independent governance.
By the time Colombia had become a state in itself, it was what it had always been as part of New Granada, "an inefficient, rather inward-looking colony." Because gold was its only meaningful export both before and after independence, Colombia had always been a "second rank" colony, lacking an economic base wide enough to provide opportunity for meaningful competition in international trade or for widespread participation in the domestic economic and social life of the country, still less to provide social mobility or productive and mutually beneficial encounters between classes. Whatever benefits obtained in the success of Colombia's international gold trade--which in any case did not last--were concentrated with what had been the well-positioned colonial elites. Bushnell comments that independent peasant agriculture grew up around the mining activity during the colonial period but that the real beneficiaries of gold production were "the merchants who provided supplies to the mines and handled the export
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