applying new technologies to warship construction, forcing the British to respond with new designs of their own. The book next turns to the western hemisphere, with chapters on the United States and Confederate navies in the American Civil War, the Brazilian navy in the years 1822-31, and the Chilean navy from 1879 to 1892. The Latin American case studies are a welcome diversion into a region often neglected by naval historians. Fleets in these waters were small by European standards, but Sondhaus shows that they were nonetheless critical in shaping the region's history. Brazil's navy played a decisive role in its struggle for independence from Portugal and in the preservation of national unity in the years following. Chile's victory in the War of the Pacific (1879-84) brought significant territorial expansion and catapulted it to the front ranks of South American states. Its emergence as the leading naval power in the region in the early 1880s also raised serious concerns in the United States, which responded with its own naval buildup. The twentieth century receives slightly less attention, but the focus here is more conventional. Sondhaus begins with Wilhelmine Germany's unsuccessful challenge to British naval supremacy from the turn of the century to the end of the First World War. This is followed by a survey of the Japanese navy from its victory over China in 1894 to its crushing defeat by the United States in the Second World War. The Cold War era is examined from the perspective of another challenger, the Soviet Union. Under the direction of Admiral Gorschkov, the Soviet navy assumed a prominent place in Soviet strategy and effectively contested the United States's command of the sea. The book concludes with a chapter on the United States Navy since 1991. Sondhaus is skeptical about this service's commitment to "transformation," noting that most technological breakthroughs in recent years were produced in European shipyards. In the absence of a peer competitor, he maintains that the United States has adopted a leisurely approach to warship construction and innovation, much like a previous hegemon, the British navy, during parts of the nineteenth century. Each of these case studies offers a solid introduction to the navies under consideration, demonstrating the complex forces that guided their development, [End Page 286] the range of activities they engaged in, and their ability to shape the fate of nations and empires. Taken together, they also provide a good overview of broad trends in naval technology, personnel and combat in the modern era. The case-study approach inevitably means, however, that some important topics are either...

The Ten Cents War: Chile, Peru, and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884

The Ten Cents War: Chile, Peru, and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884

The Ten Cents War: Chile, Peru, and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific, 1879-1884

Introduction The Stage The Contenders The Issue Opening Moves Decision at Sea Coming to Grips The Presidents Depart Tacna and Arica: The End in the South A Diplomatic Interlude On to Lima The Broken-backed War Loose Ends Selected Bibliography Index

Comunes y haciendas: Procesos de comunalización en la Sierra de Piura (siglos XVIII al XX)El Norte en la historia regional, siglos XVIII–XIX

Comunes y haciendas: Procesos de comunalización en la Sierra de Piura (siglos XVIII al XX)El Norte en la historia regional, siglos XVIII–XIX