During the 1820s, Colombia's diplomats in London, Washington and Philadelphia worked hard to obtain diplomatic recognition for their nascent republic. Their efforts were also geared towards making Colombia attractive to European and North American settlers whose industry and work ethic would, they hoped, turn it into a civilised and modern Euro-Atlantic nation. The immigration schemes they promoted enable us to understand the type of nations the nation-makers of post-independence Spanish America envisioned and how, by appealing to sentiments of hemispheric solidarity – among other means – they sought to turn their visions into reality. A comparison with similar eighteenth-century schemes promoted by the Bourbons, moreover, reveals the persistence, albeit with some critical modifications, of late-colonial ways of thinking and envisioning society.

Using the example of nineteenth-century Bolivia, this article argues that economic motivations need to be taken into account in understanding the role of peasants in constructing Latin American nation-states, especially in the Andes. Based on local archives, it considers the case of the altiplano region of Oruro-Poopó. From this perspective, during the half-century that followed independence, Andean communities were mostly in favour of a free-trade regime. They were integrated into the nation-state, but in a subordinate position. By the 1850s there was such prosperity in trading activities that community members refused to participate as authorities in their communities due to the time it would consume. However, the assault on community lands that began in the 1860s impoverished the Indians and marginalised them as peasants, turning them into a threat to the new, racist nation-state.