This book is part of the nueva historia política tendency in Latin American historiography, and as such is engaged less with the study of speeches and concepts than with the political practices and the actions (as opposed to thoughts) of its protagonists. It is based on a doctoral thesis submitted at the University of Hamburg, dealing with the Partido Civil, a political organisation that played a notable role in the government of Peru between 1872 and 1919, to the extent of occupying the presidency and dominating the legislature during approximately half the period. The party disappeared from the political scene following the Great Depression of the 1930s, and tends to be categorised as a typical Latin American party of the era: one that adorned itself with liberal ideas but was led by exclusive oligarchies that ended up spoiling the transformative promise that nineteenth-century liberalism had brought in its train.

Ulrich Mücke studies the first phase of Peru's Partido Civil, from 1871 to 1879. This has usually been considered in the context of Manuel Pardo Lavalle, the party's founder, who was Peru's first civilian president (1872–6) before being assassinated in 1878 while he was president of the Senate. This is a subject that, as ever with Latin American liberalism, has aroused passions and strong feeling beyond the academic world. The title of the book echoes Heraclio Bonilla's Guano y burguesía en el Perú (Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1974), in which the Partido Civil is portrayed as an organisation that represented the interests of a plutocracy grown rich on the guano trade and one that failed to make the transition from colonial oligarchy to capitalist bourgeoisie, if that was even within its ken, beyond a few declarations aimed at public consumption.

Mücke concurs that the founders of the Partido Civil in 1871 represented the commercial and financial bourgeoisie that had grown up in Lima on the back of the guano trade, and which in turn maintained aristocratic or traditional attitudes. This was not an emergent middle class aiming to break with a feudal aristocracy, nor did it confront an industrial working class, as was the case with the European revolutions. These were the descendants of colonial civil servants – white men with money, in a land of straitened Indians.

Along the lines of Bonilla and other previous analysts of civilismo, Mücke considers the Partido Civil as an organisation formed in order to achieve power and to defend its group interests, rather than to undertake a transformative reformation of the country, as other recent historians, among them Carmen McEvoy, have suggested. Based on the study of Manuel Pardo's copious correspondence, alongside research in the contemporary press and the legislation introduced in the decade after 1870, Mücke's monograph does not put forward new ideas so much as provide documentary ballast to the historical insights of preceding studies.

As tends to be the case with doctoral theses, it is the empirical contribution that is the book's main strength. The reconstruction of the presidential elections of 1872, and of the nature of elections generally in Latin America, is of great value, as is the review of how Congress actually functioned. The latter is a member of the body politic that has unwarrantedly been neglected in recent political history, as the author rightly points out. Another of his contributions relates to how the state functioned with regard to what has been termed ‘the interior’ across the continent – namely, those provinces outside the capital and a few major cities. Here the state apparatus was generally little in evidence, with scant schools, roads or medical services; the police served more to control any opposition than to maintain order; and public administration was crucial in the channelling of inter-faction rivalries and the neutralising of political enemies.

The book's conclusion challenges recent studies which have suggested that after post-independence inertia, the ideology of republicanism had pushed forward national projects aimed at transforming the colonial legacy, by means of the social and territorial integration of the country through decentralisation, railways, the telegraph and education. ‘Civilismo’ in Peru did not arrive hand in hand with progressive liberalism, nor did it undertake the agrarian reforms, the reduction of the role of the Church or the expansion of education and commerce that were implemented in other countries of Latin America. Manuel Pardo was no railway visionary, nor evangelist on behalf of the republic. He was a guano merchant who added to his fortune by brokering Chinese immigrants for the haciendas of the coast, outdoing his peers in canniness. Once in government he did not break with the dividing up of the spoils of public posts and stipends that had been a feature of the country for centuries.

This book is a healthy response to the excesses of recent historical studies – to which it is unfortunately not itself immune on occasion. For example, Pardo's work in the fiscal sphere, in first introducing the obligatory contribución del jornal for all adult males, followed by a similar ‘contribution’ aimed at funding schools, was an attempt to break away from the fiscal patrimonialism so criticised by his generation. This may have come to nothing, but at least an effort was made before it was buried under tons of nitrate. Administrative decentralisation by means of municipal councils, to which taxation and the delivery of services such as education were devolved, does not deserve to be dismissed as insignificant; and the same could be said for the railways project, aimed at remedying the lack of communications infrastructure in the country.

These reforms failed in some instances because they were implemented too late, in others due to a lack of support from key sectors, and in still others due to being badly framed as a consequence of inadequate information. However, a failed reform is not the same thing as an absence of reform or of the will to undertake reform, as the author seems to suggest in this work.