This book makes a valuable contribution to the study of Colombia’s nineteenth- and twentieth-century economic history. The authors use quantitative sources to test some of the hypotheses and speculative observations in the economic historiography that greatly depend on qualitative sources. Ocampo and Montenegro have not unearthed new materials. They rely heavily on official publications and the like, but they do make new use of them. If the results are not always as revisionist as they claim, there is much here that repays close reading and much, too, that suggests valuable research yet to be done.
The book opens with an essay by Ocampo on the Colombian economy in the 1930s (which had already appeared in English). It presents a particularly optimistic view of economic performance, an interpretation sustained in the second chapter, which addresses the impact of the world crisis, and is co-authored by Ocampo and Montenegro. In many respects, the second chapter is an enlargement of the first. It is extremely useful to have a lucid analysis of such themes as the behavior of relative prices as determinants of industrial development. Yet I have some reservations about the optimism shown with regard to growth performance. To take but one example, the co-authors stress the expansion of production and consumption of beer as evidence of manufacturing growth. They do not take into account the scale and significance of the illicit distilleries that the breweries gradually displaced. How serious are the distortions brought about by stressing the advanced factory sector in manufacturing (which appears clearly in the official statistics), while attaching less significance to more backward units? The third chapter, by Montenegro, which carefully traces the evolution of the textile sector from 1900 to 1945, contains, among other interesting observations, a stimulating contribution (p. 192) to the debate initiated by ECLA-CEPAL over whether the 1930s was a decade in which idle industrial capacity installed in the 1920s was utilized or one in which new capacity was established. Subsequent chapters raise themes of trade policy (in particular, exploring how far tariffs were used as a protectionist device and how far as revenue-raising instruments). But perhaps the most provocative is the last, in which Ocampo considers the economic development of Cali in the twentieth century.
The book’s impact is twofold. The reader is grateful for the caution with which the authors have analyzed the available quantitative data, challenged orthodoxies, and clarified complex problems. Yet the reader is reminded, too, of the vast lacunas in the study of the subject. The history of Cali has yet to receive a fraction of the attention dedicated to the history of São Paulo, while the history of sugar cane in the Valle del Cauca—the subject of valuable short studies by Michael Taussig and Rolf Knight—has not received the comprehensive treatment bestowed on it for Cuba and Puerto Rico. The history of food—production and distribution—and nutrition merits more attention, as does the impact of the Great Depression and new institutions (mortgage banks, for instance) on the housing sector.