This is a welcome addition to the literature on the peasantry of the central highlands of Peru. This peasantry attracted the attention of scholars such as José María Arguedas and Richard Adams as a “progressive” force, economically entrepreneurial and developing village social and economic infrastructure through their own efforts. Here, the great estate, though present in the puna pasture-lands, has not economically or politically dominated the peasant population. Since colonial times, the central highlands has been a major mining area and, in the twentieth century, the main center of production for the United States–owned Cerro de Pasco corporation. Its historical development compares usefully with analyses of the social and economic impact of other export staples, such as Peter Klarén’s study of sugar on the north coast of Peru. Florencia Mallon’s convincing portrayal of small-scale capitalist development contradicts stagnationist theories of dependency, as well as characterizations of the Latin American agrarian structure as mainly dominated by the struggles of lord and peasant.
This study is firmly rooted in historical scholarship, being based in an extensive and painstaking search of local archives; it has the additional virtue of using a theoretical issue—that of capitalist transition—to organize the accounts of village events. The findings complement those of anthropologically based work, such as that of Norman Long and myself, but provide a more rigorous historical analysis. Mallon demonstrates that it was the class interests of a group of village-based entrepreneurs that underlay much of the political and economic dynamic of the period 1860-1940, whether this was expressed in conflicts over estate boundaries, village jurisdictions, and communal obligations; the legalization of the indigenous community; or the sale of church lands. She demonstrates that the local economic impact of the mining “enclave” was, in fact, considerable, increasing monetization and commoditization, and thus generalizing wage labor and eroding the subsistence base of the peasant population. This process is seen to result in the contemporary period in a polarization between a capitalist class of village farmers and a rural proletariat. The central region, in this account, has followed a “peasant model” of capitalist development in contrast to the “Junker model” common in other areas of the country.
The extension of her argument to the contemporary period is the weakest part of her argument. She does not provide supporting data on changes in production and land tenure within the villages of the area. Also, the emphasis on a “peasant model” does not fit the realities of contemporary agrarian development, which is increasingly determined externally through government credit and food-pricing policies and through the strategies of agroindustrial capital. This situation limits the scope of all village farmers, even capitalist ones, who are further restricted by the unwillingness of peasants to sell land, still seen as an element of security in the face of the continuing uncertainties of the urban economy.
Despite these disagreements, I found this to be a stimulating and well-argued book. It makes a masterly use of local history to inform our understanding of general historical trends and of central issues in development thinking.
