Business and Politics in Costa Rica, 1849-1860: Consensus and Conflict the Coffee Planter and Merchant Elite during the Mora Years.
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Fecha
1988
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University Of California
Resumen
The politics of the period from 1849 to 1860 are analyzed in this dissertation in the context of the political, economic, and social relations among the members of the Costa Rican ruling elite. This elite was made up of planters who were also merchants and whose economic interests were closely related to the expansion of export agriculture based on coffee cultivation. These coffee planters and merchants were the architects of the jr. political institutions of the second half of the nineteenth century and shaped them to foster the continued growth of the export agriculture. The presidency of Juan Rafael Mora, a leading coffee planter and merchant, serves as a basis to illustrate that the effort to transform the government into the fundamental agent for the development of coffee exports created political consensus among the elite.
The military coup that ousted Mora in 1859 shows that despite the consensus, the relations of the coffee planters and merchants were marked by periodic outbreaks of conflicts. The analysis of the coup points out that the elite's struggle for control of the government was intensified as a result of the role assigned to it as the main promoter of economic development. The government became increasingly important for the elite from the economic point of view because it fulfilled that task in two different ways. As the entity in charge of creating the infrastructure for the expansion of coffee exports, it maintained public order, enacted laws to regulate commerce and labor and built roads and port facilities. The government also acted indirectly as supplier of capital for the elite through the participation of its members in the economic activities that were under the government’s control or through their misuse of the national treasury as public officers.
The fulfillment of both tasks created contradictions that frequently put the personal interests of some coffee planters and merchants against the general interest of elite and gave rise to political conflicts. The study demonstrates that because the coffee planters and merchants constituted an elite made up of interconnected families their members were able to resolve their political conflicts through negotiation and compromise. It contends that elite's capacity to abate political conflicts accounted in large part for the relative stability of Costa Rica in the second half of the nineteenth century
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Archivo PDF Digitalizado. Este trabajo tiene un total de 140 páginas, contiene 1 cuadro y 1 tabla, el tamaño del documento es de 9,91 MB.
Palabras clave
Política económica, ajuste estructural, élite, clase dirigente, estructura social, café, sistema económico, siglo XIX, Costa Rica, Carmen Fallas Santana, Economic policy, structural adjustment, elite, ruling class, social structure, coffee, economic system, nineteenth century, Politique économique, ajustement structurel, classe dirigeante, structure sociale, système économique, XIXe siècle, Política econômica, ajuste estrutural, classe dominante, estrutura social, sistema econômico, século XIX, Carmen Fallas Santana.
Citación
Fallas Santana, C. M. (1988). Business and politics in Costa Rica, 1849–1860: Consensus and conflict within the coffee planter and merchant elite during the Mora years (Tesis doctoral). University of California, Los Angeles.