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Capitalist Dreams: Chile's Response to Nineteenth-Century World Copper Competition

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 June 2009

William W. Culver  and
Cornel J. Reinhart
William W. Culver
Affiliation:
State University of New York, Plattsburgh
Cornel J. Reinhart
Affiliation:
Clinton Community College
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Extract

Hernando de Soto's recent book, The Other Path, argues that capitalism has not failed in Peru and Latin America, rather, it has not been tried. Basing his case on the observation that Latin American economies are strangled by arcane policies and regulations, de Soto goes on to bolster his point by providing a fresh and powerful look at the undeniable reality of the large “informal,” and thus unregulated, economic sector in Peru. As with any such generalization, how strongly does its explanatory value remain when measured against specific events, over long periods of time? This article seeks just such a perspective. It examines the impact of such regulations as mining codes and mineral taxation on the efforts of Chilean copper entrepreneurs to compete worldwide in the nineteenth century. De Soto may be correct in his contention that today's highly regulated economies keep Latin Americans from being as productive as their resources justify, but to extend this view into the past ignores earlier productive accomplishments, as well as significant efforts at different times and places to cast off Latin America's mercantile legacy.

Type
Demands of the Market Place
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 31 , Issue 4 , October 1989 , pp. 722 - 744
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 1989

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References

The authors are grateful for research support in Chile from the State University of New York, University Awards Committee, and from the National Science Foundation.

1 Soto, Hernando de, El otro sendero: la revolución informal (Bogotá: Editorial Oveja Negra, 1987; English ed., The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World) (New York: Harper & Row, 1988).Google Scholar

2 “Informal” refers to the unregistered, unregulated, and illegal shops, services, and production operating alongside the formal and regulated economy. De Soto estimates 50 percent of Peru's economy falls into the informal sector.

3 Charles W. Anderson, Politics and Economic Change in Latin America: The Governing of Restless Nations (Princeton, New Jersey: D. Van Nostrand Company, Inc, 1967). Chapter One, in particular, influenced the authors' thinking on this topic.

4 Anderson, , Politics, 9.Google Scholar

5 Tilly, Charles, Big Structures, Large Processes, Huge Comparisons (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 1984).Google Scholar

6 Every issue of the Engineering and Mining Journal of the 1880s contained editorial commentary and news on the swelling world copper demand. The EMJ gave copper an especially prominent role from 1882 to 1884 as overall United States production began to total more than any competitor. See Bohan, Merwin L. and Pomeranz, Morton, Investment in Chile: Basic Information for United States Businessmen (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1960), 87, for a typical business observation about this period of increasing copper demand.Google Scholar

7 See Roberts, R. O., “Development and Decline of the Copper and Other Non-Ferrous Metal Industries in South Wales,” Transactions of the Honorable Society of Cymmrodorian (South Wales, 1956);Google Scholar and Barker, T. C. and Harris, J. R., A Merseyside Town in the Industrial Revolution: St. Helens 1750–1900 (London, 1959), 240–446, for a British interpretation of this process.Google Scholar

8 Clearly, twentieth-century copper politics in Chile has generated a considerable interest. An excellent and thorough analysis of the post-World War II era is found in Theodore Moran, H., Multinational Corporations and the Politics of Dependence (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1974).Google Scholar

9 Chile still holds approximately 40 percent of the world's copper reserves, both as vein and porphyry coppers. Reserves are estimated on the basis of ore that can be mined “economically” (where the cost of production is below a given market price). Early copper mines were based on veins (cracks in other rocks filled with concentrations of the metal); in the late nineteenth-century porphyry deposits (very low concentrations of the metal dispersed throughout a huge area) became the mainstay of the industry. See Parsons, A. B., The Porphyry Coppers (New York: American Institute of Mining and Metallurgical Engineers, 1933);Google ScholarHollister, Victor, Geology of the Porphyry Copper Deposits of the Western Hemisphere (New York, 1978);Google Scholar and Bateman, Alan M., Economic Mineral Deposits (New York: John Wiley and Sons, Inc. 1981), 482.Google Scholar Given unlimited free energy, most metal reserves are limitless, as mineral distribution in very small quantities is vast, especially if ocean bottom nodules are considered. For an overview of the nodule aspect of copper, see Bowen, Robert and Gunatilaka, Ananda, Copper: Its Geology and Economics (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1977).Google Scholar

10 Brown, Nicol and Turnbull, Charles, A Century of Copper (London: Effingham Wilson, 1906), 20–21.Google Scholar

11 This type of social Darwinist thinking and language is found in the mining journals of all countries. Mining journals were read not just by mining engineers and investors, a conservative lot to this day, but also by the investing public. For most of the last century the leading journal in the United States has been the EMJ and in England, the Mining Journal of London. Both had an informational role like the contemporary Wall Street Journal. The Mining Journal's original title at its founding in 1835 was The Mining Journal, Railway and Commercial Gazette; Forming a Complete Record of the Proceedings of All Public Companies.

12 1848 refers to the date after which the United States had fall access to the lands of the West—lands that had earlier been a part of Mexico.

13 The best summary on the role of idea of progress in Latin America is Burns, E. Bradford, The Poverty of Progress: Latin America in the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).Google Scholar The authors have also been influenced by John Stanley's introduction to Sorell, Georges, The Illusions of Progress, John and Charlotte Stanley, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969).Google Scholar

14 A prominent version of this argument is made by Seymour Martin Lipset: “The evidence presented thus far would seem to indicate that, regardless of the causal patterns one prefers to credit for Latin American values, they are, as described, antithetic to the basic logic of a large-scale industrial system.” See his “Values, Education, and Entrepreneurship,” in Elites in Latin America, Seymour Martin Lipset and Aldo Solari, eds. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 32. Lipset develops this position as an outgrowth of the ideas of Max Weber on the requisites of economic development. “Structural conditions make development possible; cultural factors determine whether the possibility becomes an actuality” (p. 3).Google Scholar

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Another very recent expression of this view is found in Novak, Michael, “Why Latin America is Poor,” The Atlantic (March, 1982). Novak extends the present into the past when he writes, “Why, then, didn't Latin America become the richer of the two continents of the New World? The answer appears to be in the nature of the Latin American political system, economic system, and moral-cultural system. The last is probably decisive” (p. 67).Google Scholar

15 Most influential on this point is Reynolds, Clark Winton, “Development Problems of an Export Economy: The Case of Chile and Copper,” in Essays on the Chilean Economy, Mamalakis, Markos and Reynolds, Clark Winton, eds. (Homewood, Illinois: Richard D. Irwin, Inc., 1965). Reynolds draws a number of observations from secondary sources about nineteenth-century Chilean copper to conclude that Chilean entrepreneurs were outdated and backward in their outlook. “[T]here were few men in Chile at the turn of the century who had contacts with the large investment consortia and who were aware of the developments in copper technology and their potential application in Chilean mining” (p. 212). While these comments were directed at the years in which porphyry copper was just being developed, the statement implies, incorrectly, a chronic condition.Google Scholar

Less prominent but also significant in the downgrading of Chilean entrepreneurial ability is Pederson's, LelandThe Mining Industry of the Norte Chico, Chile (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University, 1966).Google Scholar A geographer, Pederson looks at silver, gold, and copper from the Conquest to the present, providing a broad historical perspective. A view similar to Reynolds is expressed: “The vast majority of Chile's mining entrepreneurs were incapable of adopting more than the simplest of the new techniques, such as oil lamps as a replacement for tallow candles” (p. 193).Google Scholar Again there is a blurring of the decades. Still other studies repeat these notions: Sumwald, Joseph and Musgrove, Philip, Natural Resources in Latin American Development (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1970), 167;Google ScholarConde, Robert Cortes, The First Stages of Modernization in Spanish America (New York: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1974), 69–71;Google ScholarMacDonnell, Lawrence, “The Politics of Expropriation, Chilean Style,” Quarterly of the Colorado School of Mines, 68:4 (October, 1973), 195–6; and Moran, Multinational Corporations, 20–22.Google Scholar

These studies assume a lack of effective nineteenth-century entrepreneurship in Chile. They ignore the years prior to the 1880s. The studies are also strongly influenced by the bitter twentieth-century copper analyses that appeared in Santiago as Chileans debated how to respond to the dominance of United States capital in the Chilean copper industry. The classic Chilean study is Encina, Francisco A., Nuestra inferioridad econdmica, sus causas y sus consequencias (Santiago: Imprenta Universitaria, 1912);Google Scholar also important is Varas, Santiago Macciavello, El problema de la industria del cobre en Chile y sus proyecciones econOmicas y sociales (Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 1923). Macciavello Varas is a key source for Reynold's position on the nineteenth century. The weakness of all of these studies, from our point of view, is their lack of discrimination about the decades from the 1840s to the 1880s.Google Scholar

16 Gras, N. S. B., Business and Capitalism (New York: F. S. Crofts and Co., 1939).Google Scholar

17 A useful summary of the older literature is found in Louis Galambos, “American Business History” (pamphlet, The Service Center, American Historical Association, n.d.).

18 Cochran, , “The Legend,” 320.Google Scholar

19 Cochran, , 320–1.Google Scholar

20 Chandler, Alfred D., Jr. “The Beginning of Big Business in American Industry,” The Business History Review, 33 (Spring, 1959), 6;CrossRefGoogle Scholar and argued subsequently in The Visible Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Belknap Press, 1971).Google Scholar

21 Chandler, , “the Beginning,” 9.Google Scholar

22 See n. 15 for a review of this literature.

23 Influential in forming this approach has been Charles Tilly, Big Structures.

24 Most historical studies of the copper industry focus on just one country or mining district. There are, however, several studies that take a comparative perspective on copper from a technical point-of-view: Brown, and Tumbull, , A Century;Google ScholarParsons, , The Porphyry Coppers;Google Scholar Bowen and Gunatilaka, Copper; Hollister, , Geology of the Porphyry Copper Deposits; and Otis Herfindal, Copper Costs and Prices: 1870–1957 (Baltimore, Maryland: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969).Google Scholar One popular description of copper mines is both interesting and useful: Joralemon, Ira B., Romantic Copper: Its Lure and Lores (New York: D. Appleton Century Co., 1934).Google Scholar

Among the many monographs and articles on Welsh and Cornish copper, the work of R. O. Roberts stands out. Especially important is his article cited above in n. 7: “Development and Decline.” For the United States regions, see Gates, William B., Jr., Michigan Copper and Boston Dollars: An Economic History of the Michigan Copper Mining Industry (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1951);CrossRefGoogle ScholarRichter, F. E., “The Copper Industry in the United States, 1845–1925,” Quarterly Journal of Economics, 41 (February and August, 1927), 236–91, and 684–717;CrossRefGoogle ScholarMurdock, Angus, Boom Copper: The Story of the First U.S. Mining Boom (Calumet, Michigan: Brier and Doepel, 1964);Google Scholar and Glasscock, C. B., The War of the Copper Kings (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1935).Google Scholar

For Chile, in addition to those works previously cited, see Miller, Benjamin L. and Singewald, Joseph T., The Mineral Deposits of South America (New York; McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1919);Google ScholarMamalakis, Markos, The Growth and Structure of the Chilean Economy: From Independence to Allende (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976);Google ScholarSayago, C. M., Historia de Copiapó (Copiapó: Imprenta de “El Atacama,” 1874);Google Scholar and Little, James M., The Geology and Metal Deposits of Chile (New York: The Bramwell Company, 1926).Google Scholar

Two studies specifically investigate the causes for the decline of Chilean copper, and the conditions that allowed for the takeover of the Chilean industry by United States capital. See Przeworski, Joanne Fox, The Decline of the Copper Industry in Chile and the Entrance of North American Capital, 1870–1916 (New York: Arno Press, 1980);Google Scholar and Bravo, Juan Alfonso, “United States' Investment in Chile: 1904–1907” (Masters thesis, Department of History, American University, Washington, D.C., 1980).Google Scholar

25 The MJ, from 1838 through 1848 in weekly chronicles, followed the Chilean pressure on the copper mines of Cornwall. The best contemporary review of this crisis is found in United Kingdom, House of Commons [Select Committee on Copper], British Sessional Papers, “Copper Ore: Copies of all Memorials and Petitions Presented to the Board of Trade, and to the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Respecting the Duty on Copper Ore, and Copies of the Answers Sent to the Applications Since January, 1849” (March 15, 1847).

26 Copper production statistics before 1880 are not always reliable, but they do provide a general production range useful for comparison. The mining regions listed in Table 1 constitute, each in its turn, the leading pre-1900 world producers.

27 Egleston, T., “The Port Shirley Copper Works,” School of Mines Quarterly, 7:4 (July, 1886), 1–25;Google Scholar and “Commerce and Progress of Chile”, Merchants Magazine and Commercial Review, 13 (1845), 325–6.Google Scholar

28 Gates, , Boston Dollars, 9–10.Google Scholar

29 Leshy, John D., The Mining Law: A Study in Perpetual Motion (Washington, D.C.: Resources for the Future, Inc., 1987). The entire book develops this theme, but chapters 1–3 are especially useful. This is the best overview of United States mining law and the law in mining history.Google Scholar

30 Mackenna, Benjamín Vicuña, El libro del cobre y del carbon de piedra en Chile (Santiago: Imprenta Cervantes, 1886). The views of Vicuña Mackenna are further supported by correspondence from industry leaders, which arrived too late for inclusion in this classic book—correspondence stored in the Archivo Nacional de Chile, Fondo Benjamín Vicuña MacKenna. In preparation for El Libro de Cobre, he wrote to all of the leaders in copper asking for their recollections and recommendations for the industry. Most helpful were letters from Juan Mackay, Guillermo C. Biggs, and Enrique Sewell.Google Scholar

31 Two sets of Chilean Congressional debates chronicled the position of landed agricultural interests in the face of calls for mining code reform. In both the Chamber of Deputies and the Senate, see the Boletín de las sesiones ordinarios de la Camara de Diputados and the same for the Senado for 1872 to 1874; and again for 1882 through 1888.

32 The Congressional debates of the 1870s and 1880s are a topic in and of themselves. Mine code reform implied restricting the rights of surface land owners. For a characteristic exchange, see Bolatín de las sesiones ordinarios del Senado, 24 July 1872, 102–6.Google Scholar

33 Beltran, Luz María Mendez, Instituciones y problemas de la mineria en Chile, 1784–1826 (Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 1979), 16–26;Google Scholar and MacKenna, Vicuna, El libro del cobre, 495.Google Scholar

34 Davis, John D., Corporations (New York: Capricorn Books, 1961), 262. In his last chapter, focusing on the modem corporation, Davis presents an interesting discussion of the role of corporations in the shift from extensive to intensive expansion. He sees a direct correlation between corporate organization and industrial growth.Google ScholarPubMed

35 Chouteau, Eujenio, Informe sobre la provincia de Coquimbo (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Nacional, 1887). His introduction is an expression of belief in inevitable progress, cast in terms of a strong copper industry needing a new impulse of modernization.Google Scholar

36 For example Carlos Cousino and Marcial Gatica were importing the latest copper smelting equipment in 1884. Minister of Luco, Hacienda Barros, in Boletín de las sesiones ordinarios del Senado, 7 October, 1884, 575.Google Scholar

37 Thomas O'Brien, in tracing the movement of Chilean capital into the Chilean nitrate mines, clearly shows that capital was available in Chile during this period, but he does not look into the copper industry's problems, in “The Antofagasta Company: A Case Study of Peripheral Capitalism,” Hispanic American Historical Review, 60:1 (1980), 1–31.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

38 “The native ‘baretoris’ or miner is a skillful workman, unsurpassed by the miner of any other country in the mere handicraft of his calling, more enduring and more expert in the handling of his tools than a Cornishman. … The Chilean miner … handles both hammer and drill, a mode of mining known as singlehand drilling, which is growing in favor in some of the mining districts of the United States.” J. D., Jr., “Chili, Her Mines and Miners-II,” EMJ, 38 (July 26, 1884), 55.Google Scholar

39 Whiteman, Maxwell, Copper for America: The Hendricks Family and a National Industry, 1755–1939 (New Brunswick, N.J., 1971), 207–8.Google Scholar Also see Maurice Zeitlin, “Class, State, and Capitalist Development: The Civil Wars in Chile (1851 and 1859),” in Continuities in Structural Inquiry, Blau, Peter M. and Merton, Robert K. eds. (Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, 1981), 121–64.Google Scholar

40 Support for this interpretation of the role of the American Civil War is somewhat controversial. The authors follow the case made by Moore, Barrington, Jr., Social Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy Lord and Peasant in the Making of the Modern World (Boston: Beacon Press, 1966),Google Scholar especially 141. The same argument is made in a novel but very useful manner by Wilson, Major L., “The Concept of Time and the Political Dialogue in the United States, 1828–1848,” American Quarterly, 19 (1907), 619–44.CrossRefGoogle Scholar Wilson observes the South's insistence on clinging to the past, represented by slavery, as distorting the national debate over economic development and forcing the debate towards conflict between the parties of the “past” and the “present.” Also useful is Eugene Genovese's several works on the Southern mind, especially his The Political Economy of Slavery (New York: Pantheon Books, 1965),Google ScholarPubMed ch. 1. Taylor, William R. makes much the same argument with different sources in his classic, Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1961).Google Scholar

41 Commission, U.S. Revenue, The Copper Crisis in the United States (Washington, D.C., 1866), 11, 13, 15, 17 and 19. See also Congressional Globe, 40th Cong., 3d sess. (January 18, 1969), 416.Google Scholar

42 Revenue, U.S. Commission, Copper, 12.Google Scholar

43 During this time the American copper industry split over struggle between smelting interests in Maryland and mines in Michigan and Tennessee. The seaboard smelters wanted low-cost, tariff-free Chilean ore. See proceedings of Congressional debates on HR1460, “To Regulate the Duties on Imported Copper and Copper Ores.” The debate extended throughout the 40th Congress, Third Session, from December 1868 to February 1869. See also the Second Session debates in the Congressional Globe; EMJ, 4 (07 25, 1867), 56; and 7 (January 2, 1869), 2.Google Scholar

44 Revenue, U.S. Commission, Copper, p. 15.Google Scholar

45 Congressional Globe, 40th Cong., 3d sess. (January 18, 1869).Google Scholar During the session Senator Zachariah Chandler of Michigan spoke endlessly about Chilean copper. His emotional pleas included a mixture of exaggerated and mistaken claims. “Copper is an interest that is absolutely being crushed by foreign competition—the competition of convict raised ores in Chile” (p. 416).Google Scholar

46 Congressional Globe, 40th Cong., 3d sess. (January 18, 1869), 416.Google Scholar

47 The Montana-Michigan copper price war is thoroughly reviewed in Toole, K. Ross, “A History of Anaconda Copper Mining Company: A Study in the Relationships Between a State and Its People and a Corporation, 1850–1950” (Ph.D. Thesis, Department of History, University of California at Los Angeles, 1954).Google Scholar

48 A typical comment of the era is found in the EMJ, 35:22 (June 2, 1883): “But yet a glance at the figures which illustrate the excessive growth of copper production will show the careful student and speculator that our American markets can no longer stand the tension of such burdens as are heaped upon them by the ambitious operators of mines. And so we are confronted by a new question: Are we ready to try to experiment the problem of shifting the battle from home to foreign fields, where we come into competition with the pauper labor of Spanish-speaking people and the inexhaustible beds of Chile, Africa, Portugal, Spain, and Australia?” (p. 313).Google Scholar

49 Since the 1840s, Chilean smelted copper was exported in bars 6 x 2 x 2 inches. In Europe and North America this “Chili bar” became the international standard for forward copper trading due to its consistent high quality and dominating abundance. Each bar was stamped with the name of the smelter of origin (interview with Sr. Claudio Canut de Bon Urrutia, July 17, 1980, Museo de Antropología de La Serena, Chile). Old Chili bars from several smelters are on display in the museum in La Serena.

50 Dumping of surplus production was standard procedure for North American industry during the era. See Crapol, Edward D. and Schonberger, Howard, “The Shift to Global Expansion, 1865–1900,” in From Colony to Empire: Essays in the History of American Foreign Relations, Williams, William Appleman, ed. (New York, 1972), 186.Google Scholar

51 The legislative fight was led by William Stewart of Nevada. See the Congressional Globe, 39th Congress, 1st sess. Senate Bill 157, 3548.

52 Ibid.

53 Doherty, William, Minerals Conservation in the U.S.: A Documentary History (New York: 1971), 542–55.Google Scholar See also Leshy, , The Mining Law.Google Scholar

54 “Foreign Copper and Lead Mines”, EMJ, 37 (1884), 456.Google Scholar

55 Hewitt, Abram S., “A Century of Mining and Metallurgy in the U.S.,” EMJ, 21 (1876), 609.Google Scholar

56 Hewitt, , “A Century of Mining,” 612.Google Scholar

57 Ibid., 614.

58 “Foreign Copper and Lead Mines”, EMJ, 37 (1884), 456.Google Scholar

59 “Copper—Arizona's Place Along the Producing Regions,” the San Francisco Bulletin, reprinted in EMJ, 32 (1881), 22.Google Scholar

60 “Foreign Copper and Lead Mines”, EMJ, 37 (1884), 456.Google Scholar

61 Ibid.

62 “The Copper Question,” EMJ, 47 (1889), 452.Google Scholar

63 See Toole, “A History of the Anaconda,” for a detailed analysis at the state level; and Tausig, Frank William, Some Aspects of the Tariff Question (Cambridge: Howard University Press, 1915), 161–70, for an analysis of federal copper politics.Google Scholar

64 Voskuil, Walter H., “Copper,” Minerals in World Industry (Port Washington, N.Y., 1930), 226–7;Google Scholar and Chandler, Alfred D., “The Beginning,” 28–31.Google Scholar

65 Chouteau, , lnforme.Google Scholar

66 Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Libro del cobre. Vicuña Mackenna expressed this view clearly (authors' translation): “All we ask of the country, that is of government, or the legislators and of the people, is three things, simple and indispensable, urgent and lifesaving: 1. Abolition of the copper tax; 2. Reform of the mining code; and 3. A railway uniting the entire north” (p. 604).

67 “La cuesti6n minera,” Boletín de la Sociedad Nacional de Mineria—Revista Minera, 1:2 (01, 1884), 9–10 [hereafter Boletín.]Google Scholar

68 Mackenna, Vicuna, Libro de cobre, 513–7.Google Scholar

69 This is implied through numerous references in Pedro Pablo Figueróa, , Historia de la RevoluciOn Constituyente, 1858–1859 (Santiago, 1889). See also an important analysis of these wars taking a somewhat different view in Zeitlin, “Class, State, and Capitalist Development.”Google Scholar

70 Encina, Francisco, Historia de Chile desde la prehistoria hasta 1891 (Santiago, 1940), 52.Google Scholar

71 Figueróa, , Historia, 31.Google Scholar

72 Chouteau, , lnforme, 2.Google Scholar

73 “Annual Review of the Metal Markets for 1882,” EMI, 35 (01 20, 1883), 27–28.Google Scholar

74 Boletin, 1:12 (30 04, 1884), 94.Google Scholar

75 See all issues of Bolean, 1 (1883–1884).Google Scholar

76 For an analysis of this process in the United States, see Robert, H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1887–1920 (New York, 1967).Google Scholar

77 Boletin, 1 (1883–1884), all issues.Google Scholar

78 Boletin, 1:1 (15 12 1883), 1–2; and 1:2 (1 January 1884), 9–10.Google Scholar

79 Ibid.

80 Ibid.

81 Bravo, , “U.S. Investment,” 53.Google Scholar

82 Ibid.

83 Boletín, 1:12 (1 06 1884), 101–2;Google Scholar and Boletín, 3:49 (15 December, 1885), 389.Google Scholar

84 Boletín, 5:4 (31 10 1888), 15; and 6:7 (31 January 1889), 193–208.Google ScholarPubMed

85 There is some confusion in existing writing on various minerals and their regulations in nineteenth-century Chile. For example, in his study of the Chilean economy Markos Mamalakis touches on nineteenth-century copper at several points, making the familiar argument about the incapacity of the copper sector to modernize, but he makes an additional important reference to government policy: “If true laissez-faire ever came close to existence in Chile, it was in nitrate and copper mining” (p. 40). While he is correct in pointing to policy as a factor to be examined, the two minerals, nitrate and copper, were produced under wholly different legal bases prior to 1888. Copper was highly regulated, nitrate not at all.

86 “Código de Mineria,” Bolaín, 6:7 (31 01 1889), 194.Google Scholar

87 Bolean, Serie 2:9 (31 03 1889), 237.Google Scholar

88 Bolain, Serie 2:37 (1 07, 31 10 1891), 190–2.Google Scholar

89 La Riqueza Minera de Chile, 1:1 (September, 1921), 29.Google Scholar

90 Varas, Santiago Macciavello, “Breve estudio,” La Riqueza Minera de Chile, 3:28 (01, 1925), 509.Google Scholar

91 “The Copper Question”, EMJ, 47 (1889), 452.Google Scholar

92 Ibid., 473.