Peru is the most interesting model of justice and development in Latin America today. To ana­lyze the sociopolitical progress of this nation, David Chaplin has gathered together and edited this interdisciplinary collection of essays. Peru's development is unique for several rea­sons. First, it has shown that a military force that was trained largely by the United States can em­ploy its professional expertise not to remain a well-behaved ally but to pull off a genuinely radi­cal nationalist revolution even at the expense of various interests of its "benefactor." Second, Peru has proven that successful economic de­velopment need be neither capitalist nor Social-ist. Peruvian Nationalism contains major papers by leading Peruvianists on the 1960s and on the current revolutionary military regime. The tem­poral focus is on the current (post-1968) revolu­tionary military government, with background material covering the early 1960s. Contributors are all social scientists -- including American, Italian and Peruvian writers -- who have carried outfield research in Peru. The primary focus of this volume is the radical change being carried out by the current military structure. Relevant background topics include: Peru's sociopolitical structure during the 1960s, especially under the Belaunde regime, with par­ticular attention to peasant movements and agrarian reform; a reassessment of the pre-1968 golpe (coup de'etat) behavior of former military governments; an analysis of the uniquely radical ideology and concrete reforms of the current mil­itary government. This social science reader on Peru is a schol­arly as well as sympathetic treatment of Peru's national and local politics, social structure, agrarian and tax reform and peasant move­ments. The editor has provided an extensive in­troduction and index and has also included a thorough bibliography of publications on Peru since 1960.

This excellent history of Peru proposes and proves an entirely new thesis on its nineteenth century: the changes in its economy that might have led to a better future were undone by taxes and other demands at the national, provincial and local levels. The failure of Peru owes a good deal to wartime taxes and local tax farming of the countryside. Professor Christine Hunefeldt does for the mundane issue of taxation what she has already done for Peruvian slavery and women’s rights; she writes a new history based on the evolution of a tax structure that changed for the worse over time. This is the work of a first-rate, mature scholar at the height of her powers. The book should sit right beside Nils Jacobsen, Brooke Larson, and Alberto Flores Galindo. Like other recent historians, Hunefeldt rejects the view that the nineteenth century was largely a continuation of Peru’s colonial period. She emphasizes the disruptions of independence which involved international battles as well as numerous regional and intraregional fights. Archive stories, beautifully told, flesh out the reality in every chapter. Men were conscripted into armies and their families left to starve without them. Taxes paid once had to be paid again when local offices changed hands. Indians, the most numerous portion of the population in Puno, the area on which Hunefeldt focuses, were often a month at most from complete ruin. Women begging for their sons and husbands to be returned. Traders who had been robbed appealing for justice. Hunefeldt’s writing is crisp and available to any educated layman.