Year: 1996
Type: article
Abstract: tural crisis of the late colonial period (when social and racial unrest, coupled with the commercial dislocation caused by Upper Peru's separation from the old viceroyalty and the independence wars, put a brake on the expansion of estates at the expense of communities).The second is the rising international demand for wool from the 1850S on (which provoked some semicapitalist development, characterized by the more rigorous appropriation of Indian land and labor by Hispanized landowners and officials).Third is the post-World War I commercial and social crisis, sparked by the collapse of international wool prices and characterized by the decline of sheepraising estates and the rise of rural unrest.The unrest, in tum, although particularly serious in the 1920S, unleashed conflicts that would remain unresolved until the post-1968 agrarian reform.At one level, this monograph makes a major contribution to the debate, particularly fashionable in the 1980s, about the relationship between the existence of "feudal" estates and underdevelopment: it shows that in Azangaro, clientelism, paternalism, and other "colonial" vestiges not only survived independence but intensified during the late nineteenth-century period of relative prosperity.The relationships between landowners and dispossessed community dwellers, however, which often stemmed from a variety of leasehold arrangements, were more subtle and complex than simplistic models often suggest.Moreover, kinship networks could be more important than communities for the collective defense of Indian rights.Readers looking for a simple, all-embracing conclusion might be disappointed by this rich, detailed analysis, which tends to qualify and elaborate its arguments rather than reduce them to easily digestible pieces.Its essential finding is that the creeping introduction of market forces, instead of transforming older social relationships, tended to reinforce them, primarily because the particular economic features of Azangaro restricted and qualified the province's transition to capitalism.The extent to which this northern altiplano experience was typical of Peru as a whole, let alone other parts of Spanish America, is not explored in any depth.What is certain is that this particular study is essential reading for any serious student of Andean social and economic history of the last two hundred years.
Authors: Olivia Harris, Maria L. Lagos
Institutions: University of London, Goldsmiths University of London
Language: English
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W2172205609