Political Economy, Citizenship, and Popular Consumption in 19th-Century Colombia

In the past three decades popular men and women have been broadly studied by Latin American historians to either understand their role as political actors in the region’s new republicans settings, explore the obstacles they faced in acquiring land and protecting their property rights, recognize the trials that freedmen and freedwomen encountered in a post-emancipation society, and grasp the struggles for citizenship of Indians, blacks and mixed race inhabitants. However, these studies have seldom explored their role as economic actors and in particular, their role as consumers. Therefore, by bridging nineteenth-century popular consumption with discussions over political economy and citizenship, this talk wishes to explore how the popular sectors participated in the market economy not only as part of the country’s labor force, but as individuals engaged in the consumption and adoption of new needs and comforts. As such it will explore the extent to which their role as consumers shaped ideas and practices of citizenship in mid nineteenth-century Colombia. The study not only suggest that citizenship was formed, contested, and recognized in fairs, streets, plazas, tiendas, and local markets; it also argues that men’s and women’s inclusion into the market economy and their pursuit of their material betterment, gave meaning to ideas of citizenship and fashioned practices of political recognition in the second half of the century. In nineteenth-century Colombia politics was everywhere and as it will be shown, the marketplace was no exception.