The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860-1945 (review)

For a long time, Argentine landowners were seen as the source of the republic's endemic woes. They were economically backward, fixed on feudal ways of doing business, nepotistic, inbred, and, above all, had the government in their deep pockets. Hora's book topples all kinds of myths. Although much of the evidence of how market-attuned the landowners were, and how much they actually were at the forefront of economic modernization, is not original, the social and political history of this group of magnates, from their rise to fall, has not been told.

Several important themes emerge. First, as a social class, the landowners were anything but a "closed," hermetic group ruling over a simple, binary society of barons and plebeians. For half a century leading up to World War I, they recycled through booms and busts, dropping those less adaptive and integrating newcomers. As Hora shows, the sequencing is important. It was not that this class designed an economic model to benefit them, but the benefits of a model created the class.

Second, landowners dallied in politics as a class but retreated. By the 1890s, in spite of all the talk about the rural barons pulling the strings, the barons were mainly concerned with adjusting to economic hard times and upgrading their estates. Indeed, rather than bother with public affairs, their leadership focused on private affairs—urging their peers to experiment with new techniques and borrow examples from afar—but they did not fare well in the rough and tumble of Argentine electoral wars. The author shows how tenuous the links with national and local authorities were. With the failure to mount a political challenge, the landowners retreated to their lucrative affairs. They had plenty of prestige, some influence, but not monolithic power.

After World War I, however, politics grew even more complicated. The electoral arena widened, and handling all the provincial alliances reduced the influence of any Buenos Aires-based clique. Even within the Pampas, social conflict was on the rise as the euphoria of the expanding frontier ended. If anything, the closure of the frontier sent the land prices—and the wealth—of the magnates soaring. At this point, the Pampas become more socially stratified, and thus more conflict-ridden. paradoxically, the private wealth of the landowners contrasted with their political weakness. Indeed, the landed elite served as the target for many groups that wanted deep structural reforms before the Depression and, especially, after 1933. Even many estate owners worried that their wealth was crushing the golden goose. Internal divisions among them burst into the open. Leadership shifted to an urban-based industrial and commercial class—which became the pivot of a new elite bloc during the 1930s.

This new elite began to implement many of the reforms championed in earlier decades. But the regime was not exactly a popular alliance. Quite the contrary. It was a vaguely modernizing but still elitist regime. By 1946, when Juan Perón came to power, the great estate was a thing of the past, even though it became the symbol of everything the populists wanted to destroy.

At times, Hora's book is too brief, passing over complex terrain with scant detail and offering important conclusions not always well supported. Also, the "social" history side of the story tends to be thin. Nonetheless, this book is well written and carefully documented. It will be a major force in the revision of modern Argentine thinking about the landed class.