Más allá de la dominación y la resistencia. Estudios de historia peruana, siglos XVI-XX (review)

This book is a collection of twelve essays about Peruvian history, ranging from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. With only one exception, the authors study or studied in Great Britain or the United States and, with most of the chapters based on recently completed doctoral research, the book provides insight into the work of young scholars of Peruvian history in Anglo-Saxon universities.

In their Introduction, Drinot and Garofalo explain what the twelve contributions have in common, beginning with a description of the three different trends in Peruvian historiography over the last fifty years. After discussing a Hispanic and conservative historiography dominant until the 1960s, they move onto the rise of a critical historiography that opposed the preceding one and then to the 1980s, when the new historiography became discredited to a certain extent because it was based more upon theoretical assumptions than empirical research and therefore paid little attention to the lower classes, especially the Indians. Drinot and Garofalo conclude that there is no dominant paradigm today and that different methods and views help to create a far more diverse—and therefore more accurate—picture of Peruvian history. According to the editors, all twelve essays fit into this current trend which means, above all, that they no longer defend the concept of Peruvian history as amounting to one long story of (foreign or upper class) dominance and (indigenous or lower class) resistance.

Five of the twelve contributions are dedicated to colonial history. Heidi V. Scott analysizes the discourses of Peru's conquerors, arguing that these were influenced far more greatly by South American nature and by the Indians than is generally assumed. In the second chapter, Rachel Sarah O'Toole shows that caste classification was by no means static, but subject to constant change. Moreover, it was not so much the color of a person's skin but rather the kind of Spanish they spoke or the way they dressed that defined their caste. In her essay on colonial religion in southern Peru, María Marsilli stresses the importance of pre-Columbian local cults, persecuted by the Catholic Church there to a far lesser extent than in the Cuzco region. Leo J. Garofalo describes life in the taverns of seventeenth-century Lima and Cuzco, places of great importance for what could be called a pre-modern public sphere in which people from almost all social strata participated. A detailed analysis of the incomplete census of 1724-1740 is the basis of the last essay focusing on colonial history. This census was one of the most important undertakings initiated by Viceroy Castelfuerte, the first 'Bourbon reformer' in Peru.

Three of the four essays on nineteenth-century Peru concern issues that have been at the center of historiographical debate for the last 15 years. Natalia Sobrevilla takes up the ongoing discussion on the role of the guano trade in changing the power balance between Peru's regions. In her opinion, the guano trade did not have the importance many historians have hitherto ascribed to it. Martín Monsalve analyses mid-nineteenth-century civil society in general and elections in particular, arguing that the liberal elite changed its political direction after losing elections in the 1850s. It began to place a greater emphasis on civil society, in this way hoping to control the participation of the lower classes to a far greater extent than it had been able to during the elections. Similarly, Antonio Espinoza sees the elites' project to improve education as a means of controlling the lower classes. Nevertheless, education did not have the significance imagined by the elites because only a small proportion of children went to school. In the last article on the nineteenth century, Tanja Christiansen describes the life of domestic employees in Cajamarca and shows that the status of these young women...