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62 The history of salt making in La Salina presents many ironies, among them the widespread perception that La Salina’s salt-making industry was a failure even though, at least in terms of production, it was a success. As with contemporary scholarship that considers the state, reflections on the salt industry often pose the question as a matter of success or failure. Elites saw the failure to create an ideal industry, an ideal market, and an ideal society of entrepreneurs and consumers. Local and regional residents had their own criteria for measuring success or failure, but they were similarly pessimistic in their assessments of the saltworks. The sense that La Salina was a failure, despite its steady production of salt, was based on the general feeling that the administration did a poor job of overseeing the sale of salt, that ministry employees failed to ensure an equitable distribution of salt to the public. The explanation behind this sense of failure is a complex story of profits, expectations, consumption, and the workings of a regional market, matters all revolving around ritualized salt sales, the market ritual whereby state action shaped life in the region. Considering these sales details how people in La Salina and the surrounding cantons engaged daily with the institutionalized presence of the state apparatus. There were many discussions of the state’s actual and ideal nature, but they were always conducted with a clear bottom line in mind. The story begins at the point where production ended, with the deshorno. chapter 4 the ministry monopoly and the market monopoly The day laborer [who gathers] sticks is poorly dressed in rags, and stooped under the weight of the bundles of wood. And at night [he] rests in a poor hut, where only the smallest fire is permitted, as to freely collect [wood] is seen as a sign of clandestine salt making. These things, and others that are worse, are the direct, cursed fruits of the monopoly over an article that is indispensable for life. —Manuel Ancízar, Peregrinación de Alpha the ministry monopoly and the market monopoly  63 After the caked salt was finished, the oven fires were put out and everything was left to cool for several days. The ceramic containers were then broken open and the salt removed. This batch of salt, which might amount to more than 10,000 kilograms, was taken to the almacén, where the bookkeeper received it, weighed it, and had it stored. The almacén was a combination of office, warehouse , and store. It was a clearly demarcated space created and maintained by the state. It was also a place where conflicting visions of the state’s proper role were articulated during public sales. Visions of appropriate state action from Bogotá, expectations from residents, and the differing interests between the two—all these met in the almacén. The disputes that took place there and the problematic resolutions applied were disseminated across La Salina’s entire consumption radius along with the cakes of salt, which were often sold at inflated prices across the eastern highlands and llanos. Disputes over marketing practices and state authority were renewed with each batch of salt delivered. the ministry monopoly During the independence era many people assumed that the onerous fiscal practices of imperial Spain would be abandoned in the republic to follow. Writing in 1826, at the dawn of this new era, the first finance minister of note, José María del Castillo y Rada, critiqued everything about the Bourbon taxation system: “The Republic must not base its rents on the ruin of its citizens. Its fiscal laws, I repeat, are not just or productive when it puts the interest of the state in contest with those of individuals.”1 The following year he expressed his frustration with the difficult legacy, writing that the earlier system “had no other principle than the blindness of the government that established it, nor other object than to maintain these populations in colonial dependency and through this, in poverty, in ignorance, and in wretchedness.” Nonetheless, he recognized the burdens facing the new republic: “When a colony breaks from dependence on its metropole and constitutes an independent nation, it inevitably multiplies its needs and it must cover greater costs than those [incurred] during its servile tutelage.”2 While Castillo y Rada advocated abolishing taxes such as the alcabala as a means to foster industry and trade, he argued that the Bourbon monopolies, such as that on tobacco (which...

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