Miners Merchants and Farmers in Colonial Colombia

<p>The inhabitants of the department of Antioquía in north-central Colombia have played a unique role in that country's economic history. During the colonial period Antioqueño placer miners supplied a substantial portion of New Granada's gold exports. Their nineteenth-century descendants pioneered investments in lode mining colonization international commerce banking stock raising tobacco and coffee. In the twentieth century Antioqueños initiated the industrialization of the regional capital Medellín.</p> <p>Many theories have been set forth to account for the special energy and initiative of Antioqueños. They range from ethnic and psychological interpretations (Antioqueños are descended from Jews or Basques; they are driven to succeed because of status deprivation) to historical explanations that emphasize their geographic isolation mining heritage or the coffee-export economy. In <i>Miners Merchants and Farmers in Colonial Colombia</i> Ann Twinam critiques these theories and sets forth her own revisionist interpretation of Antioqueño enterprise. Rather than emphasize the alien or deviant in Antioqueño psychology or culture Twinam re-creates the region's late colonial economic and social structure and attributes the origins of Antioqueño enterprise to a particular mix of human and natural resources that directed the region's development toward capital accumulation and reinvestment.</p> <p>Although the existing limitations of their colonial environment may have forced Antioqueños along enterprising pathways initially the continuation of Antioqueño investments to the present day suggests that their adaptation to a specific economic reality became a way of life transcending the historical conditions that created it.</p>