The article analyzes the mechanisms that allowed families, workers and communities to gain access to lands of mayorazgos and municipal corporations. The territory adjacent to the city of Veracruz in New Spain is taken as a space of analysis, in a period that begins in the last decades of the seventeenth century and ends in the initial phase of Bourbon militarization. During that period, a hierarchical and ethnically diverse society was consolidated and its members settled in haciendas, ranches and places, where they dedicated themselves to carrying out different productive activities. The access and permanence of families in their sites is explained by the importance of piety, custom, and the notions of justice and common good as referents of a shared culture that influenced the agreements made by owners, administrators, tenants and stewards to distribute the usufruct of the land and reduce conflicts. These circumstances produced a variety of property rights that did not always need written testimony when the compromises established between the social actors were the parameter that gave them value and durability.

This research takes a new look at the formation of nineteenth-century socialism in Peru. Although previous studies have shown that since at least 1848 this intellectual current redefined the political language in the West and other more developed nations of Latin America, little is known about how Peru, a country with an indigenous peasant majority, gave room to some of the most radical socialist projects in the world by the 1920s. Through a study of newspapers, monographs, and government documents, this article argues that by the end of the nineteenth century, despite the absence of a vanguard party and a robust working class, Peruvian society had developed sophisticated ideas about socialism in which European but also “pre-Hispanic” traditions that reformulated modern interpretations of private property, social revolution, and the nation. These visions of Peru would become more recurrent and politicized in the twentieth century.

In the first decades of the 20th century, various initiatives were undertaken to diversify the productive structure of the province of Mendoza, which had specialized in winemaking since 1890. This article addresses the evolution of malting barley cultivation in Mendoza between 1914 and 1935, employing information from Statistical Yearbooks of the province of Mendoza, agricultural magazines, newspapers, and legislative debates. We seek to identify business and state strategies for the development of malting and brewing activities within the framework of the drive for productive diversification in a predominantly wine-producing province, the impact of World War I and the Great Depression on the beer industry. We also analyze the evolution of barley plantations, identifying the main cultivation areas, in order to determine the scope of these initiatives for the development of the new agroindustrial activity. The main argument put forward is that, as part of its business strategies aimed at consolidating malt and beer production in different parts of the country, in Mendoza the Bemberg group made significant investments to develop the cultivation of malted barley and the production of malt and beer, thus achieving self-sufficiency in the supply of a fundamental input that until then had been imported.

Este número de la revista Historia Agraria de América Latina, al igual que el anterior (v. 5, n. 2, publicado en noviembre de 2024), conforman un dossier sobre el tema de fronteras de mercancías. Para ello, hemos publicado un conjunto de artículos que surgen de agendas de investigación en torno al análisis de las formas históricas del capitalismo en diversas regiones exportadoras o mercantilizadas del Gran Caribe y de América del Sur. La mayoría de los estudios se centra en el siglo XIX y la primera mitad del siglo XX, periodo de fuerte vinculación de las economías latinoamericanas con el mercado global. Los artículos abordan mercancías agrícolas, forestales, pecuarias y piscícolas. Una primera lectura sobre las contribuciones recibidas nos habla directamente de la complejidad estructural de América Latina, un espacio que desafía los esquemas de análisis rígidos y exige enfoques que reconozcan la heterogeneidad de sus procesos históricos, las conexiones transregionales y las múltiples escalas de articulación.  El presente ensayo es una introducción teórica del dossier sobre fronteras de mercancías, que busca establecer puentes históricos e intelectuales entre este enfoque y América Latina. El texto está organizado de la siguiente manera: primero, haremos una breve exposición de algunos de los postulados que se han planteado alrededor de la idea de fronteras de mercancías. En segundo lugar, explicaremos la relevancia histórica e intelectual que tiene este concepto para la historia de América Latina, así como la manera en que es deudor de muchas de las ideas y discusiones que se dieron en el pasado en torno a los problemas del subdesarrollo en la región. Finalmente, haremos una exposición ampliada de los aspectos centrales de los artículos publicados en las dos entregas que conforman el dossier temático.

This paper shows how the animal resources of the Orinoco played a decisive role in the military success of the Venezuelan and Colombian Independentistas between 1818 and 1821. It first analyzes the constitution of new agricultural activities in the Orinoco from the 18th century onwards, mainly cattle raising, essentially through the work of religious orders. Then it is demonstrated that, through international trade, the resources of the Orinoco were exported mainly to the Caribbean, where mules and cattle were indispensable for the mills (and also for feeding, in the case of cattle). Thus, this work aims to demonstrate that commerce between the cattle commodity frontier of the Orinoco and the consolidated and the sugar commodity frontier of the Caribbean enabled the patriot army of Venezuela and Colombia to defeat the Spanish forces.

This article analyzes the mechanisms that the state implemented to solve the social conflict over land and massive deforestation, but that ultimately deepened the exclusion of indigenous and peasant communities, strengthened the hacienda system and the forest industry, and consolidated the agrarian and forest capitalist model in the Araucanía region (Chile) between 1920 and 1955. It examines how four state policies, namely the Forestry Law of 1931, the Southern Property Law, Law 4169 of 1927 on the division of indigenous lands, and the Agricultural Colonization Fund, were key in the process of deepening agrarian and forest capitalism. The main argument proposed is that these state policies consolidated state domination in La Araucanía. Thus, we find that the Chilean case of land and forest commodification did not follow paths like those of countries such as Mexico and Colombia, where state management of forests and lands responded to the conflict between actors with policies less exclusive of indigenous communities and peasants. The study uses maps, agricultural censuses, and legislation to trace changes in land and forest ownership and use, and the social implications of La Araucanía's integration into capitalism and the Chilean state.

This article analyzes the expansion of the commodity frontier in northern Chilean Patagonia (Palena and Aysén provinces) in the context of the military dictatorship and neoliberal reforms (1973-1990). From this analysis, we present the particular combination of State and capitalism that characterizes this historical process, in which this territory is defined as an empty space and its occupation is imposed through economic activities of transnational projection, such as salmon farming and tourism. Both processes lead to a complex commercialization of local water resources and a new tourist valuation of nature. The article is based on a geographic-historical approach and a qualitative methodology of content analysis, in which the propositional content of archives and documents of key institutions of this process (ODEPLAN, SERPLAC, CORFO, IREN-CIREN, Fundación Chile) is analyzed.