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Chile
Index
The government played a significant role in the
colonial
economy. It regulated and allocated labor, distributed
land,
granted monopolies, set prices, licensed industries,
conceded
mining rights, created public enterprises, authorized
guilds,
channeled exports, collected taxes, and provided
subsidies. Outside
the capital city, however, colonists often ignored or
circumvented
royal laws. In the countryside and on the frontier, local
landowners and military officers frequently established
and
enforced their own rules.
The economy expanded under Spanish rule, but some
criollos
complained about royal taxes and limitations on trade and
production. Although the crown required that most Chilean
commerce
be with Peru, smugglers managed to sustain some illegal
trade with
other American colonies and with Spain itself. Chile
exported to
Lima small amounts of gold, silver, copper, wheat, tallow,
hides,
flour, wine, clothing, tools, ships, and furniture.
Merchants,
manufacturers, and artisans became increasingly important
to the
Chilean economy.
Mining was significant, although the volume of gold and
silver
extracted in Chile was far less than the output of Peru or
Mexico.
The conquerors appropriated mines and washings from the
native
people and coerced them into extracting the precious metal
for the
new owners. The crown claimed one-fifth of all the gold
produced,
but the miners frequently cheated the treasury. By the
seventeenth
century, depleted supplies and the conflict with the
Araucanians
reduced the quantity of gold mined in Chile.
Because precious metals were scarce, most Chileans
worked in
agriculture. Large landowners became the local elite,
often
maintaining a second residence in the capital city.
Traditionally,
most historians have considered these great estates
(called
haciendas or fundos) inefficient and exploitive,
but some
scholars have claimed that they were more productive and
less cruel
than is conventionally depicted.
The haciendas initially depended for their existence on
the
land and labor of the indigenous people. As in the rest of
Spanish
America, crown officials rewarded many conquerors
according to the
encomienda
(see Glossary) system, by which a group
of native
Americans would be commended or consigned temporarily to
their
care. The grantees, called encomenderos, were
supposed to
Christianize their wards in return for small tribute
payments and
service, but they usually took advantage of their charges
as
laborers and servants. Many encomenderos also
appropriated
native lands. Throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries,
the encomenderos fended off attempts by the crown
and the
church to interfere with their exploitation of the
indigenous
people.
The Chilean colony depended heavily on coerced labor,
whether
it was legally slave labor or, like the wards of the
encomenderos, nominally free. Wage labor initially
was rare
in the colonial period; it became much more common in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Because few native
Americans
or Africans were available, the mestizo population became
the main
source of workers for the growing number of
latifundios (see
Glossary), which were basically synonymous with haciendas.
Those workers attached to the estates as tenant farmers
became
known as inquilinos. Many of them worked outside
the cash
economy, dealing in land, labor, and barter. The
countryside was
also populated by small landholders
(minifundistas), migrant
workers (afuerinos), and a few Mapuche holding
communal
lands (usually under legal title).
Data as of March 1994
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