Hernán Ramírez makes clear at the outset that he is not offering an economic interpretation of Chilean independence. The limited purpose of this study is rather to analyze the prolonged economic crisis which beset Chile from the last decades of the eighteenth century and the manner in which this crisis helped to prepare the climate for political separation.

In the eighteenth century the economy of colonial Chile had achieved a maturity and potential for expansion which were already becoming incompatible with continued subordination to imperial interests. By the last quarter of the century the colony’s productive capacity had clearly outrun the limits imposed by a narrow internal market, the restrictions of the imperial system, and the monopoly control over Chilean trade enjoyed by the merchant community of Lima. The result was a serious economic depression marked by overproduction, commercial stagnation, unemployment, an alarming imbalance of trade, and a shortage of currency. The more liberal imperial trade policies with which the metropolitan government experimented in this period were of little help, for the Chilean problem required Chilean solutions.

As the crisis deepened, a number of distinguished public men proposed specific remedies. The most common of their recommendations were those for free trade, diversification of production, and the opening of new foreign markets to Chilean exports, but these were concessions which the metropolitan government could not allow without setting precedents which would undermine the whole imperial system. Even when they entertained no separatist sympathies, Ramírez asserts, the authors of these informed and thoughtful proposals were in fact spokesmen for the necessity of independence. The gravity of the economic crisis and the impossibility of an imperial solution sharpened the alternatives in the public mind and helped to give the movement of 1810 a clearly separatist character.

This book is the reworking of an essay published by the author under the same title in 1959, a portion of which was reproduced in translation by R. A. Humphreys and John Lynch in The Origins of the Latin American Revolutions, 1808-1826. The revision in hand shows much additional research and a care in organization and documentation which the excellence of the basic scholarship deserves.