Producing Territories for Extractivism: Encomiendas, Estancias and Forts in the Long-Term Political Ecology of Colonial Southern Chile

Abstract

The aim of this article is to show that what seems natural today has a long social and environmental history, associated with the way in which territory has been socially produced. Socioenvironmental change is not natural, but instead is a political ecological project, and in this case, a colonial project deeply connected with the form that capitalism took in Southern Chile from the 16th century. This paper aims to connect three things: the colonial encomienda system as a primitive accumulation based on the capture of people and land to produce profit, the metabolic rift produced by colonial territorial relationships, and the emergence of a new nature which, dialectically, destroyed and created the conditions for the Indigenous uprisings, and the Mapuche resistance that continues today. The case of the fort in Mariquina Valley is used to illustrate the interlinkages between historical geography and landscape archaeology, to make the colonial production of nature visible, to understand how the Spanish fortress supported the production of the new colonial nature and the dispossession and transformation of the Indigenous territories.