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In this article for the theme issue on “Historical Theory in a Global Frame,” I argue that “Peru” is a “historical theory in a global frame.” The theory or, as I prefer, theoretical event, named Peru was born global in an early colonial “abyss of history” and elaborated in the writings of colonial and postcolonial Peruvian historians. I suggest that the looking glass held up by Peruvian historiography is of great potential significance for historical theory at large, since it is a two-way passageway between the ancient and the modern, the Old World and the New, the East and the West. This slippery passageway enabled some Peruvian historians to move stealthily along the bloody cutting-edge of global history, at times anticipating and at others debunking well-known developments in “European” historical theory. Today, a reconnaissance of Peruvian history's inner recesses may pay dividends for a historical theory that would return to its colonial and global origins.

The name of "Peru" and the entities and beings it names first appeared "in an abyss of history" on "the edge of the world" in the early 1500s. In this essay I ask what hermeneutical truths or meanings the strange event that made the name of Peru both famous and historical holds for-and withholds from-any understanding of the meaning of colonial history. By way of a reading of Inca Garcilaso de la Vega's rendering, in Los Comentarios Reales de los Incas (1609) of "the origin and principle of the name of Peru," I suggest that Peru's name is itself an inaugural event that marks the founding void or abyss of colonial and postcolonial history, which is to say, of modern global history. This evenemential void is not unoccupied, however. It is inhabited by another founding, mythopoetic figure of history: "the barbarian" whose speech is registered in the historian's text.

Prior to the nineteenth century, the book of kings, or dynastic history, was the dominant mode of historiography in Europe and the Americas. This article explores the as-if or in-theory dimension of colonial dynastic history by way of a reading of Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo's early-eighteenth-century histories of Spain and Peru. Peralta's histories have been read as sycophantic, premodern texts that not only do not live up to the modern standards of historiography but moreover are in bad taste, that is, rhetorically prone to the excesses of Lima's colonial court culture. In contrast, I argue that Peralta's poetics of history reveal the subtle and ingenious rhetorical means by which history came to occupy, via imitating the figure of the prince, a sovereign and prognostic position of critique as the prince's simulacrum, that is, as a copy that has no original other than itself. In the case of Peralta's histories, this position of critique was colonial and postcolonial. Resumen: Hasta el siglo XIX fue el libro de los reyes, o la historia dinastica, el modo dominante de escribir historia oficialy no oficial, tanto en Europa como en las Americas o el Caribe. Este articulo explora la dimension "como si" o "en teoria" de la historia dinastica colonial por medio de una lectura de dos obras historicas escritas por el criollo limeno Pedro de Peralta Barnuevo en la primera mitad del siglo XVIII. A menudo Peralta ha sido leido como sicofanta, premoderno, y de pesimo gusto, es decir, entregado a los excesos barrocos de la cultura cortesana colonial. En contraste, aqui se arguye que la poetica de la historia de Peralta nos revela los poderosos medios internos o discursivos que hicieron posible que la historia ocupe, en una operacion de imitacion o mimesis del principe, una posicion critica y soberana como fuente fi el y voz progresiva de la verdad, a servicio de la nacion.

This article examines the historicist thought of Jorge Basadre (1903–1980). Basadre was Peru’s leading twentieth-century historian, and his brilliant and voluminous opus continues to exert a strong influence in Peru today. Basadre developed a “theory of Peru” that creatively drew upon concepts developed by European philosophers (Pascal, Fichte, Hegel, Dilthey, Renan, Ortega y Gasset, and Croce) but which was singularly Peruvian, since as an affirmative historicist apprehension of the collective subject or self named “Peru” it was “homologous with its own formation.” Nevertheless, this article argues that Basadre’s homologous “Peruvian history of Peru” admits ahistorical heterogeneity or “the abyss” as its founding (un)reason for being.

An intimate but secret union … existed between the cause of independence and the cause of the republic … the end of colonialism and the abolition of the monarchy blended together; the cause of the ...

DE HISTORIA INTELECTUAL, SIGLOS XIX-XX. Edited by Aimer Granados and Carlos Marichal. (Mexico City: El Colegio de Mexico, 2004. Pp. 269.) LA PRESENCIA DEL PASADO. By Enrique Krauze. (Mexico City: Bancomer, 2004. Pp. 495.) LOS PINCELES DE LA HISTORIA. By the Museo Nacional de Arte de Mexico. (Mexico City: Instituto Nacional de Bellas Artes, 2000-2003. 4 volumes.) LA NACION COMO PROBLEMA: LOS HISTORIADORES Y LA 'CUESTION NACIONAL.' By Elias Jose Palti. (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Econ6mica, 2003. Pp. 157.) LA CULTURA MODERNA DE LA HISTORIA: UNA APROXIMACION TEORICA

In the midst of the terrible storm in which the Republic is enveloped, the uprising of the indigenous race and its combat against the white race, which barely forms one-sixth of [the population of Peru], threatens to lend formidable proportions to the national problem. The movement in Ancash appears to obey most purely an indigenous agitation. Since its appearance we have been able to do little else but follow the story with uneasy interest, trying to discover its real character and tendencies. In it lies the fate of the Republic.

Although unimagined and unanticipated within the Creole nationalist ‘discursive frameworks’ of the liberal-republican state, nineteenth-century Andean peasant communities sought mediated re-insertion in the postcolonial Peruvian Republic. Key to peasant political engagement in the Andean region of Huaylas-Ancash was the tactical deployment of ‘Indian rights’ of colonial origin to make moral and material claims on the postcolonial caudillo state. In Huaylas-Ancash peasant claims and political practices destabilised liberal notions of ‘republic’ and ‘republican’ citizenship, and eventually challenged the teleogical historicity of Creole nation-building itself.

In the Andean field, social scientists and historians have only recently begun to ask “how peasants make politics” (Montoya 1986) or how they have “engaged their political worlds” (Stern 1987, 9). In the past, Andean peasants were frequently viewed as living outside politics or as being sporadic players at best on the stage of politics—albeit as reactive or perhaps millenarian rebels aligned against the state. When peasants did make a political showing, they were inevitably represented by the tactically mobile “middle peasantry” or independent smallholders (see Wolf 1969). In contrast, “traditional” estate peasants (service tenantry) were characterized as relatively passive, “prepolitical” victims. Further along the path of historical development and social differentiation, it was generally held, these same “prepolitical” peasants were brought into the post-feudal world of “modern political movements,” where they were soon endowed with “political consciousness” (see Hobsbawm 1959). In probing the ambiguous but historically significant “middle ground” between these extreme and rather static images of “politically modern” peasants and “prepolitical victims,” this article will raise a different set of questions. The middle ground can be found at the intersection of Herrschaft (domination) and Gemeinschaft (community) on the Andean hacienda in capitalist transition. Analysis of this middle ground reveals a highly contested terrain where the idioms of peasants' everyday political agency resound. This resonance from below, however, presents interpretive as well as political ambiguities.