ABSTRACT

Very little has been studied about Colombian economic thought during the nineteenth century, and even less about the monetary ideas developed in the country at the time. In one of the few attempts to make a history of economic ideas in Colombia, A. Espinosa (1942) asserts that, with respect to monetary thought, “there are only poor ideas on the subject. The subject could be covered only giving two or three quotations, and a couple of comments…” (p. 132). This perception can be partly explained by the confusion between the slow development of the Colombian monetary system, on one hand, and the production of related ideas on the other. Monetary history is, of course, strongly related to monetary thought. However, it is precisely because monetary institutions took a long time to be developed in Colombia that monetary thinking and debates on the subject were richer than usually acknowledged. This is what this chapter will try to show.