The Early Colombian Labor Movement: Artisans and Politics in Bogota, 1832-1919.

The literature on Colombian labor has tended to neglect nineteenth-century artisans. Miguel Urrutia's The Development of the Colombian Labor Movement (Yale University Press, 1969) devoted less than a sixth of the 258 pages to the nineteenth century--most of that focusing on the Bogota artisans' society of 1847-54--before moving on to twentieth-century labor movements. Most other Colombian historians who have treated nineteenth-century artisans have limited their attention to the dramatic artisan mobilization of 1847-54 and the artisans' revolution of 1854. Sowell, while shedding new light on those events, also provides an extended, multi-decade treatment of Bogota's artisans throughout the nineteenth century.

Sowell's monograph deals primarily with the politics and ideology of Bogota's artisans, providing relatively little information about them as a social group and none about the technical conditions under which they worked. It is, for example, never clear in this book how many artisans there were in Bogota at any point during the nineteenth century. The book's limitations as social history are determined largely by the kinds of sources available. Much local information was lost when Bogota's municipal offices burned in 1903 and riots destroyed the departmental and diocesan archives in 1948. Further, nineteenth-century census material for Bogota is spotty at best. Consequently, Sowell has to depend heavily on published materials, particularly newspapers and pamphlets. These he exploits extensively and well. If Sowell's study is limited by the available archival material, his analysis is usefully informed by a wide reading in the relevant literature on artisans and labor movements in England, France, the United States, and other parts of Latin America.

Sowell begins his study with a brief analysis of Bogota society and the artisans' position in it, followed by a survey of economic patterns in nineteenth-century Colombia. His second chapter skillfully treats the development of Colombia's political culture, and the role of Bogota's artisans in it, in the 1830s and 1840s. Subsequent chapters deal with the background to and the aftermath of the artisans' revolution of 1854, artisans and politics in the late 1860s, and the changing character of artisans' organizations in the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth.

Sowell emphasizes that artisans' organizations had to function in the context of economic decline brought on by increasing competition from imported goods and of the problems created for them by elite partisan politics. Although Sowell tends to minimize this, Colombian artisans were already feeling pressure from imported goods by 1830. Nonetheless, as he correctly notes, the problem was accentuated ca. 1847 by the simultaneous lowering of tariffs and introduction of reliable, and lower-cost, steamboat transportation on the Magdalena River. Because Bogota's artisans perennially were pinched by competition from imports, their most consistent plea was for protection from foreign goods. However, as Sowell points out, artisans' organizations also frequently called for free education, technical training, and better access to credit.

Elite partisan politics bedevilled artisans and their organizations seemingly as much as competition from imported goods. Since Colombian suffrage provisions permitted artisans to vote, from the 1830s all elite political factions sought to mobilize artisan support, often, however, cynically abandoning the artisans and their concerns after elections were over. The most notorious example of this occurred in 1847-54. When Bogota's artisans organized to protest the lowered tariff of 1847, elite Liberal politicians coopted the artisans' organization and won some electoral support from artisans by promising to raise the tariff again. Once in office, however, radical Liberals reneged on this pledge. Disillusioned by the radical Liberals' deceit on the tariff and also repelled by their anti-clericalism, the artisans turned against them. Ultimately, in an atmosphere of class warfare, Bogota's artisans in 1854 joined the capital's military garrison in a (short-lived) revolutionary coup. On their return to power, the political elites retaliated by sending large number of Bogota's artisans to exile in the jungles of Panama.

During the ferment of 1847-54, as in the late 1830s, both Liberals and Conservatives competed for artisan support, thereby dividing the artisans as an interest group. This pattern continued throughout the period that Sowell covers, despite sporadic efforts by artisan leaders to avoid entanglement in elite partisan competition. Beyond the division of their forces, artisans also suffered disproportionately from the many civil wars fought on behalf of elite partisan ambitions, for artisans, often as members of the National Guard, frequently were dragged into military service.

Through most of the nineteenth century the artisans appear to have conceived of themselves as a more-or-less homogeneous social group. By the first decades of the twentieth century, they had became differentiated into industriales (industrial entrepreneurs) and workers. During a brief transitional period some industriales and workers were joined in single organizations to drop the perennial insistence on tariff protection in favor of a preoccupation with higher wages. By ca. 1910-1916, Colombia was entering the stage of modern labor unionization.

There is much in this work that cannot be reflected in the preceding summary. One might disagree about some secondary matters of interpretation and raise a few quibbles about translation and even one small matter of fact (Carlos Martin was a lawyer, not an artisan). But this is an excellent book, informative and analytically sophisticated, from which I have learned a good deal.

Frank Safford Northwestern University