During the last 20 years, there has been an expansion of our knowledge of Colombia’s economic history. The editor has called on five well-known historians to provide a synthesis of new research for the benefit of Colombian university students. Organized chronologically, the seven chapters also offer a variety of personal and methodological approaches, discussion of debatable issues, and many indications of fruitful areas for study.
In his examination of the formation of the colonial economy from 1500 to 1740, Germán Colmenares emphasizes the concept of different orders of magnitude and space and the importance of social relations, arguing that economic privileges were derived from political and patrimonial status, not vice versa. Since colonial people acted on very different suppositions, he is wary of applying modern economic analysis to colonial realities.
In a more descriptive chapter, Jaime Jaramillo Uribe argues that while gold was the motor of the economy from 1740 to 1810, the hacienda was the fundamental structure of society. His sensitivity to regional variation enables him to portray internal trade as being much more active than is usually assumed. He is perhaps most successful in indicating areas for investigation, such as measurement of the impact of the Bourbon reforms.
The slow disengagement from the colonial past from 1810 to 1850 is explained by Hermes Tovar Pinzón as a prolonged debate between those who sought to reconstruct the colonial bases of the economy and those who saw free enterprise and exports as the axes of national development. He stresses that until 1850 both options were possible, but he is less clear about why the latter was chosen.
The theme of colonization is astutely assessed in its multifaceted dimensions in Jorge Orlando Melo’s well-balanced essay on the vicissitudes of the liberal model, 1850 to 1899. An awareness of the dynamic aspects of population, settlement, and domestic production is essential to understanding both this period and later development. Because the agrarian frontier was never closed, he concludes that mobility and a number of alternatives were possible for rural people, thus clarifying the paradox of concentration of land in a few hands and the simultaneous expansion of small holdings. Melo correctly states that our knowledge of peasant economies, especially during the Regeneración, is minimal and yet fundamental to explaining later rural violence.
Coffee provided the nucleus of expansion for the internal market from 1900 to 1928, according to Jesús Bejarano, yet little is known about the financing of early industrialization. In the last two chapters, José Antonio Ocampo and his Fedesarrollo research group have done a fine job of delineating the mechanisms of state intervention in the period since the depression, when, Ocampo argues, a new conception of the state as the regulator of the economy and society evolved. They are less successful in explaining the failure of many policies and may lean too heavily on a faith in the power of the state. This volume will be of use to specialists and nonspecialists, since it clearly illustrates the basic issues in Colombian economic history and is an accurate reflection of the state of the field.
