Rigorously researched and thoughtful monographs on modern Peruvian history in English or Spanish have, to date, been few and far between. Klarén’s well-written discussion of the 1870-1932 period brings important new substantive and analytical material to the study of modern Peru. The author essentially focuses on two areas: 1) the development of large commercial sugar plantations at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries in two rich north coast Peruvian valleys; and 2) the effect of that development on the rise of one of the most influential political movements in twentieth-century Latin America, the Peruvian Aprista Party. Of these two sections, that which deals with the economic and social changes accompanying the growth of Peru’s export agricultural sectors is clearly Klarén’s most important contribution.

The author begins his narrative with an overview of the displacement of the traditional planter elites in the Chicama and Santa Catalina valleys by a handful of foreign-born and commercial-minded hacendados. He shows how these new planters, with their access to foreign capital and technology, took advantage of favorable national and international conditions to gain control of the valuable land in the valleys and built a modern and efficient sugar industry. Klarén then describes the impact of land concentration and agricultural modernization on the social fabric of northern Peru. He identifies three groups in the region that apparently suffered the most from this process: the increasing numbers of migrants from the more backward highland areas who came to work as braceros on the new industrialized plantations; a class of small farmers who found themselves driven out of existence by the new rural enterprises; and the petty bourgeois merchants of the small cities in the area, many of whom went down in financial ruin because of their inability to compete with the dynamic and well-financed sugar planters.

The major problem with this entire section is its excessive brevity. While throughout his discussion of regional social and economic change Klarén presents fascinating data and interesting interpretation, time and again the reader finds himself wanting to know more, both substantively and analytically, about each specific phenomenon. The author’s treatment of the growing discontent experienced by the recently migrated “rural proletariat” on the modern sugar plantations is a case in point. In attempting to explain the reasons for a rash of strikes that occurred in the region from 1912 through the early 1920s, he cites only oppressive living and working conditions. We are left without information concerning the effects of landlessness, modifications in traditional patron-client relationships, and participation in a wage labor system on the rising militancy of a group that undoubtedly had left behind in the highlands more oppressive conditions than those encountered on the coastal plantations. In short, Klarén has broken important ground in delineating a series of new research areas each one of which is worth its own monograph.

The second half of the book deals with the rise of the Peruvian Aprista Party. The author’s basic thesis in this regard is well stated by the title of his book. He maintains that the modernization of agriculture in Peru’s northern coastal valleys brought about the dislocation of traditional elites, middle sectors, and rural masses leading to their political radicalization under the banners of Aprismo. Klarén argues that the ideology and backing of APRA directly arose out of social and economic change in the north coast area. In his view generalized antagonism towards the newly powerful foreign interests in the region expressed itself in support for APRA as an anti-imperialist movement. While this interpretation may be valid to some degree for certain individuals and groups in the Chicama-Santa Catalina area, the idea of Aprismo’s regional identity falls short of accounting for the development of a political party with a leadership and a support base recruited on the national level, a party forged not on the plantations of Peru’s north coast but in the university classrooms and union halls of the country’s capital city during the early 1920s. Indeed, it appears that APRA’s leaders largely overlooked the north coast area until the 1931 election, a full decade after the movement began to form; and in the election year the sugar plantation area seemed simply another political plum which the Apristas sought to pick in their fight for victory at the ballot box. Even within northern Peru Klarén’s essentially single-factor explanation for the rise of APRA overlooks the interaction of other elements that appear to have led to the emergence of this complex political movement, including the personal charisma of its founder and leader Victor Raúl Haya de la Torre and the importance of the identification of the north coast voter with Haya as a native son as well as a political radical.