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During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the social, economic, and political landscape of Peru was transformed profoundly. Within a decade of the country's disastrous defeat by Chile during the War of the Pacific, the export economy was recovering on the strength of a variety of agricultural and mineral products. The sugar industry played a pivotal role in this process and produced wealthy and socially ambitious families who became prominent political leaders on the national level.

This study, based primarily on previously unavailable private records of sugarcane plantations, examines the external and internal dynamics of the sugar industry. It offers new insights into the process of land consolidation, the economics of sugar technology and production, the formation of the coastal elite, and the organization, recruitment, and control of labor. By focusing on the plantation Cayalti within a regional context, Gonzales presents one of the richest descriptions of the modern plantation for any region of Latin America. The book is a vivid social history of laborers from a variety of racial and ethnic backgrounds, from Chinese to Peruvians of Indian, mestizo, and black heritage.

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CHOICE Review

In this comprehensive study of the development of a sugar oligarchy and associated working-class communities in the Lambayeque Valley of northern coastal Peru, Gonzales revises some common tenets of Peruvian historiography. Although some scholars (e.g., Peter Klaren's in Modernization, Dislocation and Aprismo; Origins of the Peruvian Aprista Party, 1870-1932, 1973) have depicted the sugar oligarchy as one in which foreign ownership and control were prevalent, Gonzales shows that outside a limited geographic area, creole Peruvians were predominant. More important, though, is Gonzales's richly detailed discussion of the evolution of enganche, a system of labor recruitment that brought highland peasants to work on coastal plantations after Chinese coolie labor fell into disuse during the 1880s. The records of Cayalti, an estate belonging to the influential Aspillaga family, describe the enganche system as a relatively ineffective mechanism for ensuring a stable labor supply. Ever alert to the potential for worker militancy, the Aspillagas even gave up beneficial technological improvements that could arouse the workers' resistance. Throughout the book Gonzales reminds readers of the importance of a defensive managerial philosophy of labor relations: social control was achieved at Cayalti largely because of the managers' avoidance of confrontation and repression. Upper-division undergraduates and above.-F.A. Scarano, University of Connecticut