The subject of this book is very important. In several Latin American countries nineteenth-century liberals attempted to eliminate corporate forms of property that they considered inimical to economic and political development. Legislators wanted to promote economic growth by expanding the land market. Some also wanted to create a class of individual small farmers capable of underpinning democratic states.
A few years ago it was commonly believed that these laws had encouraged the rapid and massive transfer of land from the Catholic Church and poor peasants to wealthy estate owners. Some historians also argued that liberals deliberately sought such transfers, and Indian peasants invariably opposed the laws. Only a few historians, most notably Jan Bazant and Charles Berry, began doing the kind of detailed research on property transfers that is needed to actually assess the impact of these measures. The volume at hand presents case studies of the development of liberal land policy and its practical implementation in Mesoamerica and the Andes. The essays published here vary widely in focus and quality.
Robert Knowlton provides a short piece on real estate transactions in mid-nineteenth-century Jalisco. Although he discusses several different kinds of transactions, the essay is most effective as a call for further research.
Dawn Fogle Deaton contributes a lengthier essay on peasant rebellion in the same state from 1855 to 1864. She argues that although peasant protest intensified in the period immediately after the passage of Mexico’s first national law disentailing peasant community lands, peasants were not rebelling against the division of their property. Rebellions instead had complex causes, and some groups of rebels even demanded that the disentailment law be implemented. The article offers a useful corrective to common assumptions about peasant resistance to the division of community lands.
Michael Ducey’s study of the implementation of liberal land policy in northern Veracruz is one of the best articles in the volume. It also comes closest to the promise of providing a detailed, local case study of how land tenure actually changed in response to legislation. The surprise here is that peasant communities “frustrated and transformed liberal laws in practice,” (p. 66) even reconstituting forms of collective land tenure. Indigenous control of the land was not lost until much later in the century, when Indian peasants were no longer as politically important.
Hubert Miller’s essay on liberalism and religious property in Guatemala is much less satisfying. The article adequately explains liberal legislation but does not delve into its application.
Nils Jacobsen’s “Liberalism and Indian Communities in Peru, 1821-1920,” is the volume’s most penetrating and wide-ranging piece. Jacobsen adroitly combines analysis of liberal laws and philosophy with effective explanation of how liberal initiatives were appropriated by diverse groups in distinct Peruvian regions. Jacobsen makes two convincing arguments. First, despite the importance of legislation about Indian communities, changes in structural socioeconomic conditions had more impact on communities. Second, liberalism offered both dangers and opportunities for indigenous peasants. Where communities were weak, liberalism made them weaker, sometimes to the point of extinction. Where communities were strong, “liberalism was instrumental in creating communities of peasant freeholders” (p. 160).
Erick Langer and Robert Jackson’s article on Bolivia covers both the Catholic Church and Indian peasant communities. They argue that Antonio José de Sucre was so successful in eliminating the wealth of the regular orders immediately after independence that later governments even encouraged missionary activity on the frontier. Bolivia’s governments did not attempt to divide Indian community lands until the 1860s. Peasants’ severe reaction to this attempt delayed disentailment for another decade. This brief article is useful, but more details on specific laws and political developments could have considerably improved it.
The book’s final essay is Robert Jackson’s study of changing land tenure patterns in two regions of Bolivia, Arque and Vacas, where the division of community lands did not lead to the expansion or formation of haciendas. This article is the only quantitative piece in the volume.
Although the importance of the essays varies, the overall lesson of this volume seems clear. Most of what we assumed we knew even ten years ago about the impact of liberal land policy is not being confirmed by recent archival research. However, this research will not necessarily lead us to new, more effective generalizations.
