The Pampean region has been one of the most popular subjects of Argentine historiography. Juan Manuel Palacio’s La paz del trigo, a systematic analysis of Coronel Dorrego between the years 1890 and 1945, contributes to this vast literature. The result is a well-written, thoroughly researched, and enjoyable account not only of wheat agriculture in the region but also of the conflictive and negotiated nature of Coronel Dorrego’s legal system and its role in shaping larger social and economic processes. Created in 1887, Coronel Dorrego soon became a major wheat-producing area in southern Buenos Aires. Palacio first focuses on the uncertain conditions under which tenant farmers (the largest group of producers) became involved in wheat agriculture. The author persuasively argues that farmers’ lives balanced shakily on the unsteady pillars of informal credit and precarious juridical relations with the land, both direct results of the legal vacuum that characterized frontier areas....

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