This book is a study of land tenure changes in the Department of Cochabamba, Bolivia, from the sixteenth century to the 1950s. It focuses on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the colonial haciendas that had developed to supply the Potosí market were gradually broken up and sold off, transforming the land tenure system from one of large estates to one of independent peasant cultivators. How this occurred is of great interest, because the process preceded rather than followed the political revolution in Bolivia.
Robert Jackson uses notarial records, tributary lists, and cadastral surveys to trace the fragmentation of the colonial haciendas in detail, showing that it resulted partly from subdividing larger estates among heirs and partly from selling off portions of estates both to individuals of moderate wealth and to peasant cultivators. At the same time, he shows that Indian community lands, which in the altiplano region were purchased primarily by large landowners, were sold mostly to peasant cultivators in Cochabamba. As a result, the number of individual private landholdings in the department grew from slightly over 1,000 in the 1840s to about 45,000 in 1912. Jackson attributes this result primarily to liberal free trade policies and to the building of railroads from the Pacific coast into the highlands, which left inefficient Cochabamba hacendados unable to compete in their traditional markets, forcing them into debt and ultimately into selling off their estates.
Jackson is less successful in his attempt to disprove Brooke Larson’s hypothesis that fundamental agrarian changes occurred during the eighteenth century. Larson’s Colonialism and Agrarian Transformation in Bolivia: Cochabamba, 1550-1900 (1988) showed that Indian migration and the decline of Potosí led to the development of a class of forastero and mestizo small farmers, who lived on the haciendas or in Indian communities and sold agricultural produce in competition with the hacendados. While the “external” competition Jackson emphasizes clearly contributed to the problems that forced Cochabamba hacendados to sell their land, it does not explain why local peasant farmers were able to buy it; and ultimately, it is the existence of a peasantry with the resources to buy land that distinguishes Cochabamba from most other hacienda regions in Latin America.
The most relevant comparison is with the Mexican Bajío, where David Brading has shown that a local peasantry also arose to compete with the haciendas, and where similar tendencies toward the fragmentation of haciendas were evident in the nineteenth century, though here the revival of the Mexican economy in the last quarter of the century delayed the conclusion of the process until after the 1910 revolution. The changes Jackson describes thus represent the logical outgrowth of those described by Larson, rather than contradicting them; but in analyzing these changes, Jackson has made an important contribution to the study of Latin American agrarian systems.
