Imagining development : economic ideas in Peru's "fictitious prosperity" of guano, 1840-1880 /

Gootenberg's "social history of ideas of the Peruvian elite of the age of guano" (1845-80) is a modest but brilliant riposte to the simple but rarely asked question: What were Peru's elites thinking as the ship of state loaded its cargo bay with lucrative bird dung (guano) and sailed off into the unforgiving waters of export liberalism? Upsetting the received wisdom on economic liberalism in 19th-century Latin America, the author deftly traces a heterodox "genealogy of discontent with fictive prosperities." Seven crisp chapters summarize the economic ideas of nine or ten central thinkers, from Pardo to Esteves. These "liberal" Peruvians "went against the grain of laissez-faire European political economy" by grounding their imaginings in "Peruvian experience and conditions." Thus, in the tradition of his earlier Between Silver and Guano (1989), Gootenberg chisels yet another chink in the crumbling wall of "strangely idealist" dependency theory. Like his earlier work, it is required reading for historians of Latin America. Undergraduates and above. M. W. Thurner; University of Florida