In the 1960s, the Peruvian social and political order attracted the attention of scholars, including François Bourricaud (Pouvoir et société dans le Pérou contemporain, A. Colin, 1967) and José Matos Mar (ed., La oligarquía en el Perú, Amorrortu Editores, 1969), due to the persistence of oligarchic power in what, under the impact of the Cuban Revolution, appeared to be a developing storm of revolution. Dennis Gilbert examined the Peruvian oligarchy after its demise in a 1978 dissertation that was published in 1982 in Peru as La oligarquía peruana: Historia de tres familias (Editorial Horizonte). This new book updates and broadens his earlier work.

Oligarchies arose in virtually every Latin American country during the period of the export economies, 1870s to 1930. During their heyday, the men of these oligarchies ruled their countries in near-absolute fashion. Following a visit to Chile, US political scientist Paul Reinsch in 1909 described that country's oligarchy as ‘an aristocracy of birth and wealth [that] has unquestioned control of social and political life’ (‘Parliamentary Government in Chile’, American Political Science Review, 3 (1909), p. 508). Had he visited almost any other Latin American country, he would have found that ‘unquestioned control’ was the norm at the turn of the twentieth century.

In a brief overview Gilbert defines the concept of ‘oligarchy’ and analyses the oligarchies of Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile in order to provide context for the book's focus: the Peruvian oligarchy. He divides the ‘Old Regime’, or the time of oligarchic rule, into two periods: the ‘oligarchic republic’, aptly described by Reinsch, and the ‘contested republic’, in which the working and middle classes created by the export economies began to challenge their exclusion. The oligarchies that Gilbert discusses were created through ‘blood and gold’ marriages between prestigious families of the late colonial period and post-independence entrepreneurs who accumulated fortunes and introduced non-Hispanic surnames to the newspapers’ society pages and the elite clubs’ rosters. Land ownership was the original basis of much oligarchic wealth, but the prominent families diversified into commerce, banking and – in some countries – mining and manufacturing, while immigrant entrepreneurs and their progeny acquired land. The oligarchies of Brazil and Mexico were dispersed, state-based entities, whereas those of Chile and Argentina, despite the latter's federal political structure, were centralised in the respective capitals.

In two-thirds of the book, Gilbert traces the Peruvian oligarchy's origins, its zenith between 1895 and 1919 and its prolonged struggle for survival. The fortunes that made the oligarchy were centred on the export-oriented coastal sugar and cotton plantations, and, like their counterparts throughout Latin America, the landowners diversified their portfolios. Lima was the centre of their world: there they built their mansions, sent their children to exclusive schools, met at the Club Nacional, and dominated congress as leaders of the Civilista Party and, from time to time, occupied the presidency. Augusto Leguía's 1919 coup ushered in the ‘contested republic’ and ended the oligarchs’ direct control of government and economic policy. The rise of the Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana (American Popular Revolutionary Alliance, APRA) in the early 1930s posed an existential threat to the elites. Fortunately for them, the bloody 1932 APRA uprising in Trujillo created lasting enmity between the then-radical party and the military. Oligarchs thus backed several military presidents after 1930 in order to keep APRA at bay, but, to their dismay, by the time of General Juan Francisco Velasco Alvarado's 1968 coup the military had evolved beyond its unwavering support of the status quo and quickly ended one of Latin America's most enduring bastions of wealth and privilege.

The heart of Gilbert's work is his close examination of the Peruvian oligarchy at the family or clan level. Through extensive interviews with knowledgeable individuals from inside and outside the charmed circle he identifies not the fabled ‘40 families’, but the ‘Oligarchic 29’ (p. 11). From that list he selected three for in-depth analysis. He follows each family through the generations that spanned the period of oligarchic ascendancy, providing genealogies, detailed examination of the inner workings of power and fortune, and portraits of family life.

Rooted in the north-coast Cayaltí sugar plantation, the Aspíllaga clan is the most representative of the three. Mining the archive of Lima's Centro de Documentación Agraria (Agrarian Documentation Centre) for plantation records and family correspondence, Gilbert presents an intimate portrait of the Aspíllagas through time as they crafted the political and financial strategies that kept them prosperous and powerful. Having begun as a humble carter, clan founder Ramón Aspíllaga Ferrebú did not achieve social prominence, but his sons and grandsons were at home in the Club Nacional, the halls of Congress and on the boards of directors of banks and commercial enterprises. A 1925 letter from Ramón Aspíllaga Barrera to his sons captures the oligarchic ethos: ‘Carry my name with honor and be united so that you will be respected and powerful’ (pp. 159–60). The Aspíllaga chapter also gives insights – based on ledgers and correspondence – into the workings of a sugar plantation (for more detail on Cayaltí, see Michael J. Gonzales, Plantation Agriculture and Social Control in Northern Peru, 1875–1933, University of Texas Press, 1985).

Gilbert's portraits of the oligarchic Prado and Miró Quesada families are richly detailed but, lacking the abundant documentation underpinning the Aspíllagas’ story, less intimate. The Prados’ wealth and power were centred on their Banco Popular while those of the Miró Quesadas were based on their ownership of one of Latin America's oldest newspapers, El Comercio. Through secondary sources, private archives and interviews, Gilbert examines the leadership of each generation, the interests that kept the clans together and at times threatened to divide them, and their manipulation of the military and eventual accommodation with APRA.

Gilbert's monograph has a few shortcomings, beginning with its title; a more appropriate title might have been The Peruvian Oligarchy in Comparative Perspective. He has the Chilean oligarchy beginning with the Parliamentary Republic in 1891 and ending in both 1958 (p. 264) and 1962 (p. 77). The substance and trappings of oligarchy were in place much earlier (the Club de la Unión dates from 1864 and the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura from 1869), and more appropriate terminal dates might be the 1965 congressional election that decimated the conservative parties or Eduardo Frei's 1967 agrarian reform law that began dismantling the oligarchy's rural base. At the end of the ‘contested republics’, he argues, ‘the oligarchy ceased to be a significant force in the affairs of each country …’ (p. 1), but he might have pointed out that families prominent during the oligarchic period continue to wield power in several countries today. Finally, a higher standard of copy-editing would have corrected irritating lapses in the prose.

Gilbert is to be commended for revisiting his earlier work. He offers an incisive analysis of the oligarchic period in general and a valuable study of the Peruvian oligarchy, making an important contribution to our understanding of a critical period in post-independence Latin American history.