This is a social and political history of the Argentine landowners, for many decades Latin America's most affluent propertied class. Roy Hora develops a historically based view of how socio-economic and political change affected the landowners and was in turn affected by them between the 1860s and 1940s. He questions the excessively static picture of the landowners of the pampas, which unquestioningly accepts the image of power, lineage, and permanence given by both panegyrists and critics of the estancieros. Dr Hora challenges the view of a powerful, reactionary landed class, dominating the country's history from colonial times to the rise of Peronism in the 1940s. But he also challenges revisionist interpretations which seek to de-emphasize the central role played by the landowning class in the evolution of modern Argentina.
On the Argentine pampas, between the years 1860 and 1910, a dramatic social and agricultural revolution took place. The haunts of wild cattle, native peoples, and gauchos were transformed into cultivated fields and rich pastures. A land that had produced only scrawny sheep and cattle became one of the world’s leading exporters of wheat, corn, beef, mutton, and wool. A country that had had only a sparse and scattered Spanish and mestizo population now boasted a metropolis of one and a half million, and a national population of eight million people, nearly a third of whom were born in Europe. These were significant changes, and wheat growing played a major role in all of them. This study traces the development of the Argentine wheat zone, focusing on the part wheat played in forming the Argentina of today. James R. Scobie begins his account with the first settlers who colonized Santa Fe in the 1850s and shows how they and thousands of other European immigrants converted this vast grassland into a world breadbasket. He explains why these small farmer-owners soon gave way to tenant farmers, and how crop farming developed primarily as servant to the predominant sheep and cattle interests. He expands on several factors responsible for this evolvement: the elimination of indigenous threat, the coming of the railroad, the agricultural policy—or lack of policy—of the Argentine government, and the urban orientation of the Argentine people. The railroads, by suppressing the building of other roads through the pampas, had the effect of isolating the wheatgrowers. By making the products of the pampas available to world markets, the railroads opened up new trade, which helped the growth of cities tremendously; but this very prosperity pushed the cost of land far beyond the wheatgrower’s ability to buy it. The result was a pampas without settlers, a frontier filled with migrant sharecroppers and tenant farmers, a land exploited but not possessed. Transiency as well as isolation became the common denominators of these families, who were forced to move every few years to make way for more valued tenants—sheep and cattle. They left behind them no schools, no churches, no roads, no villages. Immigrants came to labor but not to sink their roots in the pampas. Without sentimentality but with understanding and compassion, Scobie explores every facet of the lives of these laborers who created Argentina’s agricultural greatness. His examination of Argentina’s broad policies toward land, immigration, and tariffs shows that the national government had little lasting or effective interest in the country’s agricultural development. In a social sense, the thousands of immigrants who toiled the pampas were looked upon as the wild cattle or fertile soil—blessings which neither needed nor warranted official attention. Scobie’s conclusion is that Argentina got better than it deserved.
The Argentine and Canadian wheat economies, starting from very similar positions in the late nineteenth century, had diverged startlingly by 1930. In wheat production and export Argentina had stagnated and declined, while Canada had surged to a position of world leadership. This book explains how Canada had outpaced Argentina, a country with better growing conditions and a much shorter haul to port. The author finds the explanation in how differing government policies affected the paths the Canadian and Argentine wheat economies took. The author's investigations center on several key questions: In what ways did Canadian and Argentine policy makers and wheat growers attempt to improve their competitive positions by introducing efficient marketing systems, research, and agricultural education? How responsive were the two political systems to questions of land tenure, the role of immigrants, and political representation in the wheat regions? In sum, how did quite different views on the role of the state affect the outcome? The book is in three parts. The first provides a basic political and economic overview of Argentine and Canadian history between 1880 and 1930. The second part analyzes and compares the two countries' basic agricultural development policies. In the third part the focus moves away from a topical emphasis and shifts to an analysis of major agricultural policy issues in the two countries. The concluding chapter presents some final thoughts on the different paths of agrarian development in the two countries.
An American Teacher in Argentina tells the story of Mary E. Gorman who in 1869 was the first North American woman to accept President Domingo F. Sarmiento’s invitation to set up normal schools in Argentina, where she eventually settled. An ordinary historical actor whose life only sometimes enters the historical record, she moved along the fault lines of some of the greatest historical dramas and changes in nineteenth-century US and Argentine history: she was a pioneering child on the US-Indian frontier; she participated in the push for US women’s education; she was a single woman traveler at a time when few women traveled alone; she was a player in an Argentine attempt to expand common school education; and a beneficiary of the great primary products export boom in the second half of nineteenth-century Argentina, and thus well positioned to enjoy the country’s Belle Époque. The book is not a straightforward, biographical narrative of a woman’s life. It charts a life, but, more important, it charts the evolving ideas in a life lived mostly among people pushing boundaries in pursuit of what they considered progress. What emerges is a quintessentially transnational life story that engages with themes of gender, education, religion, contact with indigenous peoples in both the US and Argentina, natural history, and economic and political change in Argentina in the second half of the nineteenth century. Because the book tells a good story about one woman’s rich and eventful life, it will also appeal to an audience beyond academe.
How diaspora activism in the Irish land movement intersected with wider radical and reform causes The Irish Land War represented a turning point in modern Irish history, a social revolution that was part of a broader ideological moment when established ideas of property and land ownership were fundamentally challenged. The Land War was striking in its internationalism, and was spurred by links between different emigrant locations and an awareness of how the Land League’s demands to lower rents, end evictions, and abolish “landlordism” in Ireland connected with wider radical and reform causes. Changing Land offers a new and original study of Irish emigrants’ activism in the United States, Argentina, Scotland, and England and their multifaceted relationships with Ireland. Niall Whelehan brings unfamiliar figures to the surface and recovers the voices of women and men who have been on the margins of, or entirely missing from, existing accounts. Retracing their transnational lives reveals new layers of radical circuitry between Ireland and disparate international locations, and demonstrates how the land movement overlapped with different types of oppositional politics from moderate reform to feminism to revolutionary anarchism. By including Argentina, which was home to the largest Irish community outside the English-speaking world, this book addresses the neglect of developments in non-Anglophone places in studies of the “Irish world.” Changing Land presents a powerful addition to our understanding of the history of modern Ireland and the Irish diaspora, migration, and the history of transnational radicalism.
This timely book analyses the most significant contemporary developments and trends in property law, including the concept of property rights, the role of property law and property rights in society, and the values they enhance. It examines the effect of property rights on social, economic and cultural development and vice versa, considering the impact of phenomena such as technological innovation, digitalisation and blockchain technology, changes in social and economic organisation and globalisation.
