The Oligarchy and the Old Regime in Latin America, 1880-1970

By (author) Dennis Gilbert

Publication date:

28 February 2017

Length of book:

304 pages

Publisher

Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

ISBN-13: 9781442270893

In the last decades of the nineteenth century and early years of the twentieth, a new class—the oligarchy—consolidated its wealth and political power in Latin America. Its members were the sugar planters, coffee growers, cattle barons, and bankers who were growing rich in a rapidly expanding global economy. Examining these immensely powerful groups, Dennis Gilbert provides a systematic comparative history of the rise and ultimate demise of the oligarchies that dominated Latin America for nearly a century. He then sketches a fine-grained portrait of three prominent Peruvian families, providing a vivid window into the everyday exercise of power. Here we see the oligarchs arranging the deportation of “political undesirables,” controlling labor through means subtle and brutal, orchestrating press campaigns, extending credit on easy terms to rising military officers, and financing the overthrow of an unfriendly government. Gilbert concludes by answering three questions: What were the sources of oligarchic power? What were the forces that undermined it? Why did oligarchies persist longer in some countries than in others? His clear, comprehensible, and illuminating analysis will make this an invaluable book for all students of modern Latin America.

Contents
List of Boxes, Figures, Photos, and Tables
Introduction
Part I: The Oligarchy and the Old Regime in Latin America
Chapter 1: Origins and Organization
Chapter 2: The Oligarchic Republics
Chapter 3: The Contested Republics
Part II: The Oligarchy and the Old Regime in Peru
Chapter 4: Peru’s Oligarchic Republic
Chapter 5: Peru’s Contested Republic
Chapter 6: The Aspíllagas: North Coast Planters
Chapter 7: The Prados: Bankers and Politicians
Chapter 8: The Miró Quesadas: Aristocratic Reformers
Part III: Conclusions
Chapter 9: Class, Clan, and Cohesion
Chapter 10: The Sources of Oligarchic Power
Chapter 11: The End of the Old Regime: Peru in Comparative Perspective
Appendix: Selecting the Oligarchic Twenty-Nine
Bibliography and Archival Sources
Index

Gilbert’s account of this central story of Latin American politics between the late nineteenth century and the 1960s is level-headed, clearly written and organized, and reliable in its details. . . [his] study offers a good introduction to the social and political history of the oligarchy for undergraduate and graduate students, and presents interesting tools for analyzing the rise and fall of oligarchic politics in Latin America.