As the first volume in a new series the publishing house of Ediciones Macchi has selected Historia de los ferrocarriles en la Argentina by Dr. Horacio Juan Cuccorese, a professor of economic history at the University of Buenos Aires and the National University at La Plata, and a member of the Academia Nacional de la Historia. Dr. Cuccorese is the author of a number of other works on economic and social history.
The author has taken a chronological approach to the story of the development of the Argentine railway system. He stresses the long-felt need for a better means of communication with the interior and a faster method of conveying agricultural products to the seaports. He supports his arguments with a number of statistical tables. His background information on each of the numerous railways is sketchy and is hardly more than an historical summary. A special section is devoted to the building of the Central Railway from Rosario to Córdoba, and of interest to the North American reader are references to William Wheelwright of Newburyport, Massachusetts. To anyone familiar with the building and financing of the Union Pacific Railroad, the Argentine story seems to parallel the American story. Extensive land-grants and governmental subsidies and guarantees were employed to assist the building of most of these privately financed roads. A much more liberal policy of government assistance developed during the administration of President Juárez Celman including the sale of such roads as the Transandine to John E. Clark in 1887. Dr. Cuccorese lists a number of arguments both for and against the government’s exploitation of railways.
His survey of the unhappy economic state of his country’s roads in the first part of the present century is concluded by a brief discussion of the transfer of ownership from Great Britain and France to Perón’s control in 1948 as part of the postwar economic settlement. He regards this change as good propaganda for Perón but as a poor bargain economically, as the roads were purchased in a bad state of repair. The £150,000,000 for the British-owned roads was too high a price to pay for a propaganda piece; and, he asks, why should the country pay for lands granted free to the builders of the roads? He concludes by stating that the purchase of the roads did put the direction of these facilities, vital to the conduction of Argentine economic policies, under the control of a government-operated agency.
The author’s bibliography is limited to a few general histories of the individual railways and to several volumes of documents from the Ministry of Public Works (1908-1944). Perhaps a more detailed account of the building of Argentine railways will yet be written with more attention to the effect of these roads on the social and economic life of the country. Dr. Cuccorese’s volume is a good starting point for such a study.
