La Casa Gibbs y el monopolio salitrero peruano: 1876-1878

Abstract

This brief study aims at showing Anthony Gibbs & Sons disposition in supporting the Peruvian monopolistic nitrate project with monetary resources and its Director's influences in the only company which, due its production's capacity, could make the project fail: the Chilean Antofagasta Nitrate and Railway Co. in which Gibbs was the second most important stockholder. According to Chilean government the primary cause of 1879's war was Peru's attempt to monopolize nitrate production. Bolivia, its secret allied since 1873, helped renting and selling him her nitrate fields and imposing a tax on the nitrate exports of the Chilean company in Antofagasta, thus violating the condition stated in a Border Treaty by which Chile had ceded territory. Its recovery through the use of military forcé was the first act of the conflict. This economic-legalist thesis was questioned in Chile and elsewhere around the second half of last century, placing war's causes accent on the rearrangement of raw material markets -the warring countries exported them-as a consequence of 1870 decade's world crisis. © 2009 Instituto de Historia. Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile.