In the history of Chile, the role of nitrates has long been accepted as a factor of crucial significance, and the literature on it is truly enormous. This is not surprising: nitrates, then largely Peruvian and Bolivian (in terms of territorial location, though not of control), were, perhaps, the central issue in the War of the Pacific; they came to dominate the economic life of Chile from, roughly, 1880 to 1920; the revenues derived from them and their disposition were a critical issue in the Revolution of 1891, seen by most historians as a real watershed in the country’s evolution; and the manner and consequences of their exploitation have been a subject of continuous debate for almost a century. The raw material for investigation of the commodity seems to the researcher inexhaustible, and much of it still remains untapped, while the implications of its importance for the political, economic, social, and international history of Chile, ranging from the growth of the Chilean labor movement and its political expressions to its use as a “classic model” of dependency theory, continue to exercise a distinctive fascination. Recent years have seen a fair number of doctoral theses on both sides of the Atlantic on these themes, and a number of them have been turned into books. The latest, by Thomas O’Brien, must be regarded as a very significant contribution.
The book’s merits are easily defined. The author is the first historian to demonstrate, rather than hint at, what actually happened to Chilean interests in Peruvian nitrates in the 1870s, and he shows that, contrary to accepted opinion, they were already reduced to virtual nullity before the War of the Pacific. This research has obvious implications for the Chilean interpretations of such writers as the Marxist Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Aníbal Pinto, and for dependentista writers, such as André Gunder Frank, who have argued that a large Chilean stake (possibly the basis for a Chilean national industry) was destroyed by the collusion of Chilean decisionmakers and European capitalists after the War of the Pacific. Second, in a fascinating chapter (6), he shows, through the biographies of a number of Chilean entrepreneurs, how nitrate wealth acted as a motor of the Chilean economy, and how their investments operated: this biographical approach is one that I have long believed to be a crucial methodological key for unlocking doors to the understanding of a country which, much more than most, can really only be understood in terms of patronal and familial relationships in the elite. Third, while building on previous research, the author offers fresh material and new insights on the controversial regime of José Manuel Balmaceda (1886-91), whose regime ended in civil war and Balmaceda’s suicide. “The destruction of Balmaceda’s regime,” he says (p. 128), did not result primarily from radically new economic policies or personal idiosyncracies of the president. It was, rather, the product of the new role thrust upon the state during the Nitrate Age. That role was how to maximize the benefits of massive new income from nitrates for the national benefit, and that brought into play not only the growth of the government’s role in running the national economy, but also its relationship with the foreign factors of production dominating the nitrate industry and trade, and its relationship with the domestic oligarchy in its political, economic, and social ambiente. As he puts it, “the state became a crucial economic power base from which elite factions and foreign investors sought to benefit” (p. 143).
This is, undoubtedly, correct; but what, in effect, is the state? How does it differ from government, and what influence does the personality of governors exercise on its definition? In Balmaceda’s case, pace O’Brien, personality seems to me to have been a critical factor.
His work, however, based on considerable archival research, and a thorough knowledge of secondary sources, is a well-constructed and literate argument. The caliche (“raw material”) has been well-refined, and it should fertilize fresh debate on a central theme of Chilean history. Its conclusion (pp. 147-155), on Chilean experience with nitrates as part of the dependency debate, simply underlines the necessity for scholars to produce empirical studies as good as this one, to enlighten them, and those less objective, on what past experience can teach, if we are willing to learn from it.