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Mechanisation in the Periphery: The Experience of Chilean Agriculture, c. 1850–90

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 September 2018

CLAUDIO ROBLES-ORTIZ
CLAUDIO ROBLES-ORTIZ*
Affiliation:
Department of EconomicsUniversidad de Santiago de Chile
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Abstract:

This article examines mechanisation during the period of export-led growth in Chilean agriculture, c. 1850–90. According to conventional wisdom, since labour was cheap, landowners did not modernise their haciendas. The introduction of machinery was late and superficial; the large estate remained backward and inefficient. This view is flawed by lack of quantitative evidence and a narrow approach. Using imports and stocks data, and case material from the National Agricultural Society's bulletin, the article presents an alternative interpretation. The development of the market for agricultural equipment involved a fruitful exchange of technical expertise between the foreign importing companies and local landowners and experts. Mechanisation solved labour supply bottlenecks, and developed primarily on harvest tasks, above all the threshing of wheat. The scale and pattern of mechanisation were consistent with the development of this process in other countries’ older agricultures. The area mechanically harvested was much larger than previously estimated. Mechanisation was a significant transformation in the agricultural sector.

Type
Research Article
Information
Rural History , Volume 29 , Issue 2 , October 2018 , pp. 195 - 216
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Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2018 

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References

Notes

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49. Garrabou, ‘Sobre el atraso’, 41–4.

50. Following Collins's work for north-western European countries, this estimate considers that a reaper could cut 25 hectares in a season. Bauer used Drouilly and Cuadra's estimates of the number of reapers, and considered an area of 400,000 hectares in wheat and 100,000 hectares in barley (the Anuario Estadístico recorded an area slightly smaller: 469,334 hectares); Bauer, Chilean Rural, p. 105; Anuario Estadístico: Agricultura (1879), pp. 105–06; and Collins, E. J. T., ‘Labour Supply and Demand in European Agriculture 1800–1880’, in Jones, E. L. and Wolf, S. J., eds, Agrarian Change and Economic Development: The Historical Problems (London, 1969), pp. 74–7Google Scholar.

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52. This estimate of four hectares per day for a mechanical reaper drawn by oxen in Chile in the 1870s is consistent with evidence for the US. Citing the 1860 US census, Rogin considered that ‘a common reaper’ drawn by horses cut from ten to twelve acres (roughly four to five hectares) in a twelve-hour day. Olmstead and Rhode estimated that in the 1850s a mechanical reaper had a capacity to cut at least 110 acres in a three-to-four-week period, and also indicate that farmers exceeded this capacity by using the machine on more than one farm. They also consider that that figure increased with the improvement in machines, so that by the 1880s it would be significantly higher. See Rogin, L., The Introduction of Farm Machinery in its Relation to the Productivity of Labor in the Agriculture of the United States during the Nineteenth Century (Berkeley, 1931), p. 160Google Scholar; Olmstead, A. L. and Rhode, P. W., ‘Beyond the threshold: an analysis of the characteristics and behavior of early reaper adopters’, Journal of Economic History, 55:1 (1995), 27–57CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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54. ‘Del trabajo de las máquinas de trillar y otros datos tomados de una cosecha’, BSNA, IV:3 (5th March 1872), 255–61.

55. Adelman, J., Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890–1914 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 2, 238CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56. Collins, ‘Labour Supply’, p. 74.

57. Ibid., p. 75 (Table III).

58. Barros, ‘La introducción’, 242.

59. ‘Almanaque Agrícola: Trabajos del mes de febrero’, BSNA, V:8 (5th February 1874), 8.

60. Anuario Estadístico: Estadística Agrícola (Santiago, 1875), p. 686.

61. Lindsay, ‘Ensayo’, p. 530.

62. Anuario Estadístico de la República de Chile, Estadística Agrícola (Santiago, 1867–8), p. 391.

63. Table 3 presents lower-bound figures because, by including a large number of machines without specifying their use, the agricultural statistics understate the number of reapers.

64. ‘Descripción Estadística del Departamento de Lontué’, Anuario Estadístico de la República de Chile: Agricultura (Santiago, 1875–6), p. 140.

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