4 - A time of progress, 1830s–1870s

Summary

Everyone is shouting that Chile is the model republic of South America. What on earth can the others be like?

– El Copiapino, No. 3021, June 5, 1858

Bulnes was the second president to serve a full ten years. He was followed by two more, Manuel Montt (1851–61) and José Joaquín Pérez (1861–71). During these years, as we shall see in Chapter 5, the peace was twice disturbed by armed rebellion, but for most of the time settled conditions prevailed, and the country enjoyed noticeable commercial expansion. Steamships appeared in the ports, railroads inched across the northern desert and the Central Valley, telegraph wires linked the towns, banks and joint-stock companies were founded, and cities were improved. Educated Chileans saw this as a time of progress. This key nineteenth-century concept was fully assimilated by the country's leaders and opinion-formers. Santiago's first daily newspaper was called El Progreso: over the next hundred years this was the most popular title for newly founded Chilean newspapers. In retrospect, the period of the “early republic” can also be seen as a distinct economic cycle, as the products of the mines and haciendas flowed to the outside world. Only with the crisis of the 1870s was this phase of export-led expansion exhausted.