In this long and meticulously documented book, Pilár García Jordán studies nation building in Peru and Bolivia: more specifically, how each country conceived and implemented the incorporation of “Los Orientes,” their eastern territories. In examining how politicians made policy at an enormous remove from the polis, the author describes two Andean Orientalisms, each characterized by erroneous assumptions, fits and starts, and by failure more than success. Nevertheless, she finds that the two national experiences produced very different results.
García is a professor of the history of the Americas at the Universitat de Barcelona, as well as director of its Taller de Estudios e Investigaciones Andino-Amazonas, a project described at http://www.ub.es/america/objetivos.htm. The present study is part of a considerable body of work, some reviewed in this journal, that has grown out of the workshop’s decade-long concentration on the integration of Andean and Amazonian space into nation-states in the nineteenth and...
