Historical consciousness has not been a prized possession in most human cultures, and a sense of a time that considers social affairs to have been developing over several hundreds of years [prior to the present] and by agents ⋯μοουσἱος ⋯μîνx(of essentially the same being as ourselves) is actually a cultural oddity. Most of the thousands of the world's cultures are discrete primal societies—many of them small—that constitute the ethnographic panorama of today. They remind us that there once lay hundreds of more regionally confined, more homogeneous and tribal-oriented human groupings. For such a vast array of societies, however, we simply lack long-term histories.

Winston Churchill was winning money at the Goodwood Races when he heard the news that a tribal uprising had broken out on the north-west frontier of India. Within a matter of hours, the young cavalry officer, who was then on home leave from his regiment in Bangalore, booked return passage on the Indian Mail. He also sent off a telegram to an old family friend, General Sir Bindon Blood, who had been appointed to head the column that was being dispatched to relieve the two garrisons at Malakand and Chakdara then under Beige. General Blood had once made a casual promise to Churchill that he would include him in a future campaign, and with this promise in mind Churchill set off for the frontier.

Writing about the development of historical writing in the West, Hayden White argues that “narrative in general, from the folktale to the novel, from the annals to the fully realized ‘history’, has to do with the topics of law, legality, legitimacy, or, more generally, authority.” But precisely how does narrative treat the different forms of social authority? One answer is that historical narrative is a universal form representing time and experience that Western historians have made particularly persuasive and authoritative. The modern historian, according to this view, has brought narrative to its natural culmination by constructing such historical plots as the “Rise of the Nation-State” or the “Development of Modes of Production.” This perspective is put forward primarily by students of European historiography.

When I did my first field research in Peru in 1974, I was struck by the forceful, energetic, and at times bawdy market women known as cholas. They stood out because they appeared fearless, astute, different, and unpredictable. I could ot find a counterpart among Peruvian males. The cholas feigned neither humility toward rich white foreigners nor unbridled admiration for their ways. They inhabited a world distinct from that of either the Quechua peasantry or the westernized mestizo but easily interacted with both campesinos and mestizos. They freely insulted whom they pleased; they engaged in wheeling and dealing and stood their ground but could also be surprisingly generous, almost religiously so.

Hernando de Soto's recent book, The Other Path, argues that capitalism has not failed in Peru and Latin America, rather, it has not been tried. Basing his case on the observation that Latin American economies are strangled by arcane policies and regulations, de Soto goes on to bolster his point by providing a fresh and powerful look at the undeniable reality of the large “informal,” and thus unregulated, economic sector in Peru. As with any such generalization, how strongly does its explanatory value remain when measured against specific events, over long periods of time? This article seeks just such a perspective. It examines the impact of such regulations as mining codes and mineral taxation on the efforts of Chilean copper entrepreneurs to compete worldwide in the nineteenth century. De Soto may be correct in his contention that today's highly regulated economies keep Latin Americans from being as productive as their resources justify, but to extend this view into the past ignores earlier productive accomplishments, as well as significant efforts at different times and places to cast off Latin America's mercantile legacy.

The mechanized grain farm of the American Midwest and the Canadian prairies has been the ideological leitmotif of most attempts to modernize agrarian structures during the last century in Latin America. Not only held up as the archetype of efficient farming, the family-sized enterprise has also been taken as model for an egalitarian rural society.