This essay is not a lot of things, too, though one can imagine the nots as equally worthy topics for this dimly lit era.

This, then, was Peru's 'imagined' development. It also captures ideas that, on the whole, went against the grain of regnant North Atlantic ideologies of development and thus bore little fruit at the time. Including popular thinking-influenced these pensadores as much as any abstruse or imported theories did. I actually prefer the term 'social history of ideas' rather than 'intellectual history' since Peruvian social contexts. Social and political dimensions of their economic thinking loomed larger and larger in charting the course of this complex Peruvian developmentalism. In this book I pursue the developmental notions of ten (or so) of the century's leading statesmen, ministers, lawyers, engineers, liberal theorists, physicians, historians, educators, social scientists, bankers, and industrialists-from Manuel Pardo to Luis Esteves-and find them not so simple after all. It asks a fairly simple question: What were Peru's leaders truly thinking while they took the country down an ill-fated path of export liberalism? What sorts of economic development did they imagine? Simple as it seems, this question is rarely posed by students of Latin American liberalism. This book is a social history of ideas of the Peruvian elite of the age of guano. The voice of artisans is like the prophet who preached in the desert-imagining no one to hear or take fruit from such burning desires.Īre we to imagine guano as the staff of Moses, the hoof of Pegasus, that makes water spring from the deserts?! Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's 'Fictitious Prosperity' of Guano, 1840-1880. Berkeley, Calif: University of California Press, c1993 1993.

El redactor del congreso nacional 1816