Property and Citizenship in the Second Half of the 19th Century

Throughout the 19th century, liberal governments in Colombia, Mexico, the Caribbean, and the Andes, decreed the privatization of common and corporate lands, arguing that private property was the basis of freedom, progress, and democracy. This idea of property had its roots in seventeenth-century political economy and moral philosophy, and thereafter in a long and controversial discussion about the relationship between property and democracy. This essay discusses how poor workers, peasants, and indigenous people, considered outside of large-scale economic processes, contributed to urban privatization efforts, even shaping the property market, and how, in the process, they reformulated notions of democracy, equality and citizenship that circulated then between Europe and the Americas. This talk will examine the local expression and the close links between two processes: the transition between a system of controlled markets to the free market, and the inexorable relationship that emerged in the 19th century between property and citizenship.