By Nathan Gill Nov. 28 (Bloomberg) — Peru’s economy expanded more than economists expected in the third quarter, led by construction and investment in heavy machinery and equipment. Gross domestic product, the broadest measure of a country’s output in goods and services, grew 9.5 percent in the third quarter from the same period… Read More Peru’s Economy Expanded 9.5 Percent in Third Quarter (Update1)
By Nathan Gill and James Attwood Aug. 18, 2008 (Bloomberg) — Sigdo Koppers SA, which controls Chile’s largest explosives maker, rose to the highest in two months in Santiago trading after announcing a $23.2 million pretax gain from the sale of assets in Peru. Sigdo Koppers climbed 2.6 percent to 390.1 pesos, the… Read More Sigdo Koppers Rises After Disclosing Peru Sale Profit
June 9, 2008 (Southern Affairs) — Peru’s Transportation and Communications Minister Verónica Zavala announced May 27th that Unasur’s highest profile project, an inter-oceanic highway connecting the Brazilian Atlantic with the Peruvian Pacific, was being investigated after discovering that it did not have a budget or engineering plans. The minister told a Congressional Committee that while… Read More Peru’s Halts Jungle Highway Construction After Investigation Shows Design Wasn’t Done
June 7, 2008 (Southern Affairs) — It is unclear what the recent Unasur summit in Brasilia actually accomplished. Six months late and set against the backdrop of the worst regional conflict since the 1990s, the 12 presidents of South America tried hard to hide the growing divisions between their governments with lofty rhetoric of fraternity… Read More Unasur 2008 Summit: All Circus No Bread
(Nov. 28, 2007) For anyone interested in the state of South America’s regional relations, this week was full of news. Argentina and Uruguay appear to have given up on political dialogue and have closed their borders until The Hague gives them a reply sometime in the next 2 years, Venezuela froze ties with Colombia and… Read More Is South America Sliding Into Chaos Or Is It Just Business As Usual?
U.S. newspapers announced this week that Congress is expected to ratify a free trade agreement (FTA) with Peru before its Nov. recess. The FTA will eliminate 80 percent of U.S. export tariffs to Peru with the remaining 20 percent to be phased out over the next 10 years. While U.S. lawmakers argued over the inclusion… Read More What Does Peru’s FTA Mean For The Rest Of The Region?
By N. H. Gill (Oct. 10, 2007) – The human and environmental costs of increased infrastructure integration in South America was the topic of debate at the First Latin American Congress of National Parks and Other Protected Areas this week in Bariloche, Argentina. Scientists from around the world met to discuss the effects of the… Read More Scientists Worry About Human and Environmental Costs of Integration
On Oct.4 Brazil’s Foreign Minister Celso Amorim arrived in Ecuador to discuss potential areas of mutual interest with President Rafael Correa. The visit followed last Sunday’s national assembly elections that gave President Correa sweeping powers move forward his new socialist platform designed to reduce economic inequality and exploitation in Ecuador. The visit was also a… Read More UNASUR MAKING VERY SMALL WAVES
(May 25, 2006) President Michelle Bachelet requested that Chile’s Supreme Court keep ex-Peruvian President Alberto Fujimori quiet after a series of comments on Peru’s upcoming elections provoked an outcry from government officials in Lima. Since being released on bail, Fujimori has generated a whirlwind of controversy between the two countries as well as confrontations with… Read More FUJIMORI: PERU REQUESTS GAG ORDER
Citation Larson, Brooke. Trials of Nation Making: Liberalism, Race, and Ethnicity in the Andes, 1810–1910. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004.
Citation Escandell Tur, Neus. Producción y Comercio de Tejidos Coloniales: Los Obrajes y Chorrillos Del Cusco, 1570-1820. Archivos de Historia Andina 23. Cusco, Perú: Centro de Estudios Regionales Andinos “Bartolomé de Las Casas,” 1997.
Mark Thurner, From Two Republics to One Divided: Contradictions of Postcolonial Nationmaking in Andean Peru, Latin America Otherwise : Languages, Empires, Nations (Durham: Duke University Press, 1997).
Karl Zimmerer’s Changing Fortunes: Biodiversity and Peasant Livelihood in the Peruvian Andes looks at agriculture systems and species biodiversity in the Peruvian Andes in the late twentieth century. Focusing on an indigenous community in Paucartambo region, near Cuzco, the author explores the divergent fortunes of different communities in this area as they adapted to changing… Read More Changing Fortunes: Karl Zimmerer
Asunción Lavrin’s edited volume, Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America, presents a series of perspectives on what Lavrin calls the “conquest of the mind,” the means through which the Spanish state and Catholic Church sought to maintain control over colonial society. The authors challenge received understandings of the region’s early history by showing the… Read More Sexuality and Marriage in Colonial Latin America: Asunción Lavrin
Sociologist Léon Zamosc’s The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement in Colombia, looks at the development of agrarian capitalism and peasant land struggles in Colombia between 1967 and 1981. In ten concise chapters, Zamosc analyzes differences in agrarian strategies, changes in peasant-state relations, and what he calls the politics and ideology of the “peasant challenge,”… Read More The Agrarian Question and the Peasant Movement in Colombia: Léon Zamosc
Magnus Mörner’s The Andean Past: Land, Societies, and Conflicts (1985) is a wide-ranging survey of Andean history since conquest, focusing on classic political, social, and economic themes. In his discussion of Andean rural history, Mörner says historians should view the development of haciendas in terms of their wider commercial networks and argues that international export… Read More The Andean Past: Magnus Mörner
Karen Spalding’s history of colonial Peru, Huarochirí, begins with the origins of Andean society, following social changes from pre-Inca days until the height of colonial rule. Written in the mid-1980s amidst a brutal economic crisis that inordinately impacted indigenous communities in areas like Huarochirí, this monograph seems an attempt to revalorize Andean society at a… Read More Huarochirí: Karen Spalding
Peter Bakewell’s Miners of the Red Mountain: Indian Labor in Potosí, 1545-1650 (1984) looks at the changing systems of labor and production used at the silver mines of Potosí in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Bakewell questions the long-held assumption that the mines were overwhelmingly worked by forced laborers, arguing instead that declining silver output and new refining technologies fueled the growth of a competitive market for specialized, wage-earning workers.… Read More Miners of the Red Mountain (Review)
Stern, Steve J. Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press, 1982. Steve Stern’s Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Huamanga to 1640 centers on colonial Huamanga, a strategic military and economic region along the route between Lima and Potosí. It was… Read More Peru’s Indian Peoples and the Challenge of Spanish Conquest: Steve Stern
Cynthia McClintock’s monograph, Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change in Peru, looks at the social and political effect of the agrarian reforms of the Velasco administration between 1968 to 1975. Focusing closely on the 1969 hacienda expropriations and subsequent implementation of self-managing agrarian cooperatives, McClintock uses a series of social surveys, carried out by Cornell University… Read More Peasant Cooperatives and Political Change in Peru: Cynthia McClintock
Jürgen Golte’s Repartos y Rebeliones, published in German in 1977 and translated into Spanish by Carlos Degregori in 1980, analyzes the implementation, evolution, and resistance to the repartimiento de efectos, put in place by Spain’s Bourbon reformers in the eighteenth century.[1] Golte sought to revise earlier studies that overlooked the role of the repartos, a… Read More Repartos y Rebeliones: Jürgen Golte
Robert Keith’s 1976 Conquest and Agrarian Change: The Emergence of the Hacienda System on the Peruvian Coast, explored the rise of Spanish plantations in seven valleys along Peru’s southern coast in the second half of the sixteenth century. Keith emphasized the legacy of pre-Colombian societies in the development of the hacienda, arguing that in addition… Read More Conquest and Agrarian Change: Robert Keith
John Murra developed his now-famous theory of the Andean “vertical archipelago” in Formaciones Económicas y Políticas del Mundo Andino (1975, trans. Economic Organization of the Inka State, 1980), which grew out of his research in the Peruvian highlands between 1958 and 1973. Murra argued that pre-Columbian societies in the Andes sought to control a range of ecological zones… Read More Economic Organization of the Inka State: John Murra
When historian James Lockhart published his renown article “Encomienda and Hacienda” in 1969, the modern historiography on haciendas was already more than forty-years-old. Yet even after decades, scholars were only beginning to understand these New World estates in terms of their origins and functions as colonial institutions. Early twentieth century scholars debated the extent of… Read More Encomienda and Hacienda: James Lockhart
James Lockhart’s Spanish Peru (1968) looks at the first three decades of Spanish conquest in the colonial Andes. One of the first Latin American historians to mine notarial records as a window into social life in the sixteenth century, Lockhart provides a survey of Peru’s major socioeconomic and demographic categories via a series of life… Read More Spanish Peru, 1532-1560: James Lockhart
