William Bollaert and his Geographical, Cartographic and Anthropological Descriptions about the Tarapacá Province at the Beginning Stage of Peru’s Republican Formation, 1827-1854

The Peruvian State relied on the scientific exploration to configure the national territory and to incorporate it to its control from the beginning of the XIXth Century. This nationalization of the territory was performed with maps and geographical studies mainly in charge of natural scientists, who allowed the ruling elite to draw up and legitimize the sovereignty aspiration, a process that had a singular expression in those areas considered to be outlying but rich in natural resources, such as the far away and southern Tarapacá province and its saltpeter deposits. In this context, we address the various expeditions performed by the english chemist William Bollaert between 1827 and 1854 in a political context of an independent and republican Peruvian nation for the purpose of verifying the connections among the need of the novel Peruvian state agency to know its national territory through a rationalized record, the scientific endeavors of Bollaert, and the dynamics of Tarapacá at that time conditioned by the formation process of the Nation-state.