Abstract

Pedro Nel Ospina was an engineer, businessman, diplomat, and president of Colombia (1922-1926). Yet his true passion, he confessed, was cattle ranching. Ospina helped pioneer the settlement of northern Antioquia and southern Córdoba with cattle, fulfilling a long-held dream of tapping coastal livestock for the mining (and later coffee) economy of the department of Antioquia. While the colonization of undeveloped land has been a central dynamic of Latin American history, we can also view Ospina’s ranching enterprise as part of an expanding beef commodity frontier. A close look at his operations, however, complicates both the traditional view of Latin American ranchers as an obstacle to capitalist development, and the global bias of the commodity frontier concept. Ospina’s business model relied on the efficient transportation of cattle from breeding centers to consumer markets. He thus helped Antioquia’s coffee sector caffeinate the Global North. Yet such circuits did not constitute a spatial fix to the limits of capitalist coffee production. And demand for beef developed even more from urban growth and nascent industrialization than from peasant coffee farms.  In other words, capitalist growth in the periphery could create its own commodity frontiers and frontier dynamics.  

Bio

Shawn Van Ausdal is an associate professor of History and Geography at the Universidad de los Andes, in Bogotá, Colombia. He holds a PhD in Geography from the University of California at Berkeley and has published widely on the history of cattle ranching in Colombia and Latin America. His research interests lie at the intersection of environmental and agrarian history, food studies, and geographies of development. He is currently working on a project on the forgotten origins of the Panama Canal.  

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