El arduo tránsito hacia la modernidad: Historia de la industria textil colombiana durante la primera mitad del siglo XX

Abstract

Santiago Montenegro’s book examines the Colombian textile industry during the first half of the twentieth century. The author’s analysis of the foundation and development of major factories during this period indicates that the industry’s initial influx of capital came from commerce. This refutes the thesis, put forth by other authors, that coffee and industrial capitalists were a single group.When international textile prices dropped in the second half of the 1920s, companies such as Coltejer and Fabricato that had acquired state-of-the-art American machinery in the previous generation began to produce fabric of higher quality and surpassed other manufacturers. They later concentrated textile production in the Medellin area. Montenegro critiques the CEPAL study of Colombian industry originally published in 1957. Using careful statistical analysis, he demonstrates that the rapid industrial expansion of the 1930s was achieved through massive imports of machinery and did not simply make use of surplus capacity, as the CEPAL study argued and as has been repeated by various Colombian historians in the decades since. Montenegro critiques the idea that the crisis of the 1930s and the external shocks on relative prices and exchange rates provoked the country’s process of industrialization. And while he indicates that state tariff policy during this period failed to protect national industry (such policies only came into effect after World War II), the same argument has been made in other recent literature, which Montenegro does not mention.For Montenegro, the expansion of the industrial sector during the first decades of the century resulted from “a long process of opening of the economy to external markets”—principally in the coffee sector. The author regrets that the textile sector did not seek external markets after the 1940s and instead “opted for the strategy of consolidating itself toward the internal market.” This was not question of simple choice; Colombian industrialists realized they could not compete in the international market and resigned themselves to this defensive strategy. To a certain extent, to argue on merits of the open economy as the source of industrial expansion in the period in question and to lament that industrialists did not compete in external markets may be an anachronism stemming from the contemporary ideology of free markets at any cost.The chapter on the textile labor force refutes Miguel Urrutia’s assertion that the low rate of unionization in Antioquia was due to the difficulty in organizing female workers. Montenegro shows that union membership in Antioquia was higher among women than among men, and men and women had similar rates of unionization at the national level. It would have been interesting for the author to update and enrich this section with recent literature.Montenegro describes postwar industrialization as a “change of model” from an economy based on an open coffee sector to one supported by the internal market. This was not, however, simply a change of model (as it is called in the jargon of many economists); it was the result of the actions of the large Antiochian industrialists, united in the National Association of Industrialists (ANDI). This group managed to impose their interests on coffee and the import retailers, thanks to their alliance with the Conservative Party and their vigorous lobbying and press campaigns (as I demonstrated in a book published in the early 1990 s). The author indicates that the fact that Antioqueños had positions within the state (including Mariano Ospina Pérez, president from 1946 to 1950) “created an atmosphere of confidence toward industrial investment.” This interpretation sounds like a Colombian version of the “history of consensus.” We would have to indicate that Ospina Pérez—who initially did not want to favor industrial interests over other sectors—only decreed a highly protectionist tariff scheme at the end of his term, in the middle of the crisis of la Violencia, when it needed the right-wing support of the Conservative Party and the great Antioqueño industrial bourgeoisie. This took place after he closed a congress led by the Liberal Party and which had energetically opposed industrial protectionism.A better incorporation of Latin Americanist literature could have extended this book’s horizons. For example, the author mentions the benefits of the creation of the Bank of the Republic in 1923, as if this had been largely the result of local circumstances. The creation of the central bank and other official institutions were the result of recommendations from the mission headed by Edwin Kemmerer, professor of Princeton. Kemmerer also advised other Andean republics who followed, to a greater or lesser extent, his recommendations to modernize their economic organization. Montenegro’s book is based on his 1982 master’s thesis in economics from a university in Bogotá. Although the author claims that this new edition incorporates more recent literature, it contains few references to scholarship from the last two decades. Although this study was a valuable contribution 20 years ago, several of its assertions have been deepened or challenged by more recent studies, which the author unfortunately does not engage.

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