The Allure of Labor: Workers, Race and the Making of the Peruvian State. PAULO DRINOT: Duke University Press, 2011

Abstract

The Peruvian elite, during the first several decades of the twentieth century, viewed industrialization as a panacea for the country’s perceived shortcomings, according to historian Paulo Drinot. They believed in industry’s talismanic power as a civilizing and modernizing force. While industrialization might have its dark side—the spread of subversive, leftist ideologies and social instability—it was a risk that modernizing elites were willing to take. They especially saw industrial work as a solution to what they judged to be Peru’s most bedeviling impediment: the country’s indigenous population.