Workshop of Revolution: Plebeian Buenos Aires and the Atlantic World, 1776–1810 (review)

Lyman Johnson’s valedictory study of plebeian labor and politics in late colonial Buenos Aires is a masterwork of social and political history. Johnson more than convincingly argues that we cannot understand the political transformations of the Age of Revolution without investigating the social and economic changes (too often ignored by political and cultural historians) that subalterns experienced in the late colonial period. Furthermore, Johnson’s book earns its subtitle by demonstrating that we cannot understand these material transformations outside of the political and economic context of the larger Atlantic World, especially the slave trade and immigration. Johnson’s approach is broadly and refreshingly holistic, reconstructing the popular world of Buenos Aires through labor, social, economic, and political history.

The bulk of the book carefully uncovers the world of life and work of Buenos Aires’ laboring classes, with a focus on artisans, arguing that free labor has been largely unexplored in colonial Spanish America. However, Johnson also explores the increasing importance of slave labor in the city: for prosperous artisans, slavery and real estate, not capital expansion of workshops, proved the most enticing investments. In this epoch, artisans tried to regulate their industries by creating guilds, but these endeavors foundered due to class and (surprisingly fluid) caste divisions, as well as the changing economic philosophy of the Bourbon state. Historians will find invaluable the wage and prices series Johnson creates, drawing from a massive archival base of probate inventories, business reports from governmental and religious sources, criminal files, censuses, and notary records. While focused primarily on labor, Johnson also examines housing patterns, leisure, and masculine codes of honor that would bleed into politics.

Johnson then links these economic and social changes to the political evolution culminating in 1810. By the turn of the century, the old order under which master artisans organized work as corporate bodies had collapsed, decimated by guild failures, the encroachment of slavery, and foreign trade. The weakening of such colonial institutions and the social norms that had controlled the masses set off new political mobilizations that led to independence. Meanwhile, two British invasions of the city magnified and expanded the importance and prestige of popular militias.

Militia membership created a new form of collective identity that supplemented, even displaced, older identities based on corporate membership by occupation, ethnicity or neighborhood. Further changes in immigration, labor, trade, and slavery meant that by 1810 the colonial identities that linked plebeians with the colonial state had significantly withered. In place of the particularistic corporate identities, Johnson argues, a new more popular “public” emerged after the British invasions, creating and channeling a very real plebeian pressure to remove the viceroy from power and put a local junta in charge.

Given its central contribution of using social and economic history to inform political history, the work seems somewhat out of balance: the vast majority of the book is concerned with the former, not the latter. Johnson certainly makes a persuasive case that the economic changes in wages, prices, guild success and failure, slavery, and free trade must be considered together to comprehend the social and political changes of the late colonial era, especially the popular support for independence. However, Johnson does not sustain engagement with popular political discourse (this would have been welcome in untangling the changing meanings of liberty for plebeians) and action, perhaps impossible given the limitations of colonial sources. Yet if such work is ever done, it will owe an immense debt to Johnson’s holistic re-creation of late colonial Buenos Aires. His work is a landmark study that will critically inform future work on colonial popular politics and social history.