In colonial times, Spanish policy aimed to truncate Argentine commerce. For reasons of control and taxation, the empire banned export of silver from Buenos Aires and tried to get all shipments out of Potos to follow the Andean-Pacific route (over the mountains and down to the Pacific, up the west coast to the Isthmus of Panama, across to the Caribbean and on to Europe). With only partial success. Argentina’s northern provinces supplied food, livestock, raw cotton, and homespun to what became for a while one of the largest cities in the Americas (160,000 people at the start of the seventeenth century), altitude 15,843 gasping feet; while the silver earned thereby paid in the Atlantic ports for iron, weapons, clothing, and other European manufactures. Needless to say, the inflated value of this contraband invited all manner of corruption; it also encouraged Spanish officials and proprietors to squeeze the Indian population to the last drop of sweat. So much for good intentions to protect the natives.
The break with Spain (1816) and fragmentation of the old Spanish empire brought an end to this trade. But the natural gifts of the Argentine remained: a wide range of climates, including a temperate core; treeless, open grasslands (the pampas), excellent for raising cattle and sheep; good soil for cereals; some places suited to semitropical crops such as cotton and sugar. The country had few industrial resources, however—no iron, coal, timber, petroleum, or minerals to speak of. Such waterpower as there was, along the eastern side of the cordillera, lay far from trade routes and traders. Of manufacturing, little, and most of that the remnants of domestic industry. Almost all such work fell to women—spinning and weaving, potting, soapmaking, cooking oil, can-dlemaking.10 In a macho society with values inherited from Spain, adulthood brought males “complete independence and idleness.”11
The improvisational character of the colonial administration combined with the unexpected collapse of Spanish rule to make the fate of this tail-land problematic. Much of post-independence Argentine politics consisted in a running battle between centralist Buenos Aires and the disjointed federalismo of the “provinces.” Not until 1862 was the Argentine republic proclaimed; even that was premature. It took another generation of coups and killings to end sedition and secession. Some scholars dismiss this political instability by pointing to the schizophrenia of the young American republic: not until the defeat of the Confederacy in 1865 was the unity of the nation assured. I do not agree with the comparison. The United States (“E pluribus unum”) was an effective, working unit until the dispute over slavery became unmanageable. Argentina was not a working unit for half a century after independence.
Argentina, always a land of cattle and sheep, knew less of crops and men. The triumph of pastoralism and the relative neglect of agriculture were closely linked to land and immigration policies. Foreign observers saw the country as a potential magnet for settlers. So did some far-sighted natives, who called for a wider recruitment of immigrants, in particular, of settlers from Protestant Europe, whom they saw as better educated, harder working, politically mature. This would require, of course, a change in either the policy or the power of the Catholic Church; also of attitudes deep-rooted in the population:
Respect the altar of every belief. Spanish America, limited to Catholicism to the exclusion of any other religion, resembles a solitary and silent convent of nuns…. To exclude different religions in South America is to exclude the English, the Germans, the Swiss, the North Americans, which is to say the very people this continent most needs. To bring them without their religion is to bring them without the agent that makes them what they are.12
Good advice, but hard to follow. An established population, reared in Counter-Reformation prejudice and fearful of potent strangers, was not going to welcome heretics; nor would the Church go quietly into retreat.13
Meanwhile immigrants could go elsewhere. Argentine land policies seem designed to keep settlers out. Most of the soil went in gigantic pieces to placemen and strongmen, often by outright gift (emphyteusis), otherwise at bargain prices. Sometimes the grants or sales set conditions of settlement and cultivation, but these could not be enforced. Lacking capital and labor, the owners found it easier to leave the land idle or turn it over to cattle and sheep. Meanwhile the Argentine state expanded by driving out the Amerindians, and it paid for these campaigns by selling the new land in advance. These operations brought in money, but they meant selling the land in gobs to speculators who found their quickest return in open-range ranching.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Cause and effect went both ways. From time to time, the government sought to recruit abroad. It looked for volunteers in Italy especially, a seedbed of migrants in search, not of land, but of money—the better to buy a place back home. One 1880s contract with an Italian firm specified the kind of person the Argentines wanted: “field workers and artisans if possible, single and chosen among the youngest, most robust, and hard working people of the countryside.”14 These efforts ran up against social and political reality: the distribution of land and the predominance of labor-saving activities such as herding; endemic instability; religious restrictions; local prejudice. Those few areas that needed intensive labor—the sugar-growing districts, for example—had recourse to indenture and compulsion, which killed their attractiveness for free immigrants.
Compare land policy in the North American colonies and the United States. In the southern colonies, large holdings needed slave labor. The native Indians were few and unwilling, and free whites would not work for wages when land there was aplenty and one could be one’s own master. So blacks were brought in from Africa until such imports were banned as of 1807. After that, the use of slaves could be maintained only by natural reproduction, which entailed a higher standard of nourishment and treatment than prevailed in the Caribbean or South America. Meanwhile Americans increasingly found slavery repugnant, and the expansion of the republic westward touched off fights over the extension of servitude and the nature of the compact that had made the Union. In the end, as everyone knows, civil war settled the matter. The slaves went free, and the large estates dissolved into family-sized units.
In former free states and new territories, the expansion of cultivation rested on the westward movement of farmers abandoning tired lands in the East for virgin soil, and of European immigrants seeking better living and land of their own. Meanwhile industry had to find its own workers.* Some branches and enterprises sent recruiters to beat the European boondocks and buy indentured labor. Not a hard task: famines, business crises, boundary changes, and persecutions gave European emigrants ample reason to leave.
Things might have gone otherwise. Nothing in material circumstances compelled the North American colonists to prefer home-steading to ranching. What mattered was culture and social purpose. Thus the New England colonies were divided from the start into family holdings, because these people had come as a community of families. The proprietary colonies of the Mid-Atlantic (New York, Pennsylvania) saw the sale of larger tracts, but here too the tendency was then to divide the land and sell it in homestead bites. While special reserves of colonial origin lasted, some very large purchases occurred—as always, linked to insider trading and graft. In the 1790s, for example, Massachusetts sold 3 million acres in Maine to Henry Knox, secretary of war, and William Duer, assistant secretary of the treasury, at 21 cents an acre. That was expensive. Massachusetts also sold the 6 million acres it had retained in western New York to Oliver Phelps and Nathaniel Gorham for $100,000—less than 2 cents an acre; but then, those lands were far away. And so on.15 Here too, however, the proprietors saw their profit and salvation in resale to farmers; or to smaller speculators who resold to farmers. The puffery told the story: William Duer had his agent in Europe talking up the fabulous possibilities of these new territories: wheat at 60 to 80 bushels an acre; eighty-pound fish for the taking. Foreign investors were assured that population would double every twenty-five years (it almost did, at first); that fifty thousand young people were heading west every year.
Once t
hese large tracts were gone, the holder of frontier land was the federal government, which made it policy to promote family-size units. No clearer evidence of this than the squatter dilemma. Since auction sales made acquisition uncertain, people chose to occupy first and buy later. The authorities tried to prevent this. Not only did it violate the norms of property and procedure; it also reduced prices and thwarted the intentions of rich, acquisitive people. In vain: when those squatter farmers gathered for an auction sale, rifles in hand, it took a foolhardy agent to flout their interests. So Congress passed in 1830 a law that just about granted indemnity to squatters, which only encouraged the practice; and then in 1841 a general “pre-emption” law made squatting legal and gave the occupant the right to buy his holding at the minimum price.16
A big exception was made to encourage railway construction. New lines were granted land along the right-of-way, and these in turn sought generally to sell them to independent farmers. These were preferred, not because they were more lovable, but because they generated more freight than ranchers. In the last analysis, nature had its say: as one went west and rainfall diminished, more of the land went in large tracts for livestock and herding. Meanwhile towns became cities, and cities flourished, not only as markets and shipping points, but also as centers of manufacture. A good example: Cincinnati, largest city of the pre-Civil War West, center of meat processing and rendering (“Porkopolis”), pole of attraction for German immigrants, city of small factories making, among other things, jewelry, stoves, and musical instruments.17
These differences in policy and culture are reflected in the immigration figures. In Argentina, immigration did not pick up until the last quarter of the century, when wheat cultivation took off—about half a million hectares under cultivation in the early 1870s, still only 1.3 million in the early 1890s, and then, explosion, some 24 million on the eve of World War I.18 One of the leading historians of Argentina writes of immigrants arriving “in enormous droves”—some 5.9 million between 1871 and 1914, of whom 3.1 million stayed, in a country of 1.7 million in 1869 (not counting Indians) and 7.8 million in 1914.19 The flow was not even, reflecting political events, business conditions, and population pressure in the country of origin. In the 1870s, net immigration averaged 28.6 thousand per year; in the eighties it tripled, to 86.5 thousand. After that the flow diminished, to 40.6 thousand in the nineties; and then in the new century, especially from 1904 to 1913, it tripled again, to 125.9 thousand.
To be sure, the net figures understate the immigrant contribution to labor supply. Many of these migrants were seasonal agricultural workers, the so-called golondrinas (swallows), recruited largely in southern Italy, travel paid from Buenos Aires to place of work and back. Almost half of the 290 thousand immigrants per year in the decade 1904-13 turned around and left—an average of 135.7 thousand. This was an economical arrangement from the Argentine point of view: bring in harvesters and then send them away. It also suited the migrants, who could exploit the inverse harvest season north and south of the equator. But it had one serious disadvantage: it selected underemployed peasants of little skill and education, whose potential contribution to the economy was limited, even if they stayed.
The numbers alone, moreover, do not tell the whole story. Few Europeans who stayed became citizens—between 1850 and 1930, under 5 percent of immigrants took Argentine nationality because, among other reasons, as citizens they would have been liable for military service.* This was a land that needed people but, compared to the United States, found it hard to win and hold them. That was no doubt due in part to want of economic opportunity. But loyalty needs cultivation, and indifference is a weakness of accidental sovereignties. What do they stand for, and who stands for them?20
In contrast, immigration picked up early in the United States, rising from 14.3 thousand per year in the 1820s to 259.8 thousand in the 1850s. With the triumph of steam navigation and the opening of the West, immigration went from 281,000 per year in the 1870s, 524.7 in the 1880s, back to 368.8 thousand in the 1890s, to a peak of 879.5 thousand in the 1900s, when a number of years saw more than 1 million newcomers enter.† In all, some 32 million people entered the United States from 1821 to 1914, when American population went from 10 to 94 million—not so large a share of the increase as in Argentina, but far more important in aggregate.21
The character of the immigration also was significantly different. Most newcomers to the United States came from the British Isles and northwestern Europe, with southern and eastern Europe picking up toward the end of the nineteenth century. More of them were literate; many were trained craftsmen (classified as “skilled”); until the 1840s, more of them were farmers than laborers.22 The immigrants were drawn by the prospect of cheap homesteads and high wages, and few of them went to the slave South. By comparison with Latin America, these newcomers brought with them greater knowledge and skills. The immigrants to Argentina would have to catch up later.** (They never did.)
SOUTH AMERICA AFTER INDEPENDENCE Paraguay, cut off from the sea, needed above all to live at peace with its neighbors. Instead,…
Historians of American immigration argue about the relative importance of push and pull, and of course both mattered, at different times. Some portray the great flood as a kind of huge kidnapping operation. (Europeans, especially, have trouble dealing with the repudiation implicit in this massive exodus.) Nonsense. For most of these newcomers, the United States was a land of hope and unlimited possibilities. Personal considerations played their part. Immigrants came because their predecessors wrote happy, if not always true, letters about life in the New World. They came because relatives, friends, and neighbors preceded them; and when they arrived, they went to stay with or lodge near their forerunners. They came to a country that in the nineteenth century offered just about no obstacle to admission. Many went back—perhaps a third. But the great majority stayed (or came back a second time), found jobs alongside their kin, moved about with a freedom they had never known in the Old World.
Back to Argentina. Its economic takeoff had to wait for the second half or even the last third of the nineteenth century. When it came, it closely fit the Ricardian trade model. The major growth sector was livestock, which yielded hides for leather and wool (often together and exported to such wool-pulling centers as Mazamet in France), tallow, and salt beef. When refrigeration came in the 1880s, it gave a big boost to the meat trade, especially to Britain. At first the process worked best with lamb and mutton, but as techniques improved and temperatures became more reliable and precise, Argentina began sending frozen beef and then much tastier chilled meat.
Agricultural development lagged, primarily because labor was scarce; but the opposition of ranchers and the depredations of the tenacious Araucanian Indians, still fighting the Europeans after three hundred years, created further impediments. (As in the American West, or for that matter in Africa, it took repeating weapons to crush native resistance.) The hostility of the Indians is understandable: they were fighting for their land. But the ranchers also: farming means fences and an end to open range. (One can’t have cattle tromping the furrows and eating the crops.) Still, as in the American West, the barbed wire moved forward in Argentina, the cheapest cattle-unfriendly fencing ever devised.*
Labor remained scarce through most of the nineteenth century. Not that the pastoral, seminomadic camps of the pampas needed much manpower, or womanpower for that matter. (The authorities in Buenos Aires would now and then round up prostitutes and exile them to the largely male provinces by way of killing several birds with one stone.) But the tough work of transport found few volunteers. The Indians, as in the United States, would not work for wages, and Indian corvee labor was abolished, at least in principle, in 1813. The slave trade was also banned, and while slaves already there remained in servitude, their children were born free; further, any slaves imported from abroad became free on entry.23
The answer had to be immigration, but here, too, yesterday weighed on today. Spanish rules of exclusion
had discouraged entry; and even after independence, immigration was dampened by political instability, selective recruitment, and the lack of free land. This last was one of the worst legacies of the colonial regime: vast domains had been given away, assigned to the Church and to men of respect and power, and the leftovers were grabbed up during the troubles that followed the revolution. Further territorial gains, we saw, were followed by similar distributions. Thus the 1879 campaign against the Indians (what the Argentines grandly described as la conquista del desierto, the conquest of the wilderness) was preceded and financed by land sales, some 8.5 million hectares going to 381 persons. The buyers needed all the land they could get, for as one moved southward, the climate became arid, the soil barren. Patagonia could support perhaps a tenth as many sheep per area as the province of Buenos Aires.
The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor Page 38
