Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776–1810 by Lyman L. Johnson

Abstract

Reviewed by: Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776–1810 by Lyman L. Johnson Christopher Schmidt-Nowara Lyman L. Johnson. Workshop of Revolution: Plebian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776–1810. Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2011. xiv + 410 pp. ISBN 978-0-8223-4996-2, $94.95 (cloth); 978-0-8223-4891-5, $27.95 (paper). The fantastic growth of Buenos Aires at the end of the eighteenth century, when it was transformed from a colonial backwater into a vice-regal capital, proved the undoing of Spanish rule. As Lyman Johnson cogently states in his introduction, “[T]he social arrangements of 1776 [were] unsustainable in 1800” (p. 3). The relationship between rapid social change and anticolonial uprising is at the heart of Johnson’s study of the city, which he situates in both the Atlantic world and the continental hinterland. The protagonists of this history are the artisans of Buenos Aires, who felt the economic and social transformations most acutely and who felt compelled to challenge the colonial order because it failed to protect their collective interests. This study is therefore a marriage between older forms of social and labor history [End Page 972] on one hand and more recent approaches to the study of identity, politics, and citizenship on the other—a fruitful union that not only elucidates aspects of social and political conflict in Buenos Aires, but also throws into relief methodological issues in Latin American and Atlantic-world historiography. Workshop of Revolution will thus be a touchstone for a broad range of scholars and students. Johnson reconstructs a city where formal legal and economic institutions, such as guilds, were much weaker than in venerable colonial centers like Lima and Mexico City. Economic change and population growth compounded institutional weakness as free workers from Europe and the continental hinterland flocked to the new commercial and administrative hub. There was also a great influx of enslaved workers, making Buenos Aires the largest recipient of the slave trade in Spanish South America by 1800 (though dwarfed by Portuguese Brazil and Spanish Cuba). As in other Latin American port cities, such as Rio de Janeiro, the subject of important studies by Mary Karasch and Zephyr Frank, slave ownership in Buenos Aires was widespread. Many artisans owned one or two slaves (sometimes more), and workshops frequently combined free and enslaved workers. The constant arrival of immigrants, free and forced, made regulation of the labor market through guilds almost impossible. Johnson explains in close detail the travails of the proposed shoemakers’ and silversmiths’ guilds that were always undermined by divisions between Europeans and Americans, whites and nonwhites. The growth of slavery also weakened labor’s collective power. Many artisans thus lived precariously, unable to acquire sufficient wealth to marry and to start independent households. This was an unruly male world—and a tinderbox. Buenos Aires’ situation as an Atlantic emporium heightened the possibility of conflagration, as Johnson shows. Chapter 5, for example, is devoted to the 1795 “French Conspiracy,” which arose when news of revolution in France and Haiti arrived in the bustling port, inciting rumors of local plots masterminded by French immigrants. However, it was not revolutionary states or ideologies that pushed Buenos Aires and its artisans toward insurgency. Rather, it was inter-imperial conflict and political crisis that set the city ablaze, as was the case across the colonial Americas in the age of revolution. The British invasion of the Río de la Plata in 1806 and 1807 unintentionally started Buenos Aires on a revolutionary course. Abandoned by the inept Spanish viceroy, the urban population raised new militia units to expel and resist the redcoats. Artisans flocked to the city’s armed forces. Johnson highlights the career of Manuel Macedonio Barbarín to illustrate the changes that warfare wrought (pp. 249–250): Born in Angola and brought to Buenos [End Page 973] Aires in the 1790s, Barbarín took up arms against the British in 1807, while still enslaved. A government lottery manumitted him in 1810 as compensation for his service. As a free man, he continued in the military, supporting the patriotic government in the struggle for independence and the caudillo...