The Deeper Depths of the Nation: Dynamite, Mining, and the Explosive Governance of the Underground

This paper examines how dynamite reshaped Peru’s mining sector and reconfigured twentieth-century projects of state formation, nation-making, and the governance of the underground. Although mining had long structured Peru’s economy, the industry entered a period of decline after independence, commonly attributed to shortages of capital and labor. Beginning in the late nineteenth century, however, engineers and state officials reframed mining’s crisis as a technical and spatial problem—one to be solved by reopening “abandoned” subterranean depths through scientific expertise and new energetic materials. Central to this shift was the global circulation and local deployment of dynamite.

Tracing the emergence of engineering institutions such as the School of Civil and Mining Engineering and the Society of Engineers of Peru, the paper shows how a generation of material state-makers mobilized dynamite to reconceptualize Peru’s highlands and underground as governable, extractable, and still-untapped spaces. More than a tool of production, dynamite functioned as a technology of governance: a domestication of explosiveness that rendered destruction measurable, repeatable, and administratively legible. By turning blasts into controlled interventions, engineers and mining entrepreneurs redrew the physical and political contours of the Andean underground, revitalized the mining economy, and laid the enduring infrastructural foundations of Peru’s extractivist state.