Nineteenth-century Chile Research Articles

British-Chilean Newspapers

Since the 1820s, Chile and Great Britain have shared a unique relationship that shaped the development of both countries and is still influential today. Despite their importance, however, the historical connections between Britain and Latin America are understudied. This essay analyzes the English-language periodical press published in nineteenth-century Chile, using the newspapers digitized by the authors' Anglophone Chile Newspaper Project (http://anglophonechile.org/news-archive/) to build on the bifocal post-colonial studies established by Fernando Coronil, the transatlantic and transdisciplinary model developed by Julio Ortega and the notion of the contact zone pioneered by Mary Louise Pratt. By tracing the Anglophone periodical press through three stages of development, from the colony's beginnings in commerce, through the era of informal empire, to the eventual hybridization of the Anglo colony with the local culture, the essay maps longstanding interrelations between the global north and south and illuminates the changing dynamics of informal empire.

Pilar M. Herr, Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2019), pp. viii + 155, $65.00 hb; E-Book.

Pilar M. Herr, Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile (Albuquerque, NM: University of New Mexico Press, 2019), pp. viii + 155, $65.00 hb; E-Book. - Volume 54 Issue 4

Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile by Pilar Herr

Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile by Pilar Herr

Alberto Blest Gana: 100 Years Later

Abstract Blest Gana at 100 is a special edition for Open Cultural Studies. Alberto Blest Gana was a Chilean writer who wore many hats during his long life, dying in 1920 at the age of 90. One of the most prominent authors of nineteenth-century Chile and Latin America, he went to military school and later held political and diplomatic appointments, all of which caused him to travel and live abroad. In fact, nel mezzo del cammin of his life, Blest Gana transferred to Europe and eventually settled in Paris, never to return to his country of birth. His fiction and non-fiction conveyed a vast array of experiences and insights from his life in Chile and overseas. To commemorate the 100 years since his death, contributors to Blest Gana at 100 approach his oeuvre from innovative and fresh scholarly angles and thus generate new perspectives on the Chilean author’s most celebrated texts, such as Martín Rivas and El ideal de un calavera. They also examine the early days of his literary career; revisit critical scholarship on Blest Gana from the past; bring less explored texts, such as Mariluán and Los Trasplantados (the latter written and published in Paris) to the foreground; research the background to his work as a columnist and discover the extent to which it informed his literary career; and examine the urban social practices in Blest Gana’s award-winning novel La aritmética en el amor. From these analyses, we hope to foster an ongoing conversation of lively and invigorating Blest Gana scholarship.

Contested Nation: The Mapuche, Bandits, and State Formation in Nineteenth-Century Chile

In seven clear and concise chapters, Pilar Herr weaves together a wide array of primary sources—official correspondence, consular reports, travel writing, documents on the parlamentos (peace negotiations), political constitutions, intellectual writings, newspapers, and more—to tell the history of Chilean state formation and how this affected and was affected by the Mapuche, “an umbrella term for several indigenous groups of Chile's southern frontier who speak the same indigenous language” (p. 4). Focusing primarily on the 1810s through to the 1830s but dipping into the second half of the century toward the end of the book, Herr's overriding argument is a simple but very important one: we cannot understand Chilean state formation without looking at what was happening in Araucanía (primarily the actions of bandits and Indigenous inhabitants), and we cannot understand the history of Chile's southern borderlands region without looking at local people's interactions with the fledgling republican state.In the early nineteenth century the Mapuche were an independent people; they “owned their territory and politically and economically managed their own affairs” (p. 111). By the end of the nineteenth century they had been “conquered”—or “pacified,” according to many official sources of the time—by a postcolonial Chilean state that was firmly committed to a centralist and expansionist nation-building project. As told by Herr, this was a relatively successful project, at least from the perspective of the country's economic and political elites, and Chile became known, across the Americas and beyond, for its institutional stability in the nineteenth century. A centralized political framework that rejected Indigenous autonomy was not a predestined outcome of the 1810s and 1820s, however. This latter view of history, which is elaborated by several scholars, such as Florencia Mallon and Pablo Mariman, is not explicitly engaged by Herr, although her book helpfully emphasizes Indigenous political agency and the ongoing contestation of Chilean state policy.While elite rhetoric is at the center of the story narrated in Contested Nation, Indigenous Mapuche voices appear throughout, albeit sometimes fleetingly or indirectly due to the criollo-dominated nature of the archival material available to researchers: for example, Francisco Inalikang, who acted as interpreter to the Argentine general José de San Martín; Francisco Mariluán, who established epistolary exchanges and indeed friendships with several Chilean officials; caciques encountered by the Polish scientist Ignacio Domeyko and quoted in his 1846 travel memoir Araucanía y sus habitantes; and Mapuche leaders involved in the parlamentos (presuming that the records of such peace negotiations accurately incorporated their statements). Herr is careful to note the internal diversity of Mapuche society during this period—meaning that it is difficult to generalize about their attitudes to mainstream Chilean society or their strategies regarding how to integrate into it (or, indeed, how to resist such integration)—and she usefully draws on the work of Mapuche historian Carlos Contreras Painemal, which reproduces and interrogates the peace treaties of the nineteenth century (and the colonial era) in order to promote contemporary Mapuche territorial claims and a return to a different way of doing politics.While Herr draws on Painemal's work, she does not directly engage with the political project underpinning it or refer to other Mapuche academics who are working on similar or related histories, such as Jimena Pichinao, Héctor Nahuelpán, or the above-cited Mariman, all of whom contributed to the pathbreaking collection of essays Historia, colonialismo y resistencia desde el país mapuche, published by Ediciones Comunidad de Historia Mapuche in 2012. Contested Nation would have benefited by dialoguing more extensively with this growing body of scholarship, but there is no doubt that Herr's book makes an important contribution regardless. Certain concepts (such as the “frontier”) and terms (such as “second-class citizen”) could have been probed in more depth and the analysis of the ambiguity and complexity of Mapuche-Chilean relations thus further enriched, but Herr's rigorous empirical research, and the way that she brings it together in a cohesive and highly succinct account, make this a valuable monograph. It will be useful to scholars and students working in many different areas of Latin American history, not least borderlands history, Indigenous-state relations, banditry, and Chilean political history.

Creative Negativity

Creative Negativity

Gradual Change and Deconcentration of Presidential Powers in Nineteenth Century Chile: Ideas, Networks, and Institutional Ambiguity

The comparative literature on presidential systems has paid little attention to the causes that explain variation in executive power concentration. We use the case of nineteenth century Chile to uncover the causal path that led to one of Latin America’s most far-reaching yet gradual sets of reforms that weakened presidential power. Combining theoretical approaches that emphasize the role of institutions, ideas, networks, and ambiguity, this article seeks to explain how and why Chile went from having one of the most constitutionally powerful presidents in Latin America to one of the weakest, as part of a gradual reform process that lasted three decades.

A Father against his Daughter on Marriage Choice: A 1823 Rapto Trial in Chile

Studies of rapto—commonly known as the theft of a woman by a man—in scholarship on Chile are extremely scarce. While research into the judicial–legal culture of colonial nineteenth-century Chile from a sociohistorical framework includes judicial files on rapto, scholars have neglected the specific rhetorical and judicial strategies deployed by individual elite legal actors in cases of rapto as an opportunity to explore women’s agency and to understand rapto as an avenue for intergenerational conflict about free will in marriage choice. In this article, I look into the judicial file of a trial of rapto by seduction and its appeal, which took place during the years 1823–1824 in Santiago. I examine the judicial and rhetorical strategies used by a father, his daughter, and her suitor’s public defender to make their claims in court through the lens of gender, honor, and class. Although the father uses rapto by seduction as a tool to hide his daughter’s consent from the judges, her willingness to elope with her suitor eventually comes to the fore and disrupts the trial. In this case, the parties turn to several judicial and rhetorical strategies not only to bolster their cases but also to argue about larger social issues and conflicts specific to the early nineteenth century, such as autonomy in marriage choice and honor.

New anthropometric evidence on living standards in nineteenth-century Chile

A sample of over 44 thousand Chilean marines was used to estimate the trend of mean heights from the 1820s to the 1890s. We confirm that there was height stagnation in the last decades of the nineteenth-century Chile despite sizeable per capita GDP growth; there were hidden nutritional costs to this economic growth. This situation resembles a similar puzzle in antebellum USA or early industrial Britain, but in the case of Chile GDP growth is not explained by industrialization but by export-led-growth. Still, the results are similar: height stagnation. Regarding the determinants of adult male height, our data also convincingly showed that there was a significant correlation between height and literacy. There was a positive correlation between height and white ethnicity, and, linked to this, a strong negative correlation between stature and eyes reported as “black”. Finally, living in urban environments (or environments with higher population density) also negatively affected height.

Slavery, Resistance(s) and Abolition in Early Nineteenth-Century Chile

Abstract Chile’s abolition of slavery (1823) has commonly been framed within a self-congratulatory narrative that emphasizes the philanthropic role of republican elites and the peaceful nature of slave emancipation. The traditional narrative not only views abolition as an ideologically inspired gift from the elites, but also underscores Chile’s exceptionalism vis-à-vis other South American emancipation processes—in Chile, unlike in the rest of the continent, the eradication of slavery was supposedly both politically and socially insignificant. This article challenges two of this narrative’s assumptions: first, that consensus characterized the abolition of slavery in Chile, and second, that abolition was simply a philanthropic concession from the new nation’s republican elites. Instead, this study highlights how officials, slaveholders and enslaved people transformed slavery and its dismantlement into a contested issue. It also explores the proactive role that enslaved people played in undermining the institution of slavery throughout Chile, ultimately leading to its abolition.

Green Innovation from the Global South: Renewable Energy Patents in Chile, 1877–1910

This research note uses the case of nineteenth-century Chile to argue that the phenomenon of early green entrepreneurship was not confined to the United States and Europe. It focuses on Chile-based inventors who pursued intellectual-property protection in solar, tidal, wave motion, water flow, and wind power. The backgrounds and careers of these inventors are examined. The case contests the popular assumption that knowledge always originated in the developed North and flowed southward. Instead, at least in the case of renewable energy, knowledge emerged endogenously in Chile and sometimes even flowed northward. This research note argues that the circulation of knowledge was strongly linked to the mobility of individuals rather than to the mobility of patents between North and South.

Natural history values and meanings in nineteenth-century Chile

In nineteenth-century Chile, naturalists and their supporters argued that scientific work and study, including natural history, were good for individuals and society because they developed and tempered the character of their practitioners. These practitioners and boosters, Chileans, European visitors and European immigrants, made this argument in a context in which Chilean state support for natural history institutions, publications and education helped disseminate scientific training, perspectives and practices. Examining this nineteenth-century discourse of beneficial science is important for three reasons: first, the discourse of value-laden sciences offered this field a powerful justification for its development, especially in the face of criticism; second, because naturalists believed in this discourse, it helps explain what their work meant to them, and, finally, these values highlight the disjuncture between discourses about natural history and its links to military conquests, as well as the ways in which natural history was an exclusionary practice.

Paradoxes of the Museification of the Past in Nineteenth-Century Chile: The Case of the Coloniaje Exhibition of 1873

AbstractThe Coloniaje Exhibition, held in September 1873 in Santiago, Chile, represents a milestone in the history of Chilean museums. As the first retrospective display of the history of the Chilean nation, it was an important precedent for the collections that led to the construction of the National Historical Museum in 1911. By examining the ideas associated with the history of the colonial era and the museography related to the exhibition, this article analyses the ambiguous ways in which the Coloniaje Exhibition mobilised the colonial past in the context of the ascendancy of liberalism and the transformation of Santiago's urban social life. Situated between alienation and identification – between critiquing the colonial system and celebrating its imprint on Chilean society – the Coloniaje Exhibition is important for the understanding of postcolonial societies in Latin America.

The political economy of the fiscal deficit in nineteenth-century Chile: Roberto Pastén

A structural shift in the trend toward higher deficits had emerged by the middle of the 1860s in Chile. For some authors, this was the result of increased spending owing to a fastgrowing economy. Another common explanation is the higher spending required to finance and then recover from the war against Spain, which began in 1864. This article provides an alternative explanation for the country’s fiscal disarray during that period, suggesting that it was motivated largely by increased political turmoil at the beginning of the second half of the nineteenth century in Chile that ended with the ousting of President Balmaceda in 1891. That period represents a dramatic departure from the calmer and economically buoyant early years of the Republic. Thus, it is suggested that the beginning of President José Joaquín Pérez’s rule in 1861 marks both a major political realignment after the birth of the Republic and a structural shift in the trend toward higher deficits. This hypothesis is consistent with the idea that political instability tends to lead to a decoupling of taxes from spending, two elements which would be otherwise aligned as predicted by the tax smoothing theory. This essay is a factual description in support of this hypothesis.

Positivism, Evolutionism, and Public Administration: The Work of Valentín Letelier (1886–1917)

This article analyzes the administrative theory developed by Valentín Letelier (1852–1919), a prominent lawyer, intellectual, and public figure of the second half of nineteenth-century Chile. The focus is on how a Latin American public administration scholar moved from positivism to evolutionism, and answers key questions about the nature of public administration, such as what is characteristic of government bureaucracy and how it may differ from politics; how bureaucratic administration relates to the environment, and how this issue should be considered when developing institutional designs; and what the origin of public administration is, or, in other words, how it arises and develops.

Linguistic ideology and the ‘correct’ use of language in Camilo Ortúzar’s Diccionario manual de locuciones viciosas (1893)

The present study describes the beliefs and attitudes which undergird the Chilean priest Camilo Ortúzar’s notions of correct and incorrect language use in his Diccionario manual de locuciones viciosos (1893), and how those beliefs and attitudes are situated within the broader context of late nineteenth-century Chilean metalinguistic thought. The analysis is performed using a variety of content-oriented analytical tools, chief among them the discourse-historical approach to critical discourse analysis. The beliefs we find present in the dictionary are then summarised, and shown to be largely consistent with the prevailing hegemonic ideological beliefs surrounding language use in nineteenth century Chile.

Bureaucratization in a Changing Society: Administrative Reforms in Late Nineteenth Century Chile

ABSTRACTDuring the 1880s, a significant number of Chilean administrative services were reformed following the characteristics of the Weberian bureaucracy. From the analysis of two cases of administrative reform (the so-called Prussianization of the Chilean Army and the creation of institutions in the field of public health), this article seeks to understand why bureaucracy gained ground in nineteenth century Chile. Specifically, the article discusses how social conditions led policy makers to choose bureaucracy as a model for administrative organization. Through this analysis, the article aims to contribute to the theoretical discussion on the causes of bureaucratization.

Women in Business in Late Nineteenth-Century Chile: Class, Marital Status, and Economic Autonomy

ABSTRACTThis article analyzes Chilean women’s entrepreneurial activity in the 1877–1908 period examining two official data sources representing different socioeconomic business niches – the national trademark registry, which represents the elite among business people, and the Santiago business license registry, which includes the non-elite. The analysis reveals an economy with women engaging increasingly in business in an expanding range of sectors. By the 1890s, women managed nearly a quarter of Santiago’s firms and 5 percent of elite firms nationally. Widows appeared overrepresented among elite businesses and underrepresented among those of the non-elite. These results suggest that institutions constraining entrepreneurship among married women were more strongly enforced among the elite than among other social classes. The evidence thus suggests that during late nineteenth century there was an increase in the economic autonomy exercised by unmarried women and widows of all socioeconomic strata, but also by married women among the non-elite.

Death and the Body Politic: Burial Reforms and Mourning Practices in Nineteenth-Century Chile

AbstractIn 1821, the Supreme Director of the Chilean Republic (Bernardo O’Higgins) announced a controversial reglamento that established a new national cemetery known as the Cementerio General and attempted to control mourning practices in the new Republic. In addition to responding to growing public health concerns surrounding interments within Church walls and limiting displays of public grief, O’Higgins envisioned using the cemetery as a space from which he could establish a national “Pantheon,” thus serving as a catalyst for regulating the (dead) Chilean body politic in the decades following independence. This paper explores how O’Higgins’s 1821 reglamento, restrained until 1883 by opposition from the Catholic Church, complemented other practices that reinforced patriarchal ideologies privileging elite men in nineteenth-century Latin America. The paper also reveals how the body was a space of transverse oppression that treated the deaths of elite women differently from those of poor or non-Catholic women.

El Río Mapocho y sus riberas: Espacio público e intervención urbana en Santiago de Chile (1855–1918)

In a thorough, analytical study that brings together urban history and the history of the state, Simón Castillo Fernández argues that the canalization of the Mapocho River alongside central Santiago, and the construction of parks and new streets that went along with it, was “the principal urban design project [la principal operación urbanística] in Santiago between 1885 and 1918” (p. 435); he further argues that this project was the first in which “the State . . . used all its available tools to intervene in the urban landscape” (pp. 435–36). This project, he argues, expanded the core area of the city by adding not only the formerly peripheral Mapocho and its banks but also large areas on the north side of the river. Much as Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna had brought the rocky Cerro Santa Lucía into the east side of the central city by building an elaborate park on it in the 1870s, the Mapocho project took a strip of garbage dumps, gravel pits, and — not least — settlements of poor people and made it into a corridor of restrained river, formal parks, monumental public buildings, and more or less orderly new streets. This extension eventually reached Cerro San Cristóbal and led to the designation of that small mountain, with its emblematic 1904 statue of the Virgin Mary, as a huge public park to be clothed in irrigated forest.This 35-year transformation made at least a gesture toward most of the major goals of urban design and reform in those years: speeding up traffic, constructing imposing streets and buildings, removing garbage dumps, improving sewers, enforcing sanitation rules, reducing natural dangers such as floods and human dangers such as crime and alcoholism. The ongoing debate over poverty and the meaning of citizenship was ever present; leaders of the city and the project expressed sympathy for the miserable living conditions of the poor while working to eject them from the expanding central city. The river itself also played a role in the story, as the city, the state, and private investors sparred over the use of its waters for drinking and irrigation, the disposal of trash and sewage, and even the extraction of sand and gravel for building materials.Castillo Fernández tells his story with clarity, thoroughness, and ample evidence. He uses many documents from the Intendencia de Santiago (the branch of the central government responsible for the city), the Municipalidad de Santiago (the local government), the Ministerio de Industria y Obras Públicas (home of the state's engineers and administrator of state public-works projects), and the property records of the Conservador de Bienes Raíces; a variety of published national and municipal documents; and key books and other publications from hygienists, planners, engineers, and assorted experts. The rise of engineers and other professionals in the urban projects and state activities of late nineteenth-century Chile makes this last category of sources particularly useful for understanding the changing notions of city life and the role of the state.The many illustrations, especially the period photographs, really do illustrate many important points about the development of the banks of the Mapocho that would not be nearly so easy to grasp from prose alone. Exceptionally informative captions direct the reader to key features and tie the illustrations into the analysis of class, aesthetics, density, and land use. The many plans and maps of small areas help show the changes in the portrayal, ownership, use, and topography of the Mapocho. There is one minor omission: readers who want to follow the descriptions of streets in detail may want to find a clearly legible map of central Santiago, which the book unfortunately does not contain. The book's main argument does not depend on the details of street corners, but Castillo Fernández's thoroughness and attention to detail means that he does mention many precise locations, giving both historical and present-day names. I know that part of Santiago fairly well, but I sometimes found myself trying to remember, more or less, whether Calle Estado is east or west of the Mercado Central.In addition to its valuable contribution to the history of Santiago and of urban public works generally, this book joins Sol Serrano's ¿Qué hacer con Dios en la República? (2008) and Thomas Miller Klubock's La Frontera: Forests and Ecological Conflict in Chile's Frontier Territory (2014) among important recent studies that help us to understand how urban projects and municipal issues contributed to changing the small, Weberian state of the early national period into the “modern” state characterized by economic intervention, public works, safety regulations, and the like.