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The Coastal Elite and Peruvian Politics, 1895–1919*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 February 2009

Extract

For the foreign scholar, especially, an understanding of Peruvian politics between 1895 and 1919, the period of the so-called Repôblica Aristocràtica, is difficult to obtain. This quarter-century is considered an era of rapid social and economic change: in the words of one scholar, it completed ‘the disappearance of colonial Peru’. An important element in this transition was the growth on the coast of the ruling group connected with the expanding export economy, known in the literature variously as the ‘oligarchy’, ‘bourgeoisie’, or the ‘plutocracy’, which supposedly obtained control over the meagre resources of the state and directed them to its own ends.

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Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1982

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References

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8 Burga, and Flores, Galindo, Apogeo y crisis, pp. 8799 and 130. Their argument is very much more subtle than represented here.Google Scholar

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51 La Agricultura, Vol. 5, No. 59, (07 1920),Google Scholar II. La Agricultura had been making such complaints about the SNA for years: see Vol. 4, No. 40, (09 1978), 6, and Vol. 4, No. 41, (10 1918), 4.Google Scholar

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71 See, amongst others, the comments of Cotler, Madalengoitia, and Flores Galindo above, all of whom mention either the exporters or sugar planters as the dominant group within the elite. Baltazar Caravedo Molinari also talks of a ‘system of government in which predominated the agro-exporters, British capital, and the landowners’. Clases, lucha política, y gobierno en el Perú, 1919–1930 (Lima, 1977), p. 39.Google Scholar

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87 Dávalos, y Lissón, Diez años, p. 200.Google Scholar

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96 Of the remaining 23, 15 were born in Lima.

97 There is scope for a large-scale computer analysis of members of Congress in Peru. Jorge Basadre appears to have been engaged in research along these lines at the time of his death: Elecciones y centralismo, pp. 122–4, 128–32.Google Scholar

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