Campesinos y estancieros: una región del Río de la Plata a fines de la época colonial (review)

Campesinos y estancieros: una región del Río de la Plata a fines de la época colonial. By Jorge Gelman. Buenos Aires: Editorial Los Libros del Riel, 1998. Tables. Notes. Bibliography. 333 pp. Paper.

As Jorge Gelman notes in the introduction of this valuable work, historical research on Spain's southern-most viceroyalty has expanded dramatically since 1984. One topic that has gained particular attention is the rural sector. While a number of researchers have explored the nature and operations of estancias and their impact on rural society, Gelman has shifted his attention to an important but little understood topic: wheat production and its articulation with ranching in the late colonial period.

Gelman focuses on the Colonia region of the Banda Oriental (now Uruguay). After offering introductory remarks, Gelman explores a series of interrelated topics: the agricultural production of the Colonia region during the closing decades of the colonial era; the range and relative importance of agricultural exploitations; land distribution and colonial land policies; the way producers marketed their products; ranch operations and their labor system; how farmers produced wheat; the characteristics of the population in demographic and economic terms; and social mobility among non-elite groups.

While his work is limited in terms of the years, areas, and population under consideration, Gelman's findings provide a number of interesting conclusions. The most important revolve around the role that small farms played in the regional economy. According to Gelman, people with the ambition to farm found ample open land. Relying on the exploitation of the labor that their household provided, with wage labor employed in times of ample harvests, the region's mercantile and self-sufficient (labeled as "peasant") farms produced the majority of the region's wheat. The importance of manual labor and the risks involved in farming discouraged large-scale operations but favored family farms. As a consequence, these operations dominated the region's grain market and contributed a significant amount of revenue, through taxes, to the colony.

The farm households also provided labor for the ranches. This finding separates Gelman from other historians, whom Gelman characterizes as perpetuating a myth of a colonial pampa where ranches monopolized the land and estancieros held sway over gauchos and cattle. Rather than relying on an itinerant workforce, Gelman argues that at least during the period between the 1780s and 1804, ranchers turned to farmers, who eagerly supplemented their household income by working on nearby ranches after each year's wheat harvest.

The evidence he marshals in support of this point may not satisfy other researchers who have studied how ranches in the region operated. Gelman's evidence, taken from a range of archival sources that relate to a limited number of estancias, do show a connection between the labor that farm households provided and the work force that the ranchers employed. Whether this connection was as harmonious as Gelman suggests remains unclear.

The book has flaws. The maps provided in the opening chapters lack clear legends and vary in scale and clarity. The tables, which relay useful information in almost every case, require careful reading. Two later chapters on demographic patterns and social mobility in the farming communities, which make broad assertions on particularly thin evidence, should have been integrated with earlier chapters.

Nevertheless, Gelman succeeds in his attempt to challenge traditional but still commonly accepted views concerning farming and ranching in the Banda Oriental. Although Campesinos y estancieros surveys a brief period, it serves as a promising base for further research on the Río de la Plata region during and after the late colonial period.

Daniel Lewis
California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

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