Mendiburu, Manuel de (1805–1885)

Born in Lima on January 21, 1805, Manuel de Mendiburu is considered Peru's foremost historian of the early republic and the forerunner to Jorge Basadre. He was in fact a man of many careers—diplomat, government minister, and military officer. Mendiburu was involved in the highest levels of government for most of his adult life. No doubt the apex of his political accomplishments came when, at the height of his political influence as the prefect of Tacna, he vigorously opposed the Peru-Bolivia Confederation of Andrés Santa Cruz (1829–1836). He briefly was minister of finance and war in the early years of Ramón Castilla's presidency and later was president of the council of state. He served the government of José Rufino Echenique as minister of finance and then as ambassador to London while the government was negotiating a settlement of the external debt. For the first five months of the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), he served as minister of war. Between these assignments he compiled the invaluable Diccionario histórico-biográfico del Perú (8 vols., 1874), a descriptive catalog of colonial Peruvian public figures with heavy emphasis on the sixteenth century. He wrote many other studies, numbers of them unpublished, focusing primarily on diplomatic events of his own era.

See alsoBasadre, Jorge; War of the Pacific.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anna, Timothy E. The Fall of the Royal Government in Peru. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

Basadre, Jorge. Historia de la República del Perú, 1822–1933, 7th edition, rev. and enl. Lima: Editorial Universitaria, 1983.

Denegri Luna, Félix. Manuel de Mendiburu, prefecto en Tacna, 1839–1842. Tacna, Peru: Ediciones de la Casa de la Cultura de Tacna, 1965.

Gootenberg, Paul. Imagining Development: Economic Ideas in Peru's "Fictitious Prosperity" of Guano, 1840–1880. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

Riva Agüero, José de la. La historia en el Perú: Tesis para el doctorado en letras, 2nd edition. Madrid: Imprenta y Editorial Maestre, 1952.

                                  Vincent Peloso