Pamela S. Murray
Inspiration for The Early Colombian Labor Market: Artisans and Politics in Bogotá, 1832–1919 came to David Sowell in the mid-1970s when, while a student at the University of Western Kentucky, he paid a visit to a small highland town in the northeastern Colombian department of Santander. He was accompanying Dr. Edmund Hagen, a well-known professor of geography, for a local soil utilization project. The town brimmed with craftsmen or artisans who specialized in the traditional work of weaving blankets and ruanas (Colombian-style ponchos) and who allowed the curious young foreigner to interview them. Sowell was fascinated. “It was obvious this [work] was the center of their lives,” he would recall later for his own interviewer.1 Sowell’s interest in the experiences of artisans and their place in Colombian history eventually led him to the University of Florida where, while studying for his doctorate under the guidance of Colombia specialist David Bushnell, he completed the dissertation that became the basis of the present volume.
Sowell’s book remains a pioneering contribution to modern Latin American labor and social history. Until the early 1990s, most U.S. historians with an interest in Latin America’s working classes focused on the experiences of twentieth-century industrial wage labor, especially organized labor, within a few of the larger countries of the region, that is, Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina. Their writings overall reflected the pervasive influence of modernization theory, including the assumption that, despite being a minority within the larger workforce, industrial workers were the leading edge of a modernizing process destined to positively transform their countries along with the lives of Latin America’s poor masses. Scholars influenced by ideas associated with 1970s dependency theory, meanwhile, tended to see such workers as potential agents of social reform or revolution.
While not ignoring these major theoretical and historiographical currents of the time, Sowell blazed his own scholarly trail. Upon its 1992 publication, his book stood out for at least two reasons. It examined workers in a relatively unknown (or lesser-known) country whose industrial sector had not advanced as rapidly or grown as dominant as its counterparts elsewhere in the region. And, above all, it explored the country’s preindustrial labor history, in particular an era in which urban-based manufacturing remained in the hands of independent artisans and, only slowly and unevenly, toward the end of the nineteenth century shifted to large-scale mechanized factories operated by wage workers. Sowell’s inquiry into the organizational and political activities of nineteenth-century Bogota artisans also showed the value of thinking outside the Marxian-dependista box that had prevented most labor historians, at least in Colombia, from exploring a vital precursor of Colombia’s twentieth-century labor movements.
More important, Sowell’s sober, archivally based study charts the decades-long effort of Bogota’s craftsmen (virtually no women appear here) to stave off or ameliorate the corrosive effects of free-trade liberalism—that is, economic policies that, in opening the country to foreign competition, i.e., cheaper British- (and later, U.S.-) made goods, also threatened the craftsmen’s livelihoods and status as independent producers. It shows how artisans united to protect their common socioeconomic interests by founding, in 1847, the Sociedad de Artesanos. The Sociedad launched some of the first attempts to repeal liberal economic legislation, petitioning legislators to restore protective tariffs and invest in artisan education. Yet more interesting, it and its successor organizations participated in key public debates on fiscal, economic, and social welfare policy. Its leaders mobilized craftsmen to go to the polls during elections to vote for favored candidates. Although artisans of the Sociedad eventually distanced themselves from their early Liberal allies, the young Radicals in particular, they continued to engage in politics, collaborate with representatives of the country’s two main political parties (Liberal and Conservative), and through the 1860s, shape Colombia’s boisterous public sphere and evolving two-party political system. By the late 1860s, struggling to preserve an independent voice and protect their professional interests, their sympathies lay increasingly with Conservatives and Independent Liberals. As Sowell demonstrates, their once stable and independent way of life was gradually giving way to a more complicated, competitive reality marked by the growing presence of proletarians and industrialism. Organized artisans ultimately (if only temporarily) found help in figures like Rafael Nuñez, who, together with other founders of the Regeneration regime (1885–1899), promised to restore their fading world.
It is Sowell’s revelation of artisans’ contributions to foundational Colombian conflicts and, in turn, Colombian nation-making, that continues to intrigue historians, particularly students of Colombia’s still understudied nineteenth-century history. Sowell’s work, in short, is more than a study of a particular set of workers and their struggles. It is a bottom-up analysis of nineteenth-century Colombian political history, an early example of the social history of politics, and to some extent, although artisans represented an elite among workers, an example of so-called subaltern studies. We learn, for example, of the dilemma artisan leaders faced in dealing with Colombian political elites who courted them as allies; of the spaces and opportunities opened to them by the intensifying rivalry between Liberals and Conservatives, competing with each other to attract new voters, adherents, and clients; and of the bitter lessons learned after the Sociedad embraced the Liberal cause and contributed to its 1849 electoral triumph, only to be rewarded with Radical leaders’ betrayal and their side stepping of artisans’ key legislative goals.
Why does such a history matter? It matters if we want to understand modern Colombia, a nation where, through the middle decades of the twentieth century, one’s partisan affiliation could mean the difference between life and death and where a tendency to identify with one of the country’s two traditional parties has endured longer perhaps than in any other Latin American nation. It matters, too, in light of the struggles that continue to be waged by ordinary working Colombians, many of whom remain desperate for a voice and means to secure some modicum of dignity, security, and prosperity.
PAMELA S. MURRAY is Professor of History at the University of Alabama at Birmingham.
Note
1. Translation of quote found in Victoria Peralta and Michael LaRosa, “David Sowell: Entrevista realizada en Washington, D.C., September 29, 1995,” in Los Colombianistas (Bogota: Planeta Editorial, 1997), 258-59.