Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World (review)

Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World. By Jeremy Adelman (Stanford, Stanford University Press, 1999) 376 pp. $55.00

This is a work of analysis and synthesis, rather than an instrument for delivering new archival findings. Its underlying goal is an understanding of the changing connections between propery and law, on the one hand, and state formation, on the other. These relationships are explored in the context of a trans-Atlantic trade that generated fundamental changes from the 1780s to the 1860s. Adelman develops the story by deriving as much from the history of ideas as from the field of political economy, in what he describes as a "political history of economics."

Written mostly in a felicitous style, Adelman first traces the reconceptualization of property during the eighteenth century. Commercial property in the Spanish context had long been a politically allocated right. Although Bourbon reformers did not pronounce clearly against this tradition, they at least eroded its foundations. By spreading the rights to trade--and the political privileges that obtained--to new actors in an era of commercial expansion, enlightened reformers weakened the idea of venal commercial property rights. Of vital importance was the timing of these changes, taking place during an era of enormous upheaval in the form of greatly expanded capital value and in the nature of goods being traded. As the Crown placed its faith on Buenos Aires and its hinterland to deliver the wealth derived from Potosí silver, it also unwittingly provided for investment opportunities in land and cattle--the shiny and traditional appeal of metallic wealth turned into the transformative agrarian roots of Argentine capitalism.

Adelman points to the limits in creating shared identities among dwellers of the Río de la Plata, or, for that matter, elsewhere in Spanish America, that resulted from commercial and legal reforms or from changes in investment strategies. In this regard, he takes issue with a fundamental premise held by Anderson, whose work has served as a frame of reference de rigueur for historians of Latin America in the last decade--that colonial subjectivity fostered the formation of national identity. ¹ In Argentina, as in much of Spanish America, national identity was hard to discern prior to independence and costly to forge thereafter.

In his careful presentation of European thought imported into Argentina, and the Argentine contributions to it, Adelman demonstrates the fitful development of theory building and, ultimately, nation building. Resistance to new ideas was followed by acceptance in principle, but local circumstances prevented the adaptability of certain European ideas in favor of pragmatic applications suitable to the experiences of the South American continent and local conditions, on the one hand, and development needs on the other. At a minimum, this book will serve to revise the notion of an Argentine political state shaped merely by derivative borrowings. The best examples of European ideas transformed into new formulations appears in the chapter that discusses the political thinking of Esteban Echeverría, Juan B. Alberdi, and Domingo F. Sarmiento, key members of the Generation of 37.

Adelman elegantly demonstrates the intellectual and practical bases for the stages that capital experienced in the Río de la Plata. Capital usage underwent mercantilist practices well past the eighteenth century, surviving the failed utopian political voluntarism of the revolutionary 1810s and the liberal 1820s, after which capital was contained and manipulated within a crude, but relatively successful, matrix of political cronyism during the Rosas era. It finally ended with a constitutional framework after the 1850s arrived, more on the basis of accumulated experientialism than on the inspirational concepts drawn from European liberalism. Adelman thus traces the interpretations of the independence revolution from the left, right, and center. The Revolution of 1810 was ultimately seen as an excuse for the need to turn Argentina into a republic of order --rather than rights--as the...