The only one-volume history of Colombia in English is David Bushnell, The Making of Modern Colombia: A Nation in Spite of Itself (Berkeley, 1993). One useful volume which embodies recent trends in the historiography is Darío Jaramillo Agudelo (comp.), La nueva historia de Colombia (Bogotá, 1976). This is complemented by Jaime Jaramillo Uribe et al., Manual de historia de Colombia, vol. 3 (Bogotá, 1982), and a contemporary reader, Mario Arrubla et al., Colombia: Hoy, 2nd ed. (Bogoté, 1978).

politics and society

On the politics of the 1930s and 1940s, see Daniel Pécaut, L’Ordre et la violence: Evolution socio-politique de la Colombie entre 1930 et 1953 (Paris, 1986); Christopher Abel, Política, iglesia y partidos en Colombia, 1886–1953 (Bogotá, 1987); and Terrence Burns Horgan, ‘The Liberals come to power, por debajo de la ruana: A study of the Enrique Olaya Herrera administration, 1930-1934’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Vanderbilt University, 1983). Alvaro Tirado Mejía, Aspectos políticos del primer gobierno de Alfonso López Pumarejo, 1934–1938 (Bogotá, 1981), is a valuable introduction from a committed lopista perspective. On the economy, there are Rosemary Thorp and Carlos Londoño, ‘The effect of the Great Depression on the economies of Peru and Colombia’, and José Antonio Ocampo, ‘The Colombian economy in the 1930s’, in Rosemary Thorp (ed.), Latin America in the 1930s: The Role of the Periphery in World Crisis (London, 1984), which should be read with José Antonio Ocampo and Santiago Montenegro, Crisis mundial, protectión e industrializatión: Ensayos de historia economíca colombiana (Bogotá, 1984), Alvaro Tirado Mejía (ed.). Estado y economia (Bogotá, 1986) and Paul W. Drake, The Money Doctor in the Andes: The Kemmerer Missions, 1923–1933 (Durham, N.C., 1989).

The consolidation of Colombia as a nation-state has faced a major obstacle in the country's geography, the main topographical feature of which is the Andean mountain range. The central Cordillera of the Andes is separated from the western Cordillera by the Río Magdalena and the Río Cauca. The Pacific coastal plain that extends from Panama to the Ecuadorian frontier is covered by dense jungle, which has prevented the completion of the Pan-American Highway connection between Panama and Colombia. (In contrast, the Caribbean littoral to the north is more open and climatically better favoured.) The eastern plains - the Llanos Orientales - stretch from the foot of the eastern Cordillera south and east to the frontiers with Venezuela, Brazil, Peru and Ecuador. This fragmented landscape contains a wide diversity of altitude and relief, and since temperature depends on altitude rather than season, Colombia is, by convention, divided into ‘hot country’ (below 3,500 feet above sea-level), ‘temperate country’ (between 3,500 and 6,500 feet) and ‘cold country’ (above 6,500 feet).

The obstacles to economic development caused by poor communications can hardly be overestimated. Engineering difficulties and the high cost of construction and maintenance caused by the mountainous terrain impeded the establishment of more than a limited railway network before 1930. Indeed, Bogotá and Medellín had no direct rail connection with the Caribbean coast till the late 1950s. Thus, navigation along the Magdalena remained vital to the country's prosperity. (President Mariano Ospina Pérez in the late 1940s included the level of the Magdalena waters among the daily information that he required.)

With a growth in population from 17.5 million in 1964 to 22.3 million in 1973 and 28.6 million in 1985, Colombia was expected to overtake Argentina in the 1990s and resume its nineteenth-century position as the most populous Latin American country after Brazil and Mexico. Between 1951 and 1964 the country had one of the world's highest rates of demographic increase — 3.5 per cent per annum. From 1965 the rate of growth decelerated — in substantial part as a result of a sharp decline in birth-rates (from 40 per thousand in 1960 to 20 per thousand in 1974). By the early 1980s the annual rate had fallen to less than 2 per cent.

This reduced rate of population growth can be associated with urbanization and improved literacy. By the 1980s urban fecundity had fallen to only 55 per cent of the level in the countryside and was in part attributable to explicit policies of birth control, which, despite the power of the Church, had been adopted since the late 1960s. Between 1973 and 1985 the proportion of Colombians under fifteen years of age fell from 43 to 33 per cent. Nevertheless, growth in the under-five age group of 4 per cent per annum, combined with a 4.4 per cent annual increase among five- to fourteen-year-olds, imposed heavy pressures on health, education and housing services during the 1960s and 1970s.

About 80 per cent of the investment in opening new coffee haciendas took place between 1880 and 1895 in Cundinamarca, and between 1890 and 1900 in Antioquia. Although there were coffee-producing peasants, who responded favourably to the opportunities opened by organized buying, the merchants were in the forefront of development, and their participation was decisive for the future of coffee.

Two central aspects that turned the merchant into large-scale coffeegrower and -exporter are analysed in this chapter. In the first part, the social environment and political ties of the merchant families of Bogatá and Medellín are discussed in general terms. There is also an analysis of their tendency to diversify assets, given their fear of excessive specialization.

In the second part of the chapter, the incentives and obstacles facing the merchant-turned-planter are examined. The advantages offered by investment in coffee can be summarized as follows: the high profitability of coffee production when it was linked to exports; the relative security of this investment in an inflationary period; access to external credit with interest rates 50 per cent lower than any available in Bogatá or Medellín; and, finally, the abundance of good lands and the availability of labour. The obstacles to profit must also be recorded: the necessity to invest considerable sums of capital; the slow initial rate of return on investment; the risks of expropriation and disruption of production in periods of political instability; the risk of contracting debts in gold when the rate of devaluation was increasing; and the fact of being subject to an uncontrollable cycle of international prices.

The coffee hacienda was the result of the entry of urban merchants into rural society. On a yet more general plane, it was the product of emphasis on agricultural exporting, of the urge and the need to form links with the world market and ‘bring to the country the civilization that is overflowing in Europe’. Investment in coffee did not penetrate the rural world in order to create new types of social or productive relations. By the end of the century, for all its dynamism, commercial capital had only scratched the rude surface of the older social formations. The traditions, habits, and customs of the little worlds of a few square kilometres in which most lived out their lives showed a persistent rigour, despite the expectation that the old patterns would dissolve in contact with the new economy which the coffee entrepreneur wished to impose. In part it was a problem of quantity: coffee investment was heavily concentrated in relatively few areas. Even there, the phenomenon of specialization that occurred with tobacco in Ambalema was not repeated. Within the old haciendas of colonial origin there was a peasant stratum accustomed to the degree of independence that came from producing its own food. The coffee hacienda of Santander, Cundinamarca, Tolima, and Antioquia was founded within an existing social structure, to which it had to adapt itself, while at the same time it introduced new elements of the monetary economy which, simple and weak at first, would produce effects that disturbed the old order. In Cundinamarca, for example, the coffee municipios were old centres of colonial production and commerce.

Antioquen̄o colonization deserves the attention it has received as a decisive episode in Colombian history. The society which emerged from it on the hillsides, river banks, and valley slopes situated between the Cauca river basin and the peaks of the central cordillera found integration and economic progress in the early years of the twentieth century through the cultivation, processing, packing, and transport of coffee.

Naturally enough, a slow-maturing crop such as coffee did not appeal to colonists who had set themselves, days and even weeks away from the nearest outpost of civilization, the task of carving a living out of the monte. Coffee had to wait until communities had been established, supported by a subsistence agriculture of maize, beans, yuca, and bananas, and until improvements had been made to the bridle-paths used to transport the pigs which were fattened for the distant towns of Medellín and Bogotá. Before the frontier provided a stable economy it offered only the chance of survival to a population which in its land of origin was growing more rapidly than any other in the Republic, in a poor environment of waste lands and steep and eroded terrain. At the same time adventurers arrived to seek buried treasure from previous indigenous civilizations, and search the forests for wild rubber.

The frontier protected its inhabitants from the vicissitudes of politics, and from wars, recruiters, requisitions, and similar outrages, while the struggle against nature and isolation bred unpolished but comradely habits.