Argentina en el siglo XIX (review)

This is a unique book about nineteenth-century Argentina history. It was originally conceived as part of a history of Latin American project at the Instituto Mora in 1987, abandoned but then taken up again, almost thirty years later by a team of historians coordinated by Pablo Yankelevich. Designed to reach university students in Mexico, the book aims to offer an historiographically up-to-date synthesis of the period. What makes this book rare is that there is nothing similar on the market either in English or in Spanish. There are a few works of synthesis on Argentina history, but they are either out of date, produced in several volumes of uneven quality, or focus exclusively on the twentieth century.

The project undertaken here is ambitious. As pointed out in the Introduction, the attention that in the last two decades historians have been paying to the country’s history from independence to the turn of the twentieth century has no equal to that paid to other periods, not even to Peronism, the classic darling of researchers. Established interpretations have been challenged, new topics have been scrutinized, and historians have debated the merits of their findings in a fury of works of remarkable quality. While debates and reflections on particular topics addressed by these recent studies have been frequent, an analysis of the significance and relevance of the new production for the understanding of the whole century has yet to be undertaken. To attempt to write a book of synthesis that is sensitive to this production is a formidable task and it is not surprising that the reader of this book will encounter strengths as well as weaknesses.

The book is nicely produced, it offers a clear narrative, incorporates maps and tables, carefully chosen quotations, a chronology, and a good bibliography (although the author might have divided it by periods to facilitate its use by students). The focus of the book is on political and economic history, with little reference to the history of ideas or social history, only mentioned when directly affecting the two chosen areas that constitute the core of the narrative’s structure. Thus, “big topics” such as immigration in the last quarter of the century do not have the place they deserve.

One of the many strengths of the book is that the editors incorporate numerous new publications on the subject, while attempting to weigh the place of newer works against more traditional views. This is accomplished with uneven results. The discussions on caudillismo and the Rosas regime, for example, have been carefully addressed, balancing the extent to which new research has modified traditional views or results that are contradictory and inconclusive. The treatment of the last forty years of the nineteenth century, however, follows a more traditional interpretation of landed oligarchic rule, economic dependency and restrictive political systems, without addressing more directly the works that have challenged these views on topics such as elections, the economic and social base of the economic elite and its relation to political power, and the nature of the political system. One would have hoped for the authors to indicate within the narrative the main issues raised by the new historiography, as this is particularly relevant for the audience of Mexican university students to whom the book is especially directed. This is especially important in that the book concludes with a mere two pages of final reflections, in which the more recent historiography is ignored in favor of reinstating a traditional view defined in the 1960s.

These later aspects, however, should not undermine the immense value of this brave project. It is only to be hoped that once this book becomes established reading, the Instituto Mora will continue to support this series and that some of these weaknesses will be addressed in future editions as the book deserves to be read by everybody interested on Argentine history.