La dulce crisis: Estado, empresarios e industria azucarera en Tucumán, Argentina (1853 – 1914)

Abstract

During the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Argentina achieved self-sufficiency in sugar and Tucumán became the country’s main sugar producer. In this well-written and thoroughly researched book, José Antonio Sánchez Román explores the origins and evolution of Tucumán’s sugar industry, paying particular attention to the mechanisms instituted by provincial and national authorities to support the industry as well as to sugar industrialists’ strategies to achieve and secure those benefits. The author accurately points out that the development of the sugar industry was complementary to the export sector and should be understood as Tucumán’s way to participate in the economic bonanza of turn-of-the-century Argentina. The study stresses the central role played by government protection in the expansion of the industry through credit, railroads, and tariffs. Sánchez Román convincingly argues that the most important engine behind sugar expansion in the province was the availability of credit rather than the arrival of the Central Norte railroad in 1876, as the traditional historiography has maintained. In turn, government protection encouraged the province’s specialization in sugar production, which carried inherent structural limitations that became apparent in particular during the twentieth century.For this study, Sánchez Román has mined previously unused sources such as banking and commercial reports, mortgage loans, contracts, and refinery records, just to name a few. Tables, graphs, and appendices complement the narrative without overburdening it. The book begins with an analysis of Tucumán’s economy during the 1850s and 1860s. The province’s diversified economic structure with its extensive commercial links to regional markets facilitated initial capital accumulation. It was during those years, according to the author, that provincial economic elites started to make a gradual shift to sugar production. Despite the dynamism that characterized Tucumán’s pre-banking credit system, technological modernization required larger capital sources than those available locally. Even though informal credit mechanisms never disappeared, Sánchez Román’s analysis clearly uncovers the preeminent role played by public banking institutions in the industry’s dramatic expansion of the 1880s. Furthermore, aside from the impulse given to sugar production, the arrival of national banking institutions consolidated the links between national and provincial elites and facilitated Tucumán’s insertion into the national economy. Another important element that strengthened those links was the arrival of the Central Norte in 1876. A state-funded project, the railroad reduced freight rates and opened the national market for Tucumán’s sugar. Furthermore, the author argues that railroads facilitated the implementation of protective tariffs, which played a significant role in the expansion of the industry until the early twentieth century.After examining the different mechanisms that facilitated the industry’s successful expansion and Tucumán’s specialization in sugar production, the author shifts the focus to the provincial economy. The industry’s dramatic growth ameliorated the effects of the 1890 crisis in the province, but as Sánchez Román demonstrates, rather than leading to economic diversification as in other parts of the country, the crisis reinforced specialization in sugar, thus increasing the provincial government’s financial vulnerability as its revenues were tied to the expansion of one industry alone. Besides increasing Tucumán’s dependence on sugar, the crisis affected the availability of credit. In the last chapter, Sánchez Román provides an in-depth analysis of the strategies that sugar industrialists adopted to deal with the new financial climate of the 1890s, which ranged from the use of informal credit mechanisms to the adoption of a more modern corporate structure.Throughout the study, Sánchez Román never loses sight of sugar industrialists. His analysis reveals that the group behaved as modern and rational economic agents who, unlike what scholars have found for the economic elite of the pampas, chose to specialize in sugar production as a means to maximize benefits. Furthermore, the coincidence between political and economic provincial elites clearly benefited the industry’s expansion in Tucumán. At the national level, sugar industrialists showed a cohesive front through the Centro Azucarero, which increased the success of their lobbying strategies in the National Congress. Sánchez Román has produced a brilliant analysis of sugar industrialists, even though this reader would have liked greater exploration of the group’s internal dynamics, in particular after the crisis, when disparities among its members became more apparent.Appearing more than two decades after the last new monograph on Tucumán’s sugar industry, La dulce crisis represents a welcome and long-overdue study that will appeal to scholars interested in Argentine economic and business history. The analysis ties Tucumán’s economic evolution with the agro-pastoral economy, thus relating provincial and national affairs and providing an excellent example of economic regional history. By focusing attention on a region that was not a producer of agro-pastoral export commodities, the study redresses the imbalance that has resulted from economic historians’ fixation with Buenos Aires and the pampas.