Los Mecanismos de la Vida Economica en una Sociedad Colonial: Chile 1680-1830 (review)

Between his precocious first work, El salariado minero en Chile colonial (1963) and the most recent, El otro occidente (2003), Marcello Carmagnani of the University of Turin and El Colegio de Mexico, has written some twelve books, edited or compiled another fifteen, and published some sixty articles. Working with equal ease in Italian, Spanish, French and English, and drawing upon sources from archives in Chile, Mexico and Spain, Carmagnani´s œuvre ranges from Annales-style quantitative economic history through historical Anthropology, to books on political economy, liberalism and state formation, to provocative, wide-ranging interpretative works spanning the entire sweep of Latin American history. If one adds to this his role in inspiring a whole generation of younger Chilean, Mexican and Italian graduate students and professors, the production of such projects as the recent three-volume, Para una Historia de América (1999-2000), visiting appointments in New York City, Mexico, Paris, Chile and elsewhere, together with Directorships in important research institutes, it is clear that we have here an extraordinary scholar and a distinguished career. I make this point here because his work is not as well known in the United States as it is in Europe and Latin America, perhaps because of our practice of teaching Latin American history mainly through the use of monographs in English.

Los mecanismos de la vida económica, originally published in French 30 years ago as the fruit of Carmagnani's doctoral dissertation in the Sorbonne, is now reissued in Spanish as recognition of its foundational value in the economic history of Chile.

In midst of the then passionately held opinions on modes of production, dependency, and world systems, Carmagnani plunged into Chilean and Spanish records determined to exhume new bones and place archival flesh on the shaky skeleton of theory. He emerged with a rigorous, quantified analysis of goods, prices and trade in order to show how regional production and markets in Chile interact with external markets—in this case, the Peruvian and Spanish—to form a colonial system and, ultimately by the 1830s, a national market. We see how once independent regional markets, those of La Serena and Concepción, are absorbed into Santiago's orbit; then how the whole is subordinated to the larger processes of the global system. The essential features of Carmagnani's work over the subsequent decades can be seen here: the insistence on archival research and its interaction with theory, and the need to place American experiences in the larger framework of European or even global practice.

Today, as the historiographical tide has washed quantitative history off to one side, this is not an easy book to read. There are 90 pages of numbers and tables, while the text talks of markets, prices, structures and process, in addition to bloodless inductive theory. During the thesis defense in Paris, an admiring Fernand Braudel is supposed to have remarked, "But where are the people? I see no human beings in this work." Indeed, apart from the notes, there is not a single proper noun in the 425 pages. But if one wants an extended hypothesis on how economic life, or more properly, how colonial society, is conditioned by its interaction with large, global processes, this dense and relentless work will be rewarding.