Population and economy in Present day Bolivia - 18th century

Abstract

When Alexander von Humboldt arrived in South America at the beginning of the 19th century, the majority of the population lived in the highlands, on the mountains, a population pattern that distinguishes the Andes from the rest of the world (Mathieu, 2013). For the German naturalist, agriculture was the key to understanding the distribution of the population because mining -although the most important economic activity of the Spanish empire- implied only few workers (Humboldt in Brown, 2012: 89). His view influenced different contemporary analysis on population and economy, and also the most recent synthesis written by Brown (2012). Although Humboldt visited only few peripheral mines in South America, his impression was shared by many other observers. This particular distribution had, moreover, a long history of social, economic and political development: two important pre-Hispanic regional societies, Tiwanaku (650-1050 Current Era) and the Inkas (1200-1533 C.E.), had developed over 3500 meters above sea level. The European conqueror reinforced this population distribution pattern according to the organization of mining activities and indigenous labour. In fact, the colonial economy was based on existing population patterns, using the abundant labour force available in the highlands to organize the work of the mines and the haciendas. This characteristic has been one of the contrasts, for example, with Mexico, where miners had to organize the labour force differently because this activity had settled in sparsely populated regions. However, those existing population patterns changed significantly throughout the centuries of colonial rule due the model imposed by the new economic and social logic. And the changes were definitely not lineal. In this article I will analyze a moment in particular, the end of colonial times the period when Humboldt arrived and I will reconstruct the changes the Andean population experienced until the independence wars. My study focuses on a portion of the Andes known as Charcas in colonial times, now part of present day Bolivia, which was the center of the colonial economy at least during its mining boom. What I found in the main source of this study, the 1778 census, is the result of different processes that took place since the conquest: demographic collapse of native population, arrival of European and African population that settled, above all, in the economic and administrative centers, urbanization, intense interethnic mixing processes although geographically concentrated- and an important redistribution of the population that took place throughout the 17th century. Of all these factors, the last one is particularly interesting for demographers, because it contradicts Humboldt?s assertion: mining did matter regarding population analysis. I propose that the demographic changes caused by the peculiar and early organization of the labour force (during the 1570s) were so significant that they persisted even when mining activity had declined in comparison with its climax which was between the end of the 16th century and the beginning of the 17th. The paper is divided in three main parts: in the first, I will describe some of the topics that oriented the explanations of the demographic pattern in the Andes; in the second, I will reconstruct the demographic processes that contributed to the changes observed in the data gathered in the 1778 census in present day Bolivia; finally, I will analyze the census and discuss the topics.