1. Introduction: circulating Peru's underground
On their journey from Lima to Paris, the minerals fared poorly. These were a collection of 652 specimens that the Italian-born naturalist Antonio Raimondi had prepared for display at the 1878 Paris World's Fair, as part of the Peruvian exhibition. Born in Milan in 1824, Raimondi had arrived in Peru in 1850, with the aim of investigating the country's natural history (Bonfiglio, 2004; Seiner Lizárraga, 2003; Villacorta Ostolaza, 2012). He quickly became integrated into Peru's professional and scientific circles, and over subsequent decades he carried out, with the support or on behalf of the Peruvian state, "the most extensive and exhaustive scientific exploration of Peru in the nineteenth century" (Villacorta Ostolaza, 2012, p. 173). While over the course of his career, Raimondi became recognized as an authority on various scientific matters in Peru, chief among these were the country's minerals (Bonfiglio, 2004; Villacorta Ostolaza, 2007). And it was in his capacity as 'Geólogo Consultor del Estado' ('Consultant Geologist to the State') that he had been tasked with preparing a collection of Peruvian minerals to be exhibited at the 1878 World's Fair (Bonfiglio, 2004) – a charge that Raimondi considered a way "to make the great natural riches of Peru known" (Raimondi, 1878, p. v).
When the collection arrived in Paris, however, Peru's representatives to the Fair found it "entirely destroyed" (Martinet, 1880, p. 28). As Henri Martinet, one of these representatives, later recounted, officials in Lima had packed the minerals in glass jars or in wooden boxes with glass tops. These fragile vessels were no match for the journey. As glass shattered, and minerals escaped their containers, many specimens lost their labels. Martinet later recalled, in a report on Peru's showing at the Fair, that this made especially daunting the prospect of identifying minerals and reassembling the collection "without running the risk of committing some mineralogical heresies" (Martinet, 1880, p. 33).
Martinet and the Peruvian delegation were, nonetheless, up to the task. The labor of reorganizing Raimondi's collection took 35 days and resulted in these "circulating references" (Latour, 1999) being displayed along one whole side of Peru's exhibition space (Villacorta Ostolaza, 2007). Martinet also assumed the task of translating into French the more-than-300-page catalogue raisonné, entitled Minerales del Perú (Minerals of Peru), that Raimondi had prepared to accompany his collection, and which gave descriptions (often highly detailed) of the specimens it contained. In the end, 2000 copies of the French edition were printed and distributed, and it was completed in time for the Fair's Awards Jury to evaluate it alongside the minerals themselves. The results were excellent: Raimondi's collection was awarded a gold medal, one of three received by Peruvian exhibitors. Back in Peru, Raimondi's minerals were also celebrated, with an article from the leading newspaper El Comercio deeming the collection to be "the jewel of the Peruvian exposition" (quoted in Villacorta Ostolaza, 2007, p. 47).
What can Raimondi's experience at the 1878 World's Fair tell us about the historical relations among science, resources, and territory in Peru? What can analysis of the knowledge practices underpinning and expressed through his mineral collection and catalog reveal about the involvement of the Earth sciences in the processes through which Peru's subsurface has been ascribed meaning and incorporated into political-economic life? This paper addresses these questions, using Raimondi's mineralogy, as exemplified in his Paris collection and catalog, to probe the historical role of science in the making of resources and territory in Peru.
In doing so, the paper engages two main scholarly literatures. The first is a growing body of work on the development of scientific activities in Peru during the nineteenth century (e.g., Castro Castro et al., 2017; Contreras & Cueto, 2008; Cueto, 1989; Deustua, 2017; López-Ocón Cabrera, 1995; Orlove, 1993; Seiner Lizárraga, 2003; Villacorta Ostolaza, 2012). Much of this work centers on the relations of state-sponsored scientific exploration to efforts by Peruvian political and economic elites to stimulate resource development (e.g., mining) and to forge a 'modern' territorial nation-state. However, the concrete practices (analytical procedures, representational techniques, etc.) that were employed to 'know' Peru's underground features and to attribute these with particular meanings – including as a domain of resource exploitation – remain underexplored, a lacuna I address in this paper.
The second is recent work from geographers and others on the political economies of subterranean Earth science (e.g., Braun, 2000; Bridge, 2013; Ferry, 2010, 2013a, 2013b; Frederiksen, 2013; Kneas, 2018; Marston, 2019; Mendez et al., 2020; Pérez & Melo Zurita, 2020; Simpson, 2019). Scholars have long recognized the scientific study of the Earth's interior to be entangled with political-economic agendas. On a basic level, this is seen in long histories of government support for institutions – e.g., mining academies, geological surveys – dedicated to generating and circulating knowledge of the Earth's interior (David & Wright, 1997; Laudan, 1987; Oldroyd, 1996). Recent critical work is notable for advancing a constitutive understanding of state-sponsored Earth science (e.g., Braun, 2000; Frederiksen, 2013). Rather than approaching the scientific study of the Earth as merely an instrument of statecraft – e.g., as a tool for facilitating commercial resource exploitation – this work considers such scientific activities to be integral to the complex and historically and geographically specific formative processes through which subterranean resources and nation-states "come to be" (Bridge, 2014, p. 119).
In probing the constitutive role of Raimondi's mineralogy in the making of resources and territory in Peru, I focus on two aspects of his scientific practices. The first is his use of a mix of representational techniques to construct Peruvian national territory as distinct from the territories of other nation-states due to the abundance and diversity of minerals contained in its subsurface. Said another way, Raimondi differentiates Peru in geo-political terms based on what he claims to be the unique 'richness' of its subsurface. The second is Raimondi's deployment of a specific repertoire of primarily laboratory-based analytical procedures – those of late-nineteenth-century chemical mineralogy – to render Peru's minerals legible to international audiences. Here, I highlight how Raimondi's mineralogy was undergirded not by a claim of national uniqueness, but rather by an assumption of ontological sameness – that is, by the idea that the minerals of Peru were ontologically equivalent to minerals anywhere else and were thus knowable through 'universal' scientific knowledge practices (i.e., those of 'modern' chemical mineralogy).
Both aspects of Raimondi's work – the geo-political differentiation of Peruvian national territory and the ontological dedifferentiation of the minerals contained therein – reflected an underlying political-economic aim: stimulating the 'rebirth' of Peruvian mining, an activity that Raimondi, like many of his contemporaries, considered to have been in a state of decline since Peru's Independence in the 1820s (Raimondi, 1873, 1878, 1902; see also Contreras, 1998; Himley, 2020). Yet, close analysis of Raimondi's mineral science reveals frictions between his practices for knowing and representing Peru's minerals and his claims regarding the unique richness of the country's subsurface. Here, I highlight ways that Raimondi's mineralogy was oriented more towards revealing mineral complexity and diversity than calculating abundance, and thus how his assertions regarding the unique mineral-resource 'potentiality' (Weszkalnys, 2015) of Peru were left largely unsubstantiated. The Peruvian underground, in other words, was not fully "rendered available to political and economic calculation" (Mitchell, 1988, p. 33) through Raimondi's mineralogical work. I nonetheless suggest that this work has played an influential role in the history of resource-making in Peru, in particular serving to consolidate an imaginary of national territory as mineral-rich and underexploited – an imaginary that has been recurrently mobilized to promote and naturalize the commercial exploitation of Peru's subsurface.
The next section places Raimondi's mineral collection and catalog – and Peru's exhibition at the 1878 World's Fair more broadly – in relation to a specific set of political-economic dynamics and anxieties in late-nineteenth-century Peru. The third section details the representational techniques Raimondi used to construct Peruvian territory as 'full' of minerals, while the following section focuses on his analytical procedures for rendering these minerals legible within international arenas. The penultimate section highlights ways Raimondi's mineralogy was limited in its utility for political-economic decision-making, while also underscoring the long-term historical importance of the territorial imaginary this work helped to consolidate. In conclusion, I reflect on the paper's broader significance, calling attention to the need for research on the political economies of Earth science to approach science as an historically and geographically situated practice, to attend to the multiple (e.g., calculative and symbolic) dimensions of scientific activities, and to be attentive to ways in which the logics and aims of Earth science may not fully intersect with those of capital and the state.
2. After guano: mining reborn?
As Timothy Mitchell notes, the world exhibitions of the second half of the nineteenth century – with their systematically classified and arranged collections of art, merchandise, natural specimens, and the like – encapsulated a specific kind of world-knowing, one that "set up the world as a picture … [ordering] it up before an audience as an object on display, to be viewed, experienced and investigated" (Mitchell, 1988, p. 6; see also Majluf, 1997). Mitchell further contends that this mode of world-knowing was closely linked to a project of political-economic change: objects displayed were meant to represent and promote "the conversion of the world to modern capitalist production and exchange" (Mitchell, 1988, p. 16). For the political-economic elite of a country, like Peru, on the periphery of the global capitalist economy, participation in world exhibitions, like the 1878 World's Fair, thus presented an opportunity. As Luis Felipe Villacorta Ostolaza (2007, p. 21) puts it, this was the opportunity to "engage [engancharse] in some way in the chain of progress linked to Europe's increasing industrialization," in particular by attracting capital to exploit natural resources on demand in Europe, by identifying advanced technologies for exploiting these resources, and by contracting individuals (professionals, workers, etc.) skilled in using these technologies (see also Quiñones Tinoco, 2007).
Such ideas indeed seem to have underlaid the decision by the Peruvian delegation to the 1878 World's Fair to reorganize Raimondi's mineral collection and prepare it for display. As Martinet (1880) recounts in his post-Fair report:
As for the products that Peru needed to present in order to directly favor its interests, while illustrating to the world its true economic situation and the immense natural riches contained in its fertile and almost virgin soil, it is easy to guess: these needed to be the products of the country's two main industries; the two industries to which labor, intelligence and capital should be preferentially dedicated; that is, the valuable products of the mining industry and the countless products of the agricultural industry. (p. 23–24)
Yet, while mining and agricultural products are here framed as the obvious choices to display Peru's 'true economic situation' and 'immense natural riches', these claims must be understood in relation to a specific set of political-economic dynamics. One was the end of the Peruvian guano boom. During the middle decades of the 1800s, Peru experienced an extraordinary period of wealth creation based on seabird excrement (guano) collected from coastal islands and exported, mainly to Europe, as fertilizer (Crabtree & Durand, 2017; Cushman, 2013). This had generated a spike in state revenues and contributed to what historian Jorge Basadre termed the era of prosperidad falaz (fallacious prosperity). By the 1870s, however, guano production was on the decline, and Peru's leaders were increasingly preoccupied with the need to diversify the economy and cultivate alternate streams of state revenue, a task made all the more pressing by the outsized foreign debt Peru had taken on during the era of guano (Crabtree & Durand, 2017). Gisa Weszkalnys (2015, p. 621) contends that "speculation about resource potential thrives at historical junctures characterized by the foreclosing of previous material possibilities." The decline of guano marked, for Peru, just such a juncture; this was fertile ground for invocations, like Martinet's, of the economic potential of the country's non-guano 'natural riches'.
Second was the general sense (noted above) that since Peru's Independence mining had been in decline, with potentially lucrative sites abandoned or underworked (Contreras, 1998). Raimondi himself was a purveyor of this idea. In an 1861 text, he avers: "Seeing the almost completely abandoned mining sites, it is impossible to believe that they were all exhausted at one time; and reflecting on this, we must believe that the governments that followed after [Independence] much neglected the field of mining" (Raimondi, 1902, p. 514).