The way towards ‘civilization’

Judging from its limited participation in international trade, Colombia during the nineteenth century was one of the poorest countries of Latin America, with a backward and stagnating economy. Nevertheless, the size of Colombia's exports has never really given an indication of the extent of economic activity in the country. Historically, a large section of the economy has been relatively isolated from the international trade and its accompanying cycles of booms and busts. For example, the sharp fall in gold exports between 1600 and 1650 did not lead to a similar depression of the internal market. The latter, on the contrary, showed signs of dynamism. Again, in 1884 during a marked contraction in the export market, Salvador Camacho Roldán (one of the most distinguished economists of the time) calculated that the value of the agricultural produce sold for internal consumption – excluding subsistence agriculture – was 120 million pesos, over twelve times the value of agricultural exports, which then amounted to 10 million pesos. Even adding the figures for gold exports, the coefficient of total Colombian exports was rarely over 10 percent. The one period which seems to have been an exception to the rule was the first half of the 1870s, when the export economy began to expand.

The low export coefficient was certainly the result of the Colombian economy's isolation from the flow of capital, manpower, and technology from Europe to the temperate zones of the world. A straightforward quantitative history of Colombia's exports is still not possible.