This is a competently written and, in parts, highly interesting study of the economic development of Colombia from 1845, when the government began to adopt liberal policies, until the international economic crisis that arrested Colombian growth in 1930. As the outgrowth of a doctoral dissertation (M.I.T., 1965), the narrative is interspersed with a series of exercises in techniques of the “new economic history,” and thus is not a fully connected or comprehensive historical account. In the course of these analyses the author derives some new statistical data that may be useful to the general historian as well as to the model builder.
McGreevey first establishes the setting of Bourbon economic policies in the late colonial period, which continued with little modification during the early republican era after the former Viceroyalty of Nueva Granada achieved political independence. It was a period of slow internal change, little affected by outside events.
After 1845, with the accession of Liberals to power, Colombia entered the world network of trade and experienced a tobacco boom. In the name of agrarian reform, Liberal governments broke up many of the Indian reservations (resguardos) and established regional concentrations of large landholdings devoted to commercial tobacco and cattle production. However, the remoter regions remained almost untouched by these events. McGreevey considers that on the whole the polices initiated by the Liberal reformers were detrimental to Colombian development until about 1890. The expansion of free trade injured the domestic artisan class, the redistribution of land subjected the rural poor to the mercy of the landowning elite, a decentralized government was unable to maintain public order, and attacks on the Church contributed to seventy years of civil conflict. McGreevey conjectures that more appropriate policies for long-range development would have provided selective protection for urban artisans, preserved small landholdings in the fertile valleys, and placed less reliance on tobacco as a single export crop.
In the period from 1890 to 1930, Colombia achieved the transition from a subsistence to a commercial economy, and McGreevey describes this as a successful period of development in which three elements stand out: the cultivation of coffee by an army of small landholders and its emergence as Colombia’s major export product; the native initiative shown by a group of businessmen in the region of Antioquia; and the railways that opened the highlands of Antioquia and Caldas after 1885. Coffee exports supplied the engine of growth by affording ample investment funds and by distributing income widely enough to increase the general level of demand. On this base, the Antioquians were able to build.
A particularly stimulating section of the book is McGreevey’s review of the “myth of the Antioqueños,” as interpreted by a variety of investigators who have been fascinated by the peculiar role of this group in initiating industrial activity in Colombia—a phenomenon that has distinguished Antioquia as one of relatively few indigenous growth zones in Latin America. The problem is difficult to handle by the methods of the new economic history, and McGreevey concludes that no special psychological or cultural explanation is necessary; the Antioqueños, as well as some other Colombians, simply saw their opportunities and they took them! The subject will no doubt continue to elicit attention.
Throughout the book one is struck by the paucity of indigenous technological activity on the basis of which an integrated economic process might have taken place. McGreevey points out the key importance of the river steamboat in stimulating commercial tobacco production, barbed wire in facilitating cattle raising, and the railway in opening the coffee economy. These few cultural borrowings were of critical significance, yet even after the introduction of manufacturing, the technical resource base for economic expansion has remained so narrow that in the intervening four decades since the terminal data of McGreevey's study Colombia has not attained the “take-off.” This raises a question: In what sense can the growth period from 1890 to 1930 be called successful?
