A Landscape for Capital: Physical Geography, Environment, and Economic Mindsets in the Peruvian Central Highlands, 1900–20

Travel writing in Latin America has been a critical tool for surveying unknown territories, refashioning landscapes, and providing narratives of articulation between geographic, environmental conditions and state powers. Throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, travel writers transited from enlightened to scientific scopes in crafting, rhetorically and politically, what Mary Louis Pratt referred to as a sense of administrative control of elusive landscapes.

This work examines a different tradition of travel writers and accounts of physical geography, one that emerged at the dawn of the twentieth century. After decades of political and material devastation due to international conflict and internal warfare, the Peruvian state sought to rebuild the foundations of the country. In 1902, a publication by the Ministry of Development, Sketch for Capitalists, Tradesmen, and Settlers, targeted foreign investment as a key source for funding national reconstruction. The rural countryside occupied a center point in presenting Peruvian territory as a venue for capitalist ventures.

Following the publication of this pamphlet, a number of foreign travelers very different to early colonial and republican visitors were dispatched to survey the Peruvian countryside. The twentieth-century traveler was primarily an entrepreneur representing foreign powers and capital seeking investment opportunities. Their nationalities also reflected the global changes in the geopolitics of economic imperialism. Concomitant to the arrival of foreign entrepreneurs, Peruvian statesmen also conducted increasingly institutionalized countryside surveys.

In contrasting the accounts of foreign entrepreneurs and Peruvian statesmen, tensions emerged. While domestic accounts emphasized the profitability of turning compartmentalized physical geography into natural resources, foreigners highlighted the possibility of economically amalgamating different environmental settings, bringing attention to neighboring grazing estates and challenging preexisting mindsets concerning the puna region. Historically dominated by the legacy of mining, high altitude landscapes were refashioned as spaces for rural industrialization, facilitating their integration into state and capitalist structures of production.