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Chapter 2 - Guano and Nitrates

from Part I - Commodities

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 January 2023

Fernando Degiovanni
Affiliation:
City University of New York
Javier Uriarte
Affiliation:
Stony Brook University, State University of New York
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Summary

Exports of the agricultural fertilizers guano and nitrates spurred bursts of economic euphoria and decline on South America’s Pacific coast, first in Peru and then in Chile. This chapter analyzes fiction and economic essays from Peru’s guano era (1840s–1870s) and Chile’s nitrate era (1880s–1920s). In both contexts, intellectuals voiced concerns that the financial abundance brought by fertilizer exports would reveal itself to be “fictitious prosperity,” both ecologically and economically unsustainable. These anxieties, moreover, infuse novels that dramatize urban elite society in times of fertilizer-driven abundance: Benjamín Cisneros’s Julia (Peru, 1861) and Luis Orrego Luco’s Casa grande (Chile, 1908). By tracing shared tropes across literary genre as well as temporal and national context, the chapter illustrates how elites expressed concerns about economic booms marked by debt, financial speculation, and the export of a single, exhaustible natural resource.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2022

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