Putting together North and South: Some Considerations on the Agricultural History of the Americas between Independence and World Economic Crisis

Abstract

This article is specifically concerned with ‘American’ agriculture between 1820 and 1930. Let me emphasise straight away how unusual and problematic such an approach is. After all, it covers such disparate phenomena as plantation agriculture in the southern states of the US, the Caribbean, or Brazil, rural household economies working at subsistence level in New England or in the highlands of the Andes in South America, extensive cattle farming in the frontier regions of the southern part of South America, in the west of the USA, and in the north of Mexico and so on. The most varied geographical and climatic conditions for agricultural production can be found in the Americas, ranging from the North American plains to the Argentine Pampa, the highlands of the Andes region and Mexico to the coastal regions on the Atlantic and Pacific including the Caribbean. The extension of this subject becomes all the more apparent when we realise how wide the range of changes really was: in the USA, for example, this era is defined by the transition from an agricultural to an industrial society, in agricultural technology from the simple wooden plough to the tractor, and with regard to work systems, to name just one example, the end of slavery.