Browsing by Autor "Shawn Van Ausdal"

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Anthoine de Gogorza, Louis Lacharme, and the forgotten origins of the Panama Canal
(Cambridge University Press, 2025) Shawn Van Ausdal
Abstract The story of the Panama Canal is often framed as a morality tale juxtaposing French tragedy and American triumph (or imperialism). What gets lost in this depiction is a pair of adventurous entrepreneurs, Anthoine de Gogorza and Louis Lacharme, whose efforts led Ferdinand de Lesseps to his doomed canal project. This article shows how the roots of the Panama Canal emerged from the forests of Colombia’s Sinú River Valley, whose settlement, in turn, was fostered by the search for canal routes in the Darien. Yet despite the spatial proximity of these two regions, their overlooked connections were woven together through the ‘lifepaths’ of de Gogorza and Lacharme as they moved from France to Colombia and around the globalizing Atlantic of the nineteenth century. Following their movements, in turn, sheds light on the overlooked figure of the foreign speculator, the business of exploration, and marketing the tropics.
Book reviews - Crítica de libros - Crítica de livros (Historia Agraria, 75)
(University of Murcia, 2018) Shawn Van Ausdal; Jackeline Velazco; Christine Fertig; Ricard Soto; Gabriel Jover Avellà; Inmaculada González Villa; Antonio Amarillo Ramírez; Belinda Rodríguez Arrocha; Carolina Batet; Jesús Millán
Book reviews - Crítica de libros - Crítica de livros José Roberto Álvarez Múnera:Mercado, ganado y territorio: Haciendas y hacendados en el Oriente y el Magdalena Medio antioqueños (1920-1960) Shawn Van Ausdal Germán Carrillo García: Desarrollo rural y cooperativismo agrario en Ecuador: Trayectorias históricas de los pequeños productores en la economía global Jackeline Velazco Portocarrero John Broad & Anton Schuurman (Eds.):Wealth and Poverty in European Rural Societies from the Sixteenth to the Nineteenth Century Christine Fertig Eric L. Jones: Revealed Biodiversity: An Economic History of the Human Impact Ricard Soto Richard W. Hoyle (Ed.): Custom, Improvement and the Landscape in Early Modern Britain. The Farmer in England, 1650-1980 Gabriel Jover Teresa María Ortega (Ed.): Jornaleras, campesinas y agricultoras: La historia agraria desde una perspectiva de género Inmaculada Villa Salvador Calatayud, Jesús Millán & María Cruz Romeo (Eds.): El Estado desde la sociedad: Espacios de poder en la España del siglo XIX Antonio Amarillo Ramírez Manuel de Paz: Fruta del paraíso: La aventura atlántica del plátano Belinda Rodríguez Arrocha Rolf Kieβsling, Frank Konersmann, Werner Troβbach & Dorothee Rippmann: Grundzüge der Agrargeschichte. 1: Vom Spätmittelalter bis zum Dreiβigjährigen Krieg (1350-1650) Carolina Batet Reiner Prass, Stefan Brankensiek (Ed.) & Jürgen Schlumbohm: Grundzüge der Agrargeschichte. 2: Vom Dreiβigjährigen Krieg bis zum Beginn der Moderne (1650-1880) Jesús Millán Gunter Mahlerwein & Clemens Zimmermann (Ed.): Grundzüge der Agrargeschichte. 3: Die Moderne Gloria Sanz Lafuente Enric Vicedo: Pagesia, accés a la terra i desenvolupament històric: Els latifundis eclesiàstics a la Catalunya occidental plana (segles XVII-XX) Antònia Morey Tous Pere Bosch: La lluita per la terra: Solidaritats pageses i conflictivitat rural a la regió de Girona (1931-1936) Raimon Soler Pilar Díaz Sánchez: Vida de Antonio y Carmelita: La militancia jornalera en Andalucía (1950-2000) Carlos Gil Andrés Antonio Escobar, Romana Falcón & Martín Sánchez Rodríguez (Coords.): La desamortización civil desde perspectivas plurales Ángel Ramón del Valle
Pasture, profit, and power: An environmental history of cattle ranching in Colombia, 1850–1950
(Elsevier BV, 2008) Shawn Van Ausdal
PASTURE, PROFT, AND POWER: AN ENVIRONMENTAL HISTORY OF CATTLE RANCHING IN COLOMBIA, 1850-1950
(2009) Shawn Van Ausdal
This article examines the expansion of cattle ranching into lowland forests of Colombia between 1850 and 1950. It also explores the role of introduced African grasses in the process of pasture development, with particular emphasis on productivity gains. And it suggests that paying greater attention to the costs and labor of pasture formation can push us to reexamine a number of common stereotypes about ranching (for example, that cattle were primarily a means to control territory). This, in turn, should help us better understand the nature of landed power and the dynamics of agrarian change in Colombia.
Primera Escuela de Posgrados, Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental Bogotá, 3-7 de junio de 2013
(LA Referencia, 2013) Claudia Leal; Stefania Gallini; Andrés Guhl; Shawn Van Ausdal
Reseña. Semillas de historia ambiental. Stefania Gallini (ed.). Bogotá: Universidad Nacional de Colombia y Jardín Botánico de Bogotá, 2015
(LA Referencia, 2016) Shawn Van Ausdal
La historia ambiental, la subdisciplina que da protagonismo al medioambiente en sus narrativas históricas, ha sido una especie de niño prodigio. Con raíces en el movimiento ambiental de la década de 1970, sus partidarios han logrado abrirse un espacio importante dentro de la disciplina: las conferencias anuales de la ASEH (Sociedad Americana de Historia Ambiental) ya son recurrentes, y las revistas de la ASEH y la ESEH (Sociedad Europea de Historia Ambiental), Environmental History y Environment and History, son reconocidas por su excelente calidad. Aunque el origen de la historia ambiental en América Latina surgió de manera paralela, fue un movimiento con menos eco. El éxito de la subdisciplina en Norteamérica y Europa fue uno de los factores que la promovió en estas latitudes en décadas recientes. La institucionalización y la promoción de la historia ambiental a nivel continental han sido un esfuerzo de la Sociedad Latinoamericana y Caribeña de Historia Ambiental (SOLCHA), que se reunió por primera vez en Santiago (Chile) en 2003. Los antecedentes en cada país, por supuesto, son variados; para el caso colombiano, con énfasis en la Universidad Nacional, ver la introducción de Gallini. La editora ha cumplido un papel central en esta historia reciente a través de su trabajo académico, su liderazgo en SOLCHA y como promotora de la historia ambiental entre los estudiantes de la Universidad Nacional. Este libro sirve de testamento a sus esfuerzos y al interés creciente en hacer la historia desde una perspectiva ambiental. Reúne trabajos de once estudiantes vinculados, en algún momento de sus carreras académicas, con la Universidad Nacional. Algunos eran estudiantes de pregrado cuando escribieron sus capítulos; otros estuvieron en programas de maestría o de doctorado. En conjunto, demuestran la vitalidad de la historia ambiental en Colombia y lo que estudiantes dedicados, y bien guiados, son capaces de producir.
Robert W. Wilcox, Cattle in the Backlands: Mato Grosso and the Evolution of Ranching in the Brazilian Tropics (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017), pp. xviii + 323, $45.00; £39.00, hb
(Cambridge University Press, 2018) Shawn Van Ausdal
Robert W. Wilcox, Cattle in the Backlands: Mato Grosso and the Evolution of Ranching in the Brazilian Tropics (Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2017), pp. xviii + 323, $45.00; £39.00, hb - Volume 50 Issue 3
Rubber’s Reprise and the Origins of Amazonian Development
(2015) Shawn Van Ausdal
Review of Seth Garfield. In Search of the Amazon: Brazil, the United States, and the Nature of a Region . Durham: Duke University Press, 2013.
Territorial Rule in Colombia and the Transformation of the Llanos Orientales ‐ by Rausch, Jane M.
(Wiley, 2015) Shawn Van Ausdal
Rausch, Jane M. (2013) Territorial Rule in Colombia and the Transformation of the Llanos Orientales, University Press of Florida ( Gainesville, FL), x + 186 pp. £69.95 hbk. The Llanos Orientales, Colombia's vast tropical grasslands east of the Andes, have long been a frontier region. Isolated and environmentally challenging, Hispanic colonisation and control was minimal there, and a distinctive society, shaped by missions and extensive ranching, developed on those cultural borderlands. Despite Bogotá's ambivalence about the llanero, it was certain that these scarcely settled plains were crucial to the country's future. While the dreams of unlocking their riches went unfulfilled for centuries, since the 1950s this perennial ‘future of Colombia’ has finally become central to ‘the country's “present” expectations for prosperity’ (p. viii). In this book, Jane Rausch, dean of historians of the Llanos, synthesises the story of this recent transformation. Her chronological narrative is organised by national political periods. After setting the stage in chapter 1, the next two chapters examine the Violencia (1946–1953) and its partial containment under the dictatorship of Rojas Pinilla (1953–1957). Rausch suggests that the difficulties of territorial control, as well as evenly divided political sympathies, a sense of abandonment and long-standing tensions between ranchers and peasants, help explain why the Llanos became an important theatre in this ostensibly partisan civil war. She also identifies the Violencia as a watershed in the region's history. The widespread social upheaval in which nineteen Liberal guerrilla groups were formed demonstrated the urgency of investing in the future of the Llanos. The migrants who started pouring into these plains during the 1950s – up to 300 families per month in Villavicencio, the region's most important city – further catalysed their transformation. During the National Front (1957–1978), Colombia's bipartisan power-sharing arrangement, the state made significant strides in incorporating the Llanos within the nation. Despite limited budgets and scant personnel, it built more schools (and health centres), finally relieving the Church of its educational mandate in the 1970s. The extension of telephone and postal services, as well as the diffusion of cheap transistor radios, brought the dispersed population increasingly within the national orbit. The key, however, was extending the region's transportation infrastructure. Widening the Bogotá-Villavicencio road to accommodate two-way traffic, and other improvements, encouraged mostly spontaneous migration – the region grew over 11 per cent annually during the 1950s and 1960s – and stimulated agricultural (especially mechanised rice) production and the (still rudimentary) ranching economy. The penultimate chapter addresses the key transformative period (1978–2010), during which time the Llanos passed ‘from frontier to region’ (p. 108). The turning point was 1986, when oil began to flow from wells at Caño Limón, making the Llanos a key source of Colombian exports. Oil revenues financed further improvements to the region's infrastructure, encouraging the expansion, especially in Meta, of oil-palm plantations and fattening pastures. Drawn by job prospects and the old dreams of cheap land – or pushed by displacement – immigration has continued unabated. Currently, only one in four residents were born in the Llanos. As these llaneros have exchanged their cowboy hats for hard helmets, an identity crisis has pervaded the region. The growing population has, nonetheless, been critical to the political transformation of the Llanos as territories, formally managed in Bogotá, became independent departments. Unfortunately, autonomy came at a difficult moment, as rents from oil and drug production led to a resurgence of guerrilla activity, which had never been completely suppressed, and to violent conflicts with paramilitary groups. The new departments, however, also suffered from ‘their own inefficiency, corruption, and financial weakness’ (p. 111), exacerbating the environmental contamination of oil drilling and limiting the effectiveness of efforts to safeguard the region's remaining indigenous groups. With this book, Rausch completes her four-volume saga of the history of the Colombian Llanos since the Spanish conquest. Her prose is crisp and the narrative is well organised, although it sometimes feels encyclopaedic. She also does an admirable job in contextualising her story within the broader trends of Colombian history, making the text accessible to a wide audience. For some, the narrative might be overly traditional, with a focus on political history and economic development. There are no people beyond the key players: the waves of migrants who have helped transform the Llanos remain faceless. Additionally, cultural questions get minimal attention and even the region's main economic activities are cursorily described. The best chapters are those on La Violencia; with 50 pages, or one-third of the total, dedicated to this decade, the text has room to breathe. By contrast, the past 30 years are dispatched in twenty pages. The final chapter, which examines recent conceptualisations of the Llanos as frontier, region and borderlands, is the least satisfying. Overall, however, Rausch has delivered a remarkably succinct and readable synthesis of an increasingly dynamic region central to Colombia's future.
Timothy W. Lorek, <i>Making the Green Revolution: Agriculture and Conflict in Colombia</i> Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 342. ISBN 978-1-4696-7382-0. $34.95 (paperback).
(Cambridge University Press, 2024) Shawn Van Ausdal
In Making the Green Revolution, Timothy Lorek makes a compelling case for the 'vital role' played by Colombia and Colombians (p.9).Not only did the Rockefeller Foundation's Colombian Agricultural Program (1950-64) undertake critical researchits maize lines figured prominently around the worldbut, more significantly, the country served as an 'essential hinge' in the transformation of the Green Revolution from its populist roots in Mexico to the Cold War politics of containment via rural development in Asia (p.3).Yet more than just correcting a case of 'historiographic amnesia', Lorek's novel perspective explores the local roots and long-term consequences of the Green Revolution in Colombia's Cauca Valley (p.9).By emphasizing the local scientific tradition that lured the Rockefeller Foundation to Palmira (Colombia), Lorek suggests, contra the postdevelopment literature, that the Green Revolution was more a process of negotiation than a Northern imposition.Nonetheless, in the Cauca Valley the main beneficiaries were not family farmersa purported focus from the early years to the founding of CIAT (Centro Internacional de Agricultura Tropical) in Palmira in 1967but the sugar cane industry.Many histories of the Green Revolution emphasize its scale bias: large-scale farmers were best positioned to deploy its technology.By contrast, in this case the dynamics of social differentiation were indirectplaceless research agendas, the proliferation of private-sector agronomists, state biases and political violencesince sugar cane research was not a priority.The unintended effects were dramatic: CIAT, established to improve smallholder production in the tropics, sits in a sea of corporate-controlled sugar cane fields.This image captures the dual narratives -Colombia's role in efforts to modernize tropical agriculture and the monopolization of the Cauca Valley by large sugar cane producersthat Lorek deftly weaves together to underscore the contradictions of the Green Revolution.Making the Green Revolution is divided into three sections: the early history of agricultural modernization in the Cauca Valley (1920s-1930s), the consolidation of the valley's sugar cane industry (1930s-1940s) and Colombia's participation in the global Green Revolution with the arrival of the Rockefeller Foundation and the founding of CIAT (1950s-1960s).The main story begins with the founding of the Palmira Agricultural Experimental Station in 1927 by Ciro Molina Garcs, a conservative Catholic who believed in the redemptive value of rural labour, and Carlos Durn Castro, a young agronomist who became its first director.Dismissing claims of racial degeneration to explain the fertile valley's stagnation, they sought salvation in tropical agronomy.Economic development and raising rural standards of living required both peasant and landed elite, under the