The Struggle for Natural Resources

Findings from Bolivian History

Carmen Soliz, Rossana Barragán, Carmen Soliz, Rossana Barragán

• Publisher: UNM Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9780826366160
• eBook ISBN: 9780826366184
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Agribusiness
• Index: Business

The Struggle for Natural Resources traces the troubled history of Bolivia's land and commodity disputes across five centuries, combining local, regional, national, and transnational scales. Enriched by the extractivism and commodity frontiers approaches to world history, the book treats Bolivia's political struggles over natural resources as long-term processes that outlast immediate political events. Exploration of the Bolivian case invites dialogue and comparison with other parts of the world, particularly regions and countries of the so-called Global South.

The book begins by examining three Bolivian resources at the center of political dispute since the early colonial period, namely land, water, and minerals. Carmen Soliz, Rossana Barragán, and Sarah Hines show that, as in the colonial and early republican past, these resources have remained the focus of political contention to the present day. Until the end of the nineteenth century, Bolivia's battle over natural resources was primarily concentrated in the highlands and inter-Andean valleys. Beginning in the 1860s, the bicycle and soon the automobile industries triggered demand for natural rubber found in the heart of the Amazon. José Orsag analyzes the impact of this extractive economy at the turn of the twentieth century. The book concludes by examining two resources that are central to understanding the last century of Bolivia's history. Kevin Young examines the fraught business of hydrocarbons, and Thomas Grisaffi analyzes the coca/cocaine circuit. Each chapter studies the social dynamics and political conflicts that shaped the processes of extraction, exchange, and ownership of each of these resources

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction. A Multilayered Approach to Analyze Struggles over Natural Resources
• Chapter One. Five Hundred Years of Land Struggle
• Chapter Two. From Silver to Tin to Lithium: Five Centuries of Mining in Potosí
• Chapter Three. Dispossession and Redistribution: Social Struggle Over Water
• Chapter Four. The Rubber Boom and Indigenous Territories: Export Economy, Colonization, and the Bolivian Nation-State
• Chapter Five. Smoothing the Contradictions: The Political History of Fossil Fuels
• Chapter Six. A Brief History of Coca: From Pre-Columbian Trade to the Cocaine Economy
• Epilogue One. The Specter of El Dorado and Extractivism in Bolivian History
• Epilogue Two. Commodity Frontiers in Historical Perspective: Lessons from Bolivia
• Bibliography
• List of Contributors
• Index