The Nitrate King: A Biography of “Colonel” John Thomas North by William Edmundson (review)

Outside of Chile, John Thomas North is largely forgotten. One of the richest men of his time, he made a brief social splash in British high society and the newspapers from the mid-1880s to the mid-1990s, when he died. Within Chile, he remains a dark figure who is often seen as having brought down a progressive president and so reshaping the nation’s history. Edmundson focuses less on any conflict North might have had with president Manuel Balmaceda than on North himself, the stock market plunger and hustler. The economic and the political are woven throughout: the way in which North made his fortune in the bleak Atacama Desert, the nitrate company combinations he created to boost profits and stock prices, the Civil War of 1891, and most interestingly of all, his grandiose lifestyle. The controversy surrounding his role and the British role in the Civil War of 1891 and the defeat of Balmaceda have been discussed by Harold Blakemore, Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Felipe Portales, Maurice Zeitlin, and myself among others, going back as far as J. Fred Rippy in the 1940s. What could be left to say?

The biography turns up a good deal of new information as well as an excellent integration of the secondary literature by focusing on North rather than on the Chilean political economy. Putting North at the center of the narrative allows Edmundson to tell us the English side of the story and make us see what nitrates meant to the British speculative market. North was not a major political schemer set on maintaining his nitrate profits but a speculator bent on keeping up the price of his nitrate stocks. The two are obviously related but Edmundson argues in greater detail than I could in an article, that North was part of the British world, not the Chilean—a man who could care less about Chile aside from how the Civil War, for example, influenced the value of his portfolio. He had little reason to launch a civil war against Balmaceda, and the war itself did not preserve his fortune.

Edmundson adds a wealth of detail to what a nouveau riche with the honorary title of “Colonel” could do in the England of his time. He could turn an old mansion into a refurbished, gaudy one worth nothing in comparison to what he had spent on it. He could lavish funds on his friends, sometimes on mere acquaintances, and make himself a grand name in his hometown. He could spend another fortune on racing horses and dogs. “The Nitrate King,” as he was styled in the British press, was a promotion artist and a sometimes con man, manipulating the price of stock in Chile’s most valuable resource. When discussing North’s world, the book often takes off and becomes a real page-turner. The cover shows him in cartoon style, dressed in a military outfit (he was never a soldier), a paunchy man in red, black, and silver with a fancy sword.

A little more than a decade after his incorporation of nitrate companies, a water monopoly in Iquique (then the center of the industry), and a nitrate railroad monopoly, North’s position in the market began to erode; two years after the Chilean Civil War it was gone altogether. The plunger found new projects to promote, most ignobly King Leopold’s operations in the Congo. North was ready to give his money away and spend it grandiosely to attract attention and be presumed a success, but he never cared if it was earned exploiting Chilean miners or the poor of sub-Saharan Africa. I found myself pleased to learn that after he died suddenly in 1896, apparently of too many rich and extravagant meals, his family sold his mansion for a pittance of what it had once cost. I wonder what the hedge fund managers in...