The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860-1945

Abstract

The history of the Pampean agricultural boom—and, within it, that of the region’s large landowners—is one of the few landmarks of Argentine historiography. And yet, systematic historical studies on the landed class are scarce. Roy Hora’s book seeks to fill that void, through “a social and political history” of Pampean landowners between 1860 and 1945.Hora seeks a middle ground between two competing historiographical views of the landowners that are still current today, though in different intellectual realms. One view holds that estancieros were mostly unproductive “latifundistas” who only extracted rent from their properties and were responsible for all the evils of the Argentine economy, past and present. The second, revisionist view proposes a much more positive image of the landowners; they are portrayed as active and modern entrepreneurs whose rural interests were part of a broader strategy of investment diversification with a stake in finance and commerce. Hora sympathizes with this revisionist view, but differentiates himself from it in a crucial issue: land, not finance, was the centerpiece of landowners’ accumulation.The author devotes the finest pages of the book to the landowners’ “political history.” Here, Hora takes issue with another common view in Argentine popular wisdom. Far from being the “bovine oligarchy” entrenched in the state and pulling the strings of Argentine politics, he argues, Pampean landowners always had a rather uneasy relationship with political elites and the state apparatus. They were reluctant to directly intervene in politics—and when they did, they failed miserably. The frontier social structure of the Pampas—in which a great variety of nomadic workers and agriculturalists had only weak ties with the estancias and the landowners—conspired against the formation of a solid social base from which to build political power through clientelistic ties.These are the main hypotheses of a well-argued and elegantly written book. Its most important virtue does not rest in providing new findings or original primary sources, but rather in offering a comprehensive view of Pampean agricultural development during those years, as seen through the history of its great landowners. The result is a solid and self-sufficient text that is built upon a good reading of traditional primary sources, a well-balanced analysis of secondary sources, and powerful definitions of several key issues of Pampean historiography.To achieve that coherent view, however, does have distinct costs. In particular, the author’s analysis of landowners’ social relations inside their estancias lacks the subtleties shown in his treatment of the relations landowners had amongst themselves or with the political order. While it remains true that during the second part of the nineteenth century the Pampean region was the home of a frontier society, it is no less true that diversity was the most visible trait of the estancia in those years of frantic transformation. And in many Pampean estancias of the time, the social structure was more stable and permanent, and clientelistic practices much more common, than Roy Hora is ready to admit in his book.Paradoxically, this lack of subtlety occasionally appears when he addresses the landowners—the primary subject of the book. Hence, it is not always easy to assess what exactly Hora is referring to with “the landed class” or “the territorial magnates;” who incarnates this “class” or the different divisions within it; and whether the identity of this group experienced any significant transformation during the 80 years examined. Although it is conceivable that the parameters historians have been using so far to identify this class (property acreage, land tax payment levels) are largely inadequate, giving up the possibility of a definition without even mentioning the problem is not a solution, especially not for a text devoted to studying the landowners’ history.