Abstract

This article assesses the state of the agrarian sector and the composition of the Chilean agrarian elite during the first half of the nineteenth century, a rather unexplored period in Chile’s agrarian historiography. We have used several untapped sources such as the Catastro Agrícola and El Agricultor. From the former we have built and processed a half a million records database. From the former we have built and processed a database consisting of half a million records from the first three agricultural censuses of 1832, 1838 and 1852. We have explained why the agricultural sector was so backwards in Chile, while also established a very unequal distribution of both land tenure and agricultural income. Finally, our results show a great persistence within the composition of the agrarian elites between late colonial times and the first decades of republican Chile, as well as a significant correlation between the large landowners with highest agricultural income and the political elite.