During the nineteenth-century, Colombian policy-makers experimented with several institutional arrangements. The internal configuration of the territory was one of the areas where transformations were more radical. Indeed, policy-makers redrew the internal boundaries of Colombia several times within a short period of merely eight years, from 1849 to 1857. Between May of 1849, when Congress created the first new province, to May of 1853, the number of subnational units soared from twenty-two to thirty-six. After a military coup in 1854, the partition of existing provinces into smaller units suddenly stopped. The trend reversed one year later. In 1855, Congress reestablished four of the old larger provinces, Pamplona, Antioquia, Pasto and Bogotá. In the meantime, others were suppressed and their territories reallocated between neighboring provinces or simply annexed by a politically more important one. Two years later, in 1857, the map of Colombia looked completely different. Instead of provinces, the territory of Colombia was now organized into eight federal states. After that year (1857), the only significant change occurred in 1863, when the state of Tolima was created while the country was engaging in a civil war. This configuration of nine subnational units lasted until the first decade of the twentieth-century.
By any standard, the reconfiguration of the national territory in such a short period of time is exceptional. Surprisingly, the reconfiguration of these internal boundaries has been largely overlooked in the historical literature. In this presentation, I explain the logic of several of these territorial changes, focusing on Colombia’s western Andean region. This process of geographical reconfiguration provides much insight into Colombia’s wider, nineteenth-century political and economic trends.
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