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Agrarian Capitalism and Rural Labour: The Hacienda System in Central Chile, 1870–1920*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 August 2009

CLAUDIO ROBLES-ORTIZ
CLAUDIO ROBLES-ORTIZ
Affiliation:
Claudio Robles-Ortiz is Associate Professor in the Instituto de Ciencias Sociales atthe Universidad Austral de Chile in Valdivia. Email: claudeoaks@gmail.com
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Abstract

Using a variety of new sources directly pertaining to different types of rural estate, and contrary to interpretations of rural Chile as a traditional society unaffected by economic modernisation, this article analyses the transition of the hacienda system in central Chile towards agrarian capitalism during the period of export-led growth from the 1860s to 1930. It argues that the expansion of the ‘landowner enterprise’, along with developments in mechanisation and irrigation, resulted in the marginalisation of the precarious ‘peasant enterprises’ operated by tenants and the gradual proletarianisation of the agricultural workforce. The development of agrarian capitalism transformed the collective action of rural workers, which assumed modern forms such as strikes and unionisation, and thus became significant in national politics. The first wave of rural conflicts, which took place in the early 1920s, can therefore be understood as the response of the emerging rural working class to the agrarian expansion that Chile experienced as part of the process of capitalist modernisation.

Abstract

Usando una variedad de nuevas fuentes directamente relacionadas con diferentes tipos de propiedades agrícolas, y al contrario de interpretaciones de Chile rural como una sociedad tradicional que no fue transformada por la modernización económica, este artículo analiza la transición del sistema de hacienda de Chile central al capitalismo agrario durante el período de crecimiento exportador desde la década de 1860 a 1930. El trabajo argumenta que la expansión de la ‘empresa terrateniente’, junto con el desarrollo de la mecanización y el regadío, dieron como resultado la marginación de las precarias ‘empresas campesinas’ de los inqilinos y la gradual proletarización de la fuerza de trabajo agrícola. El desarrollo del capitalismo agrario transformó la acción colectiva de los trabajadores rurales, la cual asumió formas modernas como las huelgas y la sindicalización, y así alcanzó significación en la política nacional. La primera ola de conflictos rurales, que tuvo lugar a principios de los años 20, se puede entender por lo tanto como una respuesta de la emergente clase obrera rural a la expansión agraria que Chile experimentó como parte de su proceso de modernización capitalista.

Abstract

Utilizando uma gama de novas fontes diretamente relacionadas a diferentes tipos de propriedades rurais, contrário a visões do Chile rural como sociedade tradicional intocada pela modernização econômica, este artigo analisa a transição do sistema hacienda no Chile central em direção ao capitalismo agrário durante o período de crescimento baseado em exportações durante o período de 1860 a 1930. Argumenta que a expansão de empreendimentos dos proprietários rurais acompanhados de avanços na mecanização e em sistemas de irrigação levaram à marginalização de precários ‘empreendimentos camponeses’ realizados por inquilinos, e à gradual proletarização da mão-de-obra agricultora. O desenvolvimento do capitalismo agrário transformou a ação coletiva dos trabalhadores rurais. Greves e sindicalização estão dentre as formas modernas assumidas, ganhando importância, portanto, na política nacional. A primeira onda de conflitos rurais, ocorrida no começo da década de 1920, pode ser compreendida como resposta de uma classe trabalhadora rural emergente frente à expansão agrária vivida pelo Chile que passava pelo processo de modernização capitalista.

Keywords

Chileagrarian capitalismhacienda systemrural workersinquilinosArturo AlessandristrikesFOChChilecapitalismo agrariosistema de haciendatrabajadores ruralesinquilinosArturo AlessandrihuelgasFOChChilecapitalismo agráriosistema haciendatrabalhadores ruraisinquilinosArturo AlessandrigrevesFederación Obrera Chilena (FOCh)
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Latin American Studies , Volume 41 , Issue 3 , August 2009 , pp. 493 - 526
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2009

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References

1 The exception is the pioneering work by Carmen Cariola and Osvaldo Sunkel, Un siglo de historia económica de Chile, 1880–1930: Dos ensayos y una bibliografía (Madrid, 1982, and Santiago, 1991); for a comprehensive analysis of agrarian expansion in Chile in this period, see Claudio Robles-Ortiz, ‘Agrarian Capitalism in an Export Economy: Chilean Agriculture in the Nitrate Era, 1880–1930’, unpubl. PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 2002.

2 Arnold J. Bauer, Chilean Rural Society from the Spanish Conquest to 1930 (Cambridge, 1975), pp. 101–5; and ‘Chilean Rural Labor in the Nineteenth Century’, American Historical Review, vol. 76, no. 4 (1971), pp. 1076–82. Bauer drew his opinion about the lack of mechanisation from Hernández, Silvia, ‘Transformaciones tecnológicas en la agricultura de Chile central. Siglo XIX’, Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Socioeconómicos, no. 3 (1966), pp. 1–31.Google Scholar However, Hernández argued that official statistical sources were not suitable sources for estimating machinery imports or stocks, and she did not actually study the mechanisation associated with the export booms or its continuity after 1880.

3 Cristóbal Kay, ‘Comparative Development of the European Manorial System and the Latin American Hacienda System: An Approach to a Theory of Agrarian Change for Chile’, unpubl. PhD diss., University of Sussex, 1971; and El sistema señorial europeo y la hacienda latinoamericana (Mexico, 1980).

4 Kay, ‘Comparative Development’, pp. 92–135. For a summary of the arguments of both Bauer and Kay, see Arnold Bauer and Ann Hagerman Johnson, ‘Land and Labour in Rural Chile, 1850–1935’, in Kenneth Duncan and Ian Rutledge (eds.), Land and Labour in Latin America: Essays on the Development of Agrarian Capitalism in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Cambridge, 1977), pp. 83–102; and Cristóbal Kay, ‘The Development of the Hacienda System, 1850–1973’, in Duncan and Rutledge (eds.), Land and Labour, pp. 103–39.

5 Santana, Roberto, ‘Un cas de proletarianisation rurale: l'inquilino’, Cahiers du Monde Hispanique et Luso-Bresilien, no. 28 (1977), pp. 73–90CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Paysans dominés: Lutte sociale dans les campagnes chiliennes, 1920–1970 (Toulouse, 1980).

6 Gabriel Salazar, ‘Entrepreneurs and Peons in the Transition to Industrial Capitalism: Chile, 1820–78’, unpubl. PhD diss., University of Hull, 1984, pp. 243–5; and its Spanish-language version, Labradores, peones y proletarios: Formación y crisis de la sociedad popular chilena del siglo XIX (Santiago, 1985).

7 José Bengoa, Haciendas y campesinos: Historia social de la agricultura chilena, vol. 2 (Santiago, 1990).

8 Bauer himself noted these variations on both his own and Kay's interpretations in the works that Chilean scholars published in the 1980s; see Arnold J. Bauer, ‘Landlord and Campesino in the Chilean Road to Democracy’, in Evelyn Huber and Frank Safford (eds.), Agrarian Structure and Political Power: Landlord and Peasant in the Making of Latin America (Pittsburgh and London, 1995).

9 Brian Loveman, Struggle in the Countryside: Politics and Rural Labor in Chile, 1919–1973 (Bloomington, 1976); and Antecedentes para el estudio del movimiento campesino chileno: Pliegos de peticiones, huelgas y sindicatos agrícolas, 1932–1966 (Santiago, 1971).

10 Arnold Bauer refers to them as ‘some disturbances’ provoked by ‘the intrusions of urban labor leaders’ in the countryside, which, once these external agitators retreated, ‘remained essentially passive’ until the agrarian reform of the 1960s: see Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, p. 169. The same opinion is presented in José Bengoa, El poder y la subordinación: Historia social de la agricultura chilena, vol. 1 (Santiago, 1988).

11 Sergio Sepúlveda, El trigo chileno en el mercado mundial: Ensayo de geografía histórica (Santiago, 1959); Bauer, Arnold J., ‘Expansión económica en una sociedad tradicional: Chile central en el siglo XIX’, Historia, no. 9 (1970), pp. 137–235.Google Scholar

12 This process was first discussed in Bauer, Arnold J., ‘The Hacienda El Huique in the Agrarian Structure of Nineteenth-Century Chile’, Agricultural History, vol. 46, no. 4 (1972), pp. 455–70.Google Scholar

13 ‘La Hacienda Peñuelas de Arquén’, Boletín de la Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura (BSNA) (July 1877), p. 339.

14 Charles Lambert, Sweet Waters: A Chilean Farm (London, 1952), p. 12.

15 Juan Nepomuceno Espejo, ‘El trabajador rural’, Primer Congreso Libre de Agricultores (Santiago, 1875), pp. 141–2.

16 Antonio Yañez, ‘Estudio sobre el fundo de don Francisco Baeza’, unpubl. thesis, Instituto Agronómico, 1879.

17 Luis Correa Vergara, Agricultura chilena (Santiago, 1938), vol. 2, pp. 64–5; Lambert, Sweet Waters, p. 11. 40,000 acres is equivalent to approximately 16,000 hectares, 18,000 acres to approximately 7,200 hectares.

18 Julio Menadier, ‘La Hacienda de Viluco’, BSNA (April 1872), p. 209.

19 Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, De Valparaíso a Santiago (Leipzig, 1877).

20 Ibid., pp. 329–30; ‘La Hacienda de Cauquenes’, BSNA (June 1872), p. 302; Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, p. 182.

21 Julio Menadier, ‘El ferrocarril de Talcahuano a Chillán’, BSNA (Feb. 1872), pp. 183–5; see also John H. Whaley, ‘Transportation in Chile's Bío Bío Region’, unpubl. PhD Diss., Indiana University, 1974, pp. 124–6, and Robert Oppenheimer, ‘Chilean Transportation Development: The Railroad and Socio-Economic Change in the Central Valley, 1840–1885’, unpubl. PhD Diss., University of California, 1976.

22 BSNA (Feb. 1873), p. 176.

23 Espejo, ‘El trabajador rural’, p. 144.

24 Lauro Barros, Ensayo sobre la condición de las clases rurales en Chile. Memoria presentada al concurso de la Esposicion Internacional de 1875 (Santiago, 1875), pp. 18–21.

25 Rumbold, Horace, ‘Report … on the Progress and General Condition of Chile’, Parliamentary Papers (1876), LXXVI, p. 390.Google Scholar

26 Martín Drouilly and Pedro Lucio Cuadra, ‘Ensayo sobre el estado económico de la agricultura en Chile, redactado para el Congreso Agrícola de París’, BSNA (May 1878), p. 297.

27 One such estate was Hacienda Viluco, which in 1872 was equipped with ‘180 Howard & Grignon ploughs, two steam and two hydraulic engines, one Ransomes and three Pitts threshers, two winnowers, ten grain cleaners, a steam-powered mill, a tobacco chopper, a corn sheller, a Buckley steam-powered saw mill, five Governor & Buckley reapers’, and a number of tilling implements. In his report on this estate Julio Menadier also noted that ‘the large machinery shops draw attention not only because of their order, symmetry, and good organisation, but also for the smart arrangement of the steam engines, which can power all the machinery’: Menadier, ‘Hacienda Viluco’, p. 209.

28 ‘Las propiedades rústicas de Chile’, BSNA (June 1875), p. 412.

29 ‘Del trabajo de las máquinas de trillar y otros datos de una cosecha’, BSNA (March 1872), pp. 25–61.

30 Agricultural machinery imports were recorded from 1841 in the Estadística Comercial, but after 1889 this source ceased recording the number of machines, maintaining a record only of their value.

31 Frank von Motz, Markets for Agricultural Implements and Machinery in Chile and Peru (US Department of Commerce, Special Agents Series no. 142, Washington, 1917), pp. 34–5.

32 Victoria Tagle, Tasación de la Hacienda Antivero (Santiago, 1920), pp. 4–5.

33 Espínola, José M., ‘Hacienda La Esmeralda’, La Agricultura Práctica (1916), pp. 847–8.Google Scholar

34 Raúl Ramírez, Monografía del fundo San Francisco (Santiago, 1932), pp. 35–7.

35 Ibid., p. 37.

36 Alfonso Acuña, Monografía cultural y económica del fundo San Luis (Santiago, 1932), pp. 12–16.

37 Calculated by the author with data from Sinopsis geográfico-estadística de la República de Chile (Santiago, 1933).

38 There was a great variation in the average number of tareas a worker did, but usually a cuadra (roughly 3 acres) was divided into 10 tareas, which to Opazo demonstrated ‘the slowness at which the work was done when following this procedure’. Roberto Opazo, ‘Cosecha de cereales’, El Agricultor (Jan. 1916), p. 7.

39 Anuario Estadístico, 1909, p. 330; Opazo, ‘Cosecha’, p. 8; Von Motz, Markets, pp. 31, 34.

40 Carlos González, ‘Los inquilinos de El Peumo’, BSNA (1875), pp. 306–10.

41 At San Ricardo, a 267-hectare fundo in the province of O'Higgins, some 100 kilometres to the south of Santiago, each of the six inquilinos was given a ración of three tareas; see J. de la Rivera, Informe pericial y tasación del fundo San Ricardo (Santiago, 1925), pp. 5–6. A case where inquilinos were paid a nominal ration was Fundo San Javier, in Isla de Maipo, very close to Santiago, to the south. The fundo had 540 hectares, and employed ten peones forasteros and only three inquilinos. The latter, however, were not given land to cultivate ‘because, the property's exploiter [sic] considers that they devote too much time to the tending of their chacras, and thus he prefers to assign them 1/4 cuadra of nominal land which at the end of the year accrues them $250 in cash or in beans, maize, etc.’ Oscar Besoaín, Tasación del Fundo San Javier (Santiago, 1929), p. 5.

42 Guillermo González, Tasación del Fundo Cocauquén (Santiago, 1920), pp. 2–7.

43 Espínola, ‘Hacienda Esmeralda’, p. 858.

44 Angel Arrigorriaga, Informe y tasación de la Hijuela Segunda de Comalle (Santiago, 1923), pp. 4–5; Osvaldo Fuentes, Informe y tasación de la Hacienda Quivolgo (Santiago, 1923), pp. 11–17.

45 Bengoa, Haciendas y campesinos, pp. 122–5.

46 Claudio Gay, Agricultura chilena (Santiago, 1973), vol. 2, pp. 182–3. This is the facsimile edition of the volumes on agriculture in Claudio Gay, Historia física y política de Chile según documentos adquiridos en esta República durante doce años de residencia en ella y publicada bajo los auspicios del Supremo Gobierno (Paris and Santiago, 1844–71), 28 vols. and atlas.

47 Ramón Domínguez, Nuestro sistema de inquilinaje (Santiago, 1867).

48 Santiago Prado, ‘El inquilinaje en el Departamento de Caupolicán’, BSNA (Nov. 1871), pp. 391–5.

49 Félix Echeverría, ‘Las máquinas y el trabajador agrícola’, BSNA (Aug. 1871), pp. 305–7.

50 Rumbold, ‘Report’, pp. 388–90.

51 Ibid., p. 390.

52 Ibid., p. 390.

53 Bauer, Chilean Rural Society, p. 132.

54 Bengoa, José, ‘Una hacienda a fines de siglo: Las Casas de Quilpué’, Proposiciones, no. 19 (1990), pp. 157, 163, 168–70.Google Scholar

55 Alberto Castillo, Informe pericial y tasación del fundo Flor del Llano (Santiago, 1925), pp. 3–12.

56 Chile, Dirección de Estadística, Censo de Agricultura, 1935–36 (Santiago, 1938), pp. 683–704. The decrease of the inquilinos' share of the workforce was also recorded in the 1920 Censo de Población: see Ann Johnson, ‘Internal Migration in Chile to 1920: Its Relationship to the Labor Market, Agricultural Growth and Urbanization’, unpubl. PhD diss., University of California at Davis, 1978, pp. 241–3.

57 Loveman, Struggle in the Counryside, pp. 134–41.

58 John Walton, Western Times and Water Wars: State, Culture, and Rebellion in California (Berkeley, 1992), p. 332.

59 This was first studied in Arthur Lawrence Stickell Jr., ‘Migration and Mining Labor in Northern Chile in the Nitrate Era, 1880–1930’, unpubl. PhD diss., Indiana University, 1979; see also Julio Pinto, ‘Donde se alberga la revolución: La crisis salitrera y la propagación del socialismo obrero’, Contribuciones Científicas y Tecnológicas, no. 122, pp. 115–56.

60 Loveman, Struggle in the Countryside, pp. 39, 139.

61 James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven, 1985).

62 El Mercurio, 3–16 Feb. 1921.

63 James Petras and Hugo Zemelman, Peasants in Revolt: A Chilean Case Study, 1965–1971 (Austin and London, 1972), p. 107.

64 La Federación Obrera, 7 Nov. 1921.

65 See Oficina del Trabajo (OT), vol. 67, Comunicaciones enviadas, Oficio n. 64, 1921; idem, notas 123, 376, 1107; Inspector Regional to Labour Office (Concepción), OT Comunicaciones recibidas, vol. 74; telegrama 8/8, Labour Inspector to Labour Office (Valparaíso), OT Comunicaciones recibidas, vol. 80; El Mercurio, 16–19 Aug. 1921; 16 Sept. 1921; 26 Sept. 1921; 27 Jan. 1922; 4 May 1922; OT Telegramas, Director Claudio Arteaga to Labour Inspector, 2 Feb. 1922.

66 Loveman, Struggle in the Countryside, pp. 134–41.

67 Loveman, Struggle in the Countryside, p. 139.

68 República de Chile, Ministerio de Fomento, Departamento de Agricultura, Estudio sobre el estado de la agricultura chilena (Santiago, 1929).