Chilean Expansion and Southern South America’s Integration into the Modern Capitalist System, 1879–1931

Abstract

This chapter reconstructs Chilean expansion and southern South America’s integration into the modern capitalist system from the War of the Pacific (1879–1883) to the Ibáñez dictatorship (1927–1931). It argues that the region’s growing mining activities and Chileans’ use of force and negotiations to gain control over them and the territories in which they occurred drove this expansion. It also shows how this helped to construct the modern Chilean nation, particularly its institutions, political parties, and labor movement. These political, military, and economic activities helped to unleash new forms of social conflict within the country that took decades to resolve, but nevertheless confirmed Chile’s place in global society as a liberal nation aligned with like-minded liberals in Latin America, North America, and Europe by the 1930s.