This is a brief, interpretive history of the Banda Oriental from the founding of Colonia do Sacramento in 1680 to the economic crisis of the mid-1960s. The emphasis, however, is upon rural Uruguay of the nineteenth century; it is here that the author finds the background to both the nation’s early success and her current difficulties.
Fertile, unpopulated, and containing an estimated five million head of wild cattle in 1680, the Banda Oriental developed a cattle economy which was more extractive than agricultural and even came to be known as “leather mining” (p. 64). After cattle became more valuable, land was still accepted as an unlimited natural resource requiring little attention to title or improvement. This benevolence of the land combined in the nineteenth century with expanding foreign markets and technological innovations such as the frigorífico to provide a growing prosperity which continued until 1930. In the 1870s the per capita income of Uruguay exceeded that of the United States (pp. 77-78), and the cattle economy allowed the development of the hemisphere’s first welfare state early in the twentieth century.
The Uruguayan cattle industry never fully recovered from the world depression of the 1930s, but the national economy was kept active for the next twenty-five years by the development of light industry. The crisis of the mid-1960s, the author says, results from the fact that import substitution in consumer goods was largely accomplished by about 1955, and light industry expansion has been much slower since that time. The development of heavy industry is needed both to renew the economic growth and to relieve light industry of its dependence upon foreign sources of materials and machinery; this new industrial cycle must be preceded, however, by rural development which in turn is hampered by problems of land tenure and attitudes growing out of the earlier abundance. Without suggesting any simple or doctrinaire alternatives, the author questions whether contemporary political structures are capable of coping with the crisis (p. 104).
The book draws on the works of numerous historians and economists, with documentation which is rather extensive if uneven. There is a somewhat distracting mixture of documentation styles, especially in the early part of the book, and the “bibliografía sumaria” lists ten suggested readings rather than the scores of works cited in the text and notes.
