The Kinship Networks at the Origin of the Saltpeter Industry. The Structural Change of Tarapacá Society (1860-1875)

Abstract

This article focuses on the local actors that gave rise to what will be known as the saltpeter industry in Tarapacá, which would later be the industrial base of one of the most important economic cycles in Peru and Chile. The social structure of this Peruvian province is analyzed, which —before the expropriation process of this industry— made possible the formation of mining guilds based on kinship networks which, in turn, were the ones that for half a century carried out the activity of searching and implementing the first saltpeter ‘oficinas de Parada’. The transformation of the province of Tarapacá from a marginalized and peripheral territory within the department of Moquegua, politically and administratively dependent on Tacna, to a coastal province, with autonomy and economic projection in the 1860s. The demographic, political, sociological and cultural structural change from the industrial boom and the process of expropriation of this industry in the 1870s is also observed.