The military government that seized power in Chile (1973–89), bringing to a brutal end Salvador Allende's experiment with democratic socialism, is well known for having engineered one of the first and most thoroughgoing free market economic transitions on the South American continent. While the economic consequences of this process of economic reorientation have been much discussed, the political implications it had are decidedly more opaque. It is the central thesis of this book that these political effects were indeed profound, but in equal measure they were socially heterogeneous.

Indeed, the implementation of national level neoliberal policies in rural Chile meant nothing less than the establishment of agrarian capitalism in a sector of the economy where it had not before existed, and was in any event well along in the transition from traditional landlordism to cooperative socialism. This post-1973 free market “great transformation” in agriculture thus not only redefined prevailing patterns of economic activity, but also the building blocks of rural social structure. The contrast with the urban effects of liberalization is stark. In the cities economic reform meant principally the freeing of long extant and comparatively well-functioning markets. By contrast, in the countryside the foundations of a market economy – individual and alienable property rights, free labor contracting, and free price setting – had to be built largely from scratch.