Germán Colmenares (1938-1990)

On March 27, 1990, Germán Colmenares died in Cali, Colombia, cut down by cancer while still in his early fifties. His too-brief life was one of extraordinary accomplishment. A man of considerable intellect, he combined in his scholarship historical imagination, analytical penetration, and a taste and capacity for generalization. He was among the first Colombian historians to use quantitative methods. But he was throughout his life a person engaged by ideas, and in his mature work the quantities and other data were always deployed in the service of sophisticated understandings. To a very great degree, he shaped our vision of the economic and social history of Colombia’s colonial period, in studies ranging from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries and focusing upon western Colombia as well as the eastern cordillera.

His first major work, an imaginative social analysis of Colombian politics in the middle of the nineteenth century, apparently was first drafted as a thesis for his law degree at Bogotá’s Colegio del Rosario when he was only twenty-two. Reworked in 1963 in France under a grant from the French government, it subsequently appeared as Partidos políticos y clases sociales (1968). This book, influenced by Georg Lukacs’s analysis of class consciousness, was an early manifestation of Colmenares’s orientation toward intellectual currents emanating from continental Europe.

After his law degree, Colmenares studied in the history seminar of Jaime Jaramillo Uribe at the Universidad Nacional, where he and his fellow students, the first corps of modern academic historians in Colombia, were introduced to the work of Fernand Braudel and the Annales school. French influences were further reinforced during a period of study with Rolando Mellafe, Álvaro Jara, and Eduardo Miranda in Chile, from which resulted Colmenares’s Haciendas de los jesuitas en el Nuevo Reino de Granada: siglo xviii (1969).

After his return from Chile, Colmenares began a cycle of investigations into the impact of Spanish rule on the indigenous population in Colombia’s eastern cordillera, with the works of Woodrow Borah and Charles Gibson now as evident guides. Beginning in 1967 he headed a research team at the Universidad de los Andes (including Margarita González and Darío Fajardo), which published archival documents (Fuentes coloniales para la historia del trabajo en Colombia [1968]) and a series of monographs on Indian demography and colonial systems of exploitation in the eastern cordillera. Colmenares himself wrote two of these monographs—Encomienda y población en la provincia de Pamplona (1549-1650) (1969) and La provincia de Tunja en el Nuevo Reino de Granada: ensayo de historia social 1539-1800 (1970). These investigations, along with further research in Seville (1970-71), provided the material for his doctorate at the Sorbonne, which in 1972-73 Colmenares elaborated into an important synthesis of the social and economic history of the colonial era, with particular reference to the eastern cordillera: Historia económica y social de Colombia, 1573–1719 (1973).

After his return from Paris, Colmenares, unable to obtain an appropriate academic position in Bogotá, migrated to the Universidad del Valle in Cali. Bogotá’s rejection of Colmenares proved fortuitous for the development of Colombian history and probably also for Colmenares himself, for he found a new field for research, previously neglected by modern Colombian historians, in the Cauca Valley. Two salient products of his Cauca years were his Historia económica y social de Colombia, Tomo II— Popayán: una sociedad esclavista, 1680–1800 (1979) and Cali: terratenientes, mineros y comerciantes—siglo xviii (1980). As the subtitles indicate, these works focus on different themes from those of his earlier studies of the eastern cordillera—now no longer the Indian population but rather mining, slavery, land, and commerce, themes appropriate to the different conformation of western Colombia. These books greatly clarified our picture of the Cauca’s economic structure, and some of its social features, in the colonial period.

Colmenares’s establishment in Cali not only prompted a change of regional focus in his own work. His presence in itself drew attention to the region and to the Universidad del Valle. In this and other ways he played an important part in the emergence at the Universidad del Valle of a community of historians and other social scientists engaged in the study of the region. His interest in the history of the Cauca and his concern for encouraging other scholars found expression in several collaborative works—first the five-volume Sociedad y economía en el Valle del Cauca (1983), treating aspects of the history of the Valle from the eighteenth century to 1980, and then La independencia: ensayos de historia social (1986). Throughout the Cali years Colmenares also contributed a number of synthetic essays on colonial society to collaborative histories of Colombia, most notably the three-volume Manual de historia de Colombia edited by Jaime Jaramillo Uribe (1978-80).

Toward the end of 1989 Colmenares was planning to return to Bogotá as dean of humanities at the Universidad de los Andes. Virtually at the moment of his intended departure, however, his cancer was discovered, in an advanced stage. He stayed in Cali, where he continued to work until his death.

Germán Colmenares as a person is deftly sketched in a brief memoir by Jorge Orlando Melo, his friend and colleague of more than thirty years.¹ Early in their long relationship, Melo says, he learned to appreciate Colmenares’s “moral and intellectual intransigence, his loyalty to his friends, his at times aggressive disdain of mediocrity, his surprising capacity for work, his capacity to see new problems and pose new questions” and to tolerate “his occasional pedantry, his display of erudition, and the vanity for his intellectual successes.” Colmenares, as Melo notes, wielded an ironic and mordant wit. As a counterpart one should also mention the warmth that Colmenares revealed as a fond husband and father and as a friend—a warmth surprising to those who knew him as a slightly edgy youth but which came more and more to the fore in his maturity.