Chile's newly-acquired nitrate fields, soon controlled by…

Chile's newly-acquired nitrate fields, soon controlled by British and then by United States investors, become a classic monocultural boom and bust.

The boom will last our decades.

Export taxes on nitrates will often furnish over fifty percent of all state revenues, relieving the upper class of tax burdens.

The income of the Chilean treasury nearly quadruples in the decade after the war.

The government uses the funds to expand education and transportation.

The mining bonanza generates demand for agricultural goods from the center and south and even for locally manufactured items, spawning a new plutocracy.

Even more notable is the emergence of a class-conscious, nationalistic, ideological labor movement in the northern mining camps and elsewhere.