Cosechar para el mundo, pastar para la region: Una historia de globalización en los Montes de María (1850-1914) By Santiago Colmenares Guerra, Bogotá: Banco de la República and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia. 2023. pp. 366. ISBN: 9789585051645

Abstract

In Harvest for the World, Graze for the Region: A History of Globalization in the Montes de María (1850-1914) (my translation), Santiago Colmenares explores a fascinating Colombian counterpoint of tobacco and cattle in a low-lying chain of mountains that bisects the country's Caribbean plains. The book is a major contribution to the agrarian history of this region. For a long time, the history of Colombian tobacco production focused on Ambalema, in the centre of the country (Harrison, 1952; Ocampo, 1984). It was from here that tobacco exports, freed from state monopoly in the late 1840s, reconnected Colombia with an expanding North Atlantic economy and fanned the flames of liberalism. For all the importance of Ambalema, however, the Montes de María produced more tobacco over a longer period. Building on the work of Viloria (1999) and Blanco (2011), Colmenares examines the production and commercialization of tobacco in this region with empirical rigour and theoretical sophistication. Two sets of literature frame his study: the classic agrarian question regarding the resilience of the peasantry and the interest of the new economic history in quantitative studies and income distribution. By highlighting the importance of credit rather than just land, processes of social differentiation and locating the expansion of ranching within an economic-cum-ecological crisis, Colmenares enriches our understanding of commodity production and inequality in Colombia's Caribbean region.

Cosechar para el mundo, pastar para la region has five chapters plus an introduction and a short conclusion. Specialists in Latin American agrarian history will find Chapters Two through Five, which tackle the subjects of credit, the social relations of production, the distribution of income along the tobacco commodity chain and the expansion of ranching, of particular interest. I will address the findings of these chapters below. The first chapter, which situates the tobacco zone of the Montes de María within a global context, has a broader appeal.

Colmenares' global perspective is innovative, for few if any agrarian histories of Colombia seriously attempt to look beyond the borders of the nation. However, his approach is rooted more in comparative than global history. There were four main producers of medium- to low-quality, dark leaf tobacco for the German market, where it was used to produce cheap cigars: the Montes de María and Ambalema (Colombia), Cibao (Dominican Republic) and Recôncavo (northeastern Brazil). While a relatively independent peasantry cultivated tobacco in the Montes de María and Cibao, in Ambalema it was grown by sharecroppers. In Recôncavo, marginal sugar estates ceded terrain to a growing landowning peasantry. By comparing these regions, Colmenares demonstrates that tobacco exports could occur under a variety of conditions. Nonetheless, tobacco cultivation was most onerous for the sharecroppers of Ambalema. In addition to owing rent (although it was only about 10% of the harvest), sharecroppers had to sell their harvest to their landlords, who paid them about 10% less than the export merchants of other regions. More significantly, as the international price of tobacco fell, Ambalema landlords did not lower their margins, as export merchants were willing to do, leading to the collapse of Ambalema's tobacco industry. Colmenares blames an inflexible landed elite (in the sphere of circulation), rather than the falling quality of Ambalema tobacco, which is how the short-lived export boom is typically explained. Yet rather than characterize their decision as irrational, he suggests that the option to convert tobacco fields into pastures made them less dependent on export markets. In other words, as the price of tobacco fell, ranching became the more profitable alternative (cf. Van Ausdal, 2020).

In the rest of the work, Colmenares focuses on the Montes de María, where a ‘superabundance’ of communal and public lands underwrote a rather independent peasantry. Unable to control peasants through the monopolization of landholdings, export merchants relied on credit. The function of their loans was to acquire tobacco rather than earn interest. Tobacco merchants also had little interest in acquiring land themselves. Between 1859 and 1880, Colmenares found only two cases of foreclosure out of 338 mortgages related to tobacco production. Ultimately, he suggests, credit was a mechanism to control peasant labour. Merchants offered more credit than peasants could easily repay, leading to cases of debt servitude. Merchants might have been less oppressive than landlords, but credit was still coercive. Yet, Colmenares also complicates this notion by underscoring the way credit, often distributed through local intermediaries (prominent peasants and shopkeepers), was embedded within a moral economy. And despite cases of prolonged indebtedness, he suggests that tobacco loans were often repaid every 2 years or so. Credit was clearly a mechanism to access labour, but the degree of merchant ‘control’ should be weighed against peasant demand for loans. In the neighbouring Sinú River Valley, cattle ranchers who tried to stop advancing wages, due to non-repayment, found themselves without workers (Ocampo, 1988).

In the mid-1870s, the tobacco industry of the Montes de María entered a period of crisis. Prices fell as German importers turned towards Dutch Indonesia. Declining quality made them spurn Colombian tobacco even more. Export merchants tried to force peasant producers to raise the quality of their tobacco by threatening to stop accepting inferior leaves as a means of repayment. But exporters and state officials also imported improved tobacco seeds and promoted ‘better’ agricultural methods. Contextualized in this manner, the surprisingly early attempts to modernize agriculture in the Colombian Caribbean make more sense. Yet Colmenares also shows how the promotion of the plough, and thus spatially fix-shifting agriculture, was also rooted in growing competition over land between ranchers and peasants. In the end, these efforts had little effect, especially in the wake of a spike in German tariffs in 1879 and a locust plague in the early 1880s. The result was a deep economic crisis that contributed to a wave of outmigration towards Panama, where the French had begun to build a canal.

The combined economic and environmental crisis proved a boon to ranching, however. As tobacco exports fell, and demand for cattle remained robust (with growing sales to Santander, where coffee production had taken off, as well as exports to Cuba and Panama), merchants diverted capital into livestock. Ranching was also more resilient, as locusts devoured crops but not pasture grasses. And the collapse of the tobacco economy, which caused wages to fall, made the development of pasturelands (cleared out of the tropical forest) cheaper. Based on a comparison of a couple of his many price series (wages and pasture sales), this is one of Colmenares' more astute insights.

By the time tobacco exports rebounded in the 1890s through 1914, the social landscape had been transformed. The key change was the progressive closure of the agrarian frontier. Rapid population growth was one factor. Another was the shifting nature of tobacco farming, which moved to new (forested) land every 2 or 3 years. Additionally, a tradition of improvement rights allowed peasants to claim property rights on old tobacco fields—whether on communal or public lands—that were planted in grass. While merchant-ranchers also claimed large areas of public lands, a key dynamic behind the rising land concentration, Colmenares suggests, was social differentiation. Demand for pasturage encouraged the consolidation of farmland in ever larger units. Poorer peasants, hit hard by the crisis, sold land to richer ones (often intermediaries in the tobacco trade), who might then sell engrossed pastures to merchants and ranchers. Orlando Fals-Borda (1976) called this process the ‘law of three steps’. As landownership became more concentrated, sharecropping and the use of wage labour became more common. Whereas merchants initially advanced credit to acquire tobacco, after 1880 their loans could also be repaid through labour services. By 1914, the peasantry of the Montes de María had not disappeared, in part because tobacco was still a remunerative crop. But both tobacco and peasants were increasingly squeezed to the margins by the expansion of pastures.

More generally, Colmenares underscores the variability of Latin American agrarian history. While the ‘second conquest’ of Latin America (via export agriculture) undermined peasantries across wide swaths of the region, the effects were uneven (Topik & Wells, 1998). In some areas, like the Montes de María, export production helped raise living standards and consolidate peasant economies, at least temporarily. Colmenares (p. 52) calls such cases ‘bubbles of bienestar’ (well-being). Peasant households, rather than just haciendas and plantations, also helped to connect the region to global markets, complicating the tendency to generalize Latin America's Junker path to agrarian capitalism (de Janvry, 1981). In some cases, such as in the Montes de María, peasants could also sustain export-commodity production during crises through Kautsky's notion of self-exploitation. (For a similar story in Colombia's coffee industry, see Palacios, 1980.)

But perhaps most importantly, Colmenares' book makes us rethink the enclosure narrative that defines much of Colombian historiography. Land grabbing and displacement—whether a colonial inheritance or the product of frontier settlement during the late 19th and early 20th centuries—are the typical means of explaining the country's unequal agrarian structure (LeGrand, 1986). Colmenares highlights additional dynamics: social differentiation and property markets. During the first export boom, peasants in the Montes de María were able to contain the expansion of pastures. From the 1880s on, however, the combined crisis of tobacco and the growing demand for cattle turned the tide. To enlarge their pastures, better-off peasants began buying their neighbours' farms. Foreclosure also played a role. These larger properties would then be attractive to bigger merchants and ranchers. The key mechanisms in Colmenares' account are property markets. His painstaking research in the region's notary archives—often some of the only archives left—provides a wealth of empirical data to sustain his findings. Few agrarian histories in Colombia have examined one region so systematically. Yet archives also introduce biases. Catherine LeGrand's magisterial study of Colombia's public domain highlights pervasive conflicts between peasants and ‘land sharks’ in part because her main source—the archives of the Ministry of Public Works—concentrated all the complaints sent to the central government. What this archive ‘silences’ are land sales. Colmenares' notary archives, by contrast, focus on property markets but downplay land conflicts. Such conflicts have been pervasive throughout Colombian history. But the tendency to narrate the nation's past in terms of an endless series of land struggles is too simplistic. What Colmenares convincingly shows is that a weakening peasant economy, internal differentiation, land markets and the advantages of ranching were central to the concentration of landholding in the Montes de María by the end of the 19th century. The chicanery and violence central to Fals-Borda's ‘law of three steps’ were undoubtedly present. But Santiago Colmenares' thoroughly researched book helps show us that the story of agrarian change in Colombia's Caribbean region is much more than a long history of land grabbing.