More Precious Than Gold: The Story of the Peruvian Guano Trade (review)

More Precious Than Gold is more an old-style moral narrative or maritime history than a new academic work about the guano trade. Although Hollett pries into a few English primary sources on guano shippers such as Gibbs and Grace, the making of the 1840s English guano fertilizer market, and the treatment of guano workers, the book relies on a hopelessly outdated bibliography on nineteenth-century Peru (a topic which has attracted quality research over the past few decades) and no Spanish sources whatsoever. Latin American historians will be less than enlightened by the book’s long and clichéd contextual chapters on the trade, with Prescott-like titles such as “Peru: Land of the Incas,” “The Conquest: Gold, God, and Glory,” and “Chinese Bondage in Peru.” The book purports to link the guano boom to abuses of “human rights” among the coerced laborers (slaves, convicts, coolies) on the Chincha Islands. But apart from a few new tidbits about shipping and some good stories, there is little here of serious interest to scholars of Latin America or global commodity trades.