Buenos aires—the city and the province—experienced a nineteenth-century trade boom that expanded cattle raising over much of the virgin pampa long before the age of railroads and chilled beef. The emergence of pastoral exports differentiates nineteenth-century commerce from the staple trade in Potosí’s silver bullion during the colonial era. Following de facto independence in 1810, Spanish and porteño merchants lost their dominance in foreign commerce. Englishmen and other Europeans residing in Buenos Aires now linked Argentine pastoral production to new industrial and non-industrial markets in Europe and America. Foreign merchants also assumed the continued import of manufactured goods and certain processed foods. Foreign shipping in the estuary, which increased despite the region’s political and diplomatic disorders, stimulated an impressive expansion of cattle and sheepraising on the prairies south of Buenos Aires.
Exportation of pastoral raw materials could not have proceeded without the corresponding development of Buenos Aires as freight-handler for the entire region. The local economy obtained its dynamism from foreign trade and the export sector, but the domestic market at the port city grew in importance as a result. The marketing system of the early nineteenth century exemplifies the relative autonomy of one Latin American economy often attributed to be “neocolonial” or “dependent” in the historical literature.1
The dependency model appears to rest on the dominant power which foreign merchants and the industrial metropolis exerted over Latin American economic development. After all, foreign traders owed their positions in the Argentine trade to their contacts abroad, which availed them of international credit to ship raw materials and to import manufactured goods. Dependency theorists argue that foreigners reaped large commercial profits from the trade and restricted local economic activity to the export sector. Latin America’s reliance on export trade in the nineteenth century supposedly limited economic diversification, stunted development of the domestic market, and concentrated, rather than diffused, local economic opportunity.2
These arguments notwithstanding, Argentina’s international trade did establish the necessary linkages to widen and diversify the domestic infrastructure. Rather than acting as masters of the economy, foreign merchants appeared to be no more independent of market conditions than creole traders and ranchers. Nor did they participate effectively in the local marketing system. Available documentation indicates that a broad complex of creole merchants and immigrant entrepreneurs without foreign commercial contacts directed and financed the development of internal transport and processing. Admittedly, local commerce depended on the markets and profits of foreign trade—but not on foreign investment and management.
Foreign Trade and Merchants
Buenos Aires, though not a convenient port, remained the principal entrepôt in the region because of the extraordinary expansion of ranching in its hinterland. Montevideo and Colonia on the East Bank in Uruguay had better harbors and were equally accessible both to Atlantic ships and to riverboats, yet both ports served as points of coastal transshipment from Buenos Aires and as secondary terminals for river traffic. Commerce in Uruguayan produce finally revived in the 1840s after three decades of civil war.3 Atlantic ships also gained access to other river ports after the exile of the porteño governor, Juan Manuel de Rosas, in 1852. Foreign vessels now ascended the Río Paraná to Rosario, terminus of the overland cart trades out of Córdoba, and sailed up the Río Uruguay to Concepción, center of the cattle industry in Entre Ríos.4 Buenos Aires, however, had been the capital and leading port during the viceregal era and, in the early nineteenth century, not only retained its earlier prominence but became the focus of an expanding regional commercial system.
Foreign trade through Buenos Aires port, nonetheless, proved erratic. Four foreign naval blockades in the first half of the nineteenth century disrupted porteño commerce, even though each blockade turned out to be porous.5 Blockade running became an ordinary pastime for many merchant vessels in the Río de la Plata, and commerce shifted to other ports in the estuary, such as Ensenada or Montevideo. Blockades also tended to shift idle commercial capital at Buenos Aires into ranching, transport, and processing.6 Once resumed, porteño trade thereby reached even greater levels of pastoral export. The average annual arrival of foreign ships at Buenos Aires shows a six-fold increase in the half-century following independence. In the 1810s, an average of 107 foreign ships stopped at Buenos Aires each year. In the 1820s, the average was 288 ships per year; in the 1830s, 280; in the 1840s, 452; and in the 1850s, 674.7
International demand created by both industrial and non-industrial consumers was responsible not only for growth but also for diversification of commerce in the estuary. Buenos Aires’ hide exports increased throughout the century because metropolitan populations were consuming greater amounts of leather goods. By 1850, Argentina was providing both the United States and Great Britain with more than twenty percent of their growing imports of hides.8 Meanwhile, technological innovations in woolen manufacturing, beginning in the late 1820s, prompted mill owners in Britain and North America to import foreign wool. Short-stapled Argentine wool proved especially suitable for the manufacture of carpets and blankets on the new steam-powered broadlooms of the era.9 France and the Germanies also took both hides and raw wool from the Río de la Plata, while non-industrial Italy and Spain bought Argentine hides and tallow. The Cuban sugar boom and the Brazilian coffee boom, with the resultant increase in the Cuban and Brazilian slave populations, added Latin American markets for pastoral goods. Argentine salted beef (carne salada) proved a cheap protein diet for plantation slaves.10 Expanding international markets enabled porteños to overcome their colonial dependence on silver exports. Throughout the nineteenth century, Argentina expanded trade in a variety of pastoral commodities. (See Table I.)
British shippers dominated the foreign commerce of Buenos Aires early in the century but relinquished much of their hegemony as vessels from other consuming nations began to appear in the estuary. In the 1810s, shipping of British registry handled up to sixty percent of Argentine trade, but the combined shipping of other countries soon outstripped the British share. By mid-century, the number of British ships reaching Buenos Aires was twenty-five percent of the total, and Spanish and North American tonnages occasionally surpassed that of Great Britain. In 1857, smaller British vessels, despite their numerical superiority in the estuary, amounted to 35,159 tons. Larger North American vessels totaled 42,842 tons, and Spanish ships, 23,214 tons.11 French, Sardinian, and German vessels called as well, thereby diversifying Argentina’s foreign customers. Most trade went to industrial nations, but at mid-century, thirty-three percent of Argentine commerce was destined for non-industrial countries—Cuba, Brazil, Italy, and Spain. (See Table II.)
An extraordinary presence of British merchants and an adverse balance of trade characterized the porteño economy only in the first two decades after 1810. In 1824, for example, Great Britain exported £803,237 sterling worth of goods to Argentina and imported only £388,338 in Argentine produce.12 Porteños paid off their initial trade imbalances in silver specie. Some British merchants, like the Robertsons and James Brittain, thus were able to return home with substantial fortunes.13
But Buenos Aires trade sustained neither the favorable position nor the excessive profits of English import merchants for long. Industrial markets for Argentine raw materials were booming at a faster rate than the region’s consumption of foreign goods. By mid-century, the balance of trade seems to have turned against the metropolitan countries. England’s total trade deficit with Argentina from 1854 to 1860 amounted to £553,259 sterling. The United States’ balance of trade with Argentina produced a consistent North American deficit averaging U.S. $963,847 between 1827 and 1860.14
British merchants began to lose their nearly monopolistic trading status to other Europeans and to creoles. By 1818, a total of fifty-five English import-export houses at Buenos Aires facilitated the trade between the region and Europe. Within seven years, twenty-seven merchant houses faced liquidation or went bankrupt, and more British firms fell during the 1827 Brazilian blockade. Buenos Aires’ commerce increasingly came under the aegis of French, German, and Brazilian traders and of several houses with mixed foreign and native proprietorship. Creole exporters flourished again when Spanish trade revived in the 1840s. Of the ten largest brokerage houses, handling one-third of all overseas trade at mid-century, not one was British.15 English merchants amounted to only one-fifth of all exporters in the 1860s.16
In the immediate post-independence period, Argentine officials proposed to attract foreign capital to invest in the domestic economy. In 1822, the province of Buenos Aires, governed by Bernardino Rivadavia, passed laws that guaranteed the commercial status of foreigners in Argentina and recognized their right to make profits. Rosas neglected such juridical niceties, but the Constitution of 1853 reaffirmed the right of foreigners to trade, travel, and export their profits from the country.17 In spite of such official encouragement, foreign merchants found only limited opportunity to invest in the local infrastructure. British attempts to revive Andean mining of precious metals, notably the Potosí and La Famatina Mining Companies, failed in 1825. London’s House of Baring in 1824 loaned the government £600,000 on Argentine securities, but this investment money was squandered during the Brazilian war in Uruguay.18 Some Englishmen invested their commercial profits in local sheep ranches and severed their foreign ties. Other foreign merchants with solid commercial connections settled down to the consignment business at commission rates of two percent.19 By 1830, the brief era of merchant adventure in Buenos Aires had ended.
Market demand from a diverse set of industrial and non-industrial customers actually permitted a diversification of staple exports from Buenos Aires. Foreign traders, capitalizing on their connections to overseas markets, survived in an increasingly competitive situation. Furthermore, each increment in the amount of export broadened the economic infrastructure of the Río de la Plata, despite the limitations of traditional native technology.
Transportation Network
River shipping and caravans of oxcarts and packmules linked the far-flung territories of the Río de la Plata to a regional commercial system whose hub was Buenos Aires. Expansion of the ports foreign trade stimulated use of locally constructed, wooden sailing vessels, measuring up to 150-tons burden, for carrying bulk freight from Uruguay, Paraguay, and the riverine provinces of Argentina. Many of these craft proceeded to Buenos Aires or to the Riachuelo, a small river south of the city, to unload regional products and take on return cargos of European goods. Vessels also put in above the city at Las Conchas, where carts transshipped the freight to urban markets, while other boats made for Montevideo.20 Toward midcentury, riverboats eliminated some transshipment by loading provincial export cargos directly onto foreign ships in the outer roads of Buenos Aires’ harbor. Foreign-made steamboats appeared on the Paraná and Uruguay rivers in the 1850s but carried little freight. Steam navigation of the era mainly facilitated passenger service and commercial correspondence in the region.21
River shipping contributed to the boom in foreign trade at Buenos Aires. At least thirty-three percent of all river cargo deposited at the port consisted of export products. Dried hides, horse hair, wool, tallow, sheepskins, and nutria pelts came from small ports serving the grazing areas of the Paraná-Uruguay river basin. As oceanic tonnages increased, therefore, so did the amount of cargo deposited at Buenos Aires by coastal vessels. Foreign shipping at the port rose from 48,354 tons in 1837 to 191,376 in 1858, while river shipping increased from 23,626 to 62,933 tons in the same years.22
Buenos Aires’ domestic market, however, provided the chief stimulus for river shipping. Foodstuffs such as wheat, cheese, yerba mate, corn, and even watermelons arrived on river vessels. Most important was the freight in wood products such as kindling, posts, timber, and charcoal from areas as far away as Paraguay or as near as the delta islands. In 1810, nearly 700 riverboats put in at Buenos Aires, and fifty years later the arrival of river craft annually exceeded 2,000. Statistics for Buenos Aires and the Riachuelo show that the departure of river traffic increased from 999 boats in 1810, to 2,114 in 1830, and to 3,877 in 1860.23
Proximity was a major factor in the freight operations of river commerce. Greater numbers of vessels ran between Buenos Aires and the closest river ports. The bulk of traffic proceeded from adjacent areas, Uruguay, Entre Ríos, and Santa Fe. In addition to the river ports of Buenos Aires province itself, domestic shipping also served southern estancieros at boat landings along the Atlantic coast. Still, more than twenty-five percent of all river freight entering Buenos Aires originated in Corrientes and Paraguay, both of which, despite their remoteness, formed part of the regional commercial system. The disadvantage of the longer distance to Buenos Aires’ markets was offset partially by the fact that larger vessels served the farthest ports. (See Table III.)
Ship registries at Buenos Aires reveal the increasing importance of boat building, a domestic industry, in the regional economy of the era. Boatwrights constructed vessels close to timber sources in Santa Fe, Corrientes, Paraguay, and the Banda Oriental. Boats built at Buenos Aires probably came from wood of salvaged ocean vessels or from timbers transported from upriver. Port blockades by foreign warships actually fostered the local shipbuilding industry as the crews of idled coastal vessels entered the industry’s labor force. Such activity occurred during the 1847 Anglo-French blockade. Between 1843 and 1855, port authorities registered 281 newly constructed boats over forty-tons burden, and 1,082 smaller craft.24
Buenos Aires also served as freight terminal for the cart and mule trades. Wagon trains arriving from Córdoba and the northern provinces carried dried hides, horse hair, raw wool, and goatskins for the export market, and flour, tanned leathers, timber, and ponchos for domestic consumption. Western freight from the Andean provinces of Mendoza and San Juan came via mule train. Packmules brought pastoral export goods as well as flour, dried fruits, raisins, figs, and leather bags of muscatel wine and grape brandy.25 Like river shipping, overland transport served both the domestic and export markets. Yet, the overland trade responded to expanding markets by restructuring its tradition-bound operations in the Río de la Plata. Buenos Aires’ commerce with the interior shifted gradually from road to river traffic.
Overland freighting operated within a strong colonial heritage that changed little in its technology after independence. Trails remained primitive and unimproved. Rain created huge mudholes and slowed cart and mule traffic considerably. A caravan of fifteen carts traveled more than a month from Buenos Aires to reach Córdoba and an additional two to three months to reach Salta.28 Indeed, cart construction had changed little from colonial styles and even from Spanish medieval models. Oxcarts still rumbled along on two giant wheels, six to eight feet high, and were pulled by teams of six oxen. Not a single metal part, only timber and rawhide, went into the construction of the freight wagon.
Of the two modes of overland freighting, wagon trains appear to have been more efficient, given the generally level terrain between Buenos Aires and the northern provinces. Carts brought much more freight to Buenos Aires than did packmules. Each wagon carried 1.7 tons of freight and the packmule only 200 pounds; and the cargo capacities per teamster ran twenty-five percent greater than that of the muleskinner.27
At first glance, it might appear that the overland transport trade between Buenos Aires and the interior did not participate in the port’s commercial expansion of the first half of the nineteenth century. Fragmentary data indicate that the amount of overland freight deposited at Buenos Aires declined steadily. The arrival of cart freight from the interior dropped from 2,165 tons in 1823, to 1,395 tons in 1828, and to 144 tons in 1860. Packmule cargos at Buenos Aires fell from 1,296 tons in 1823, to 863 tons in 1828, and to 146 tons in 1860.28
Do these statistics support the traditional historiography which suggests that the interior of the Río de la Plata did not participate in the commercial growth of Buenos Aires? The “depression” of the interior customarily is attributed to the decline of Upper Peru’s silver production, to the chronic civil wars, and to the influx of foreign manufactured goods which undersold those of provincial handicraft industries. The very inefficiency of moving long-haul freight via oxcarts and packmules offers a more cogent explanation. While boatmen carried three to four tons of cargo per man, one cartman transported only 1.25 tons on each trip.29
Buenos Aires’ statistics in themselves cannot confirm the decline of interior transport and economy. But overland traffic at the port diminished not only because of the inefficiency of overland freight haulage, but also because of the growth of the city. Farmers usurped traditional parking and grazing areas for cultivation, and the cattle drives and oxcarts coming from estancias and farms within Buenos Aires province intensified traffic on the roads and in cart terminals of the port. By the late 1820s, cart traffic from the ranching areas of Buenos Aires province already had surpassed freighting from the interior.30
Commercial congestion in the port city, in fact, caused the rerouting of overland freight, not its downfall. Caravans from the interior headed to freight terminals at river ports like Conchas and San Nicolás north of Buenos Aires. Most important of the freight transfer points was Rosario, the small river port in the south of Santa Fe province. Cart trains traveling over the road from Córdoba deposited their Buenos Aires-bound cargos in this river town. From Rosario, riverboats carried the freight down to Buenos Aires.31 Despite the inefficiency of overland transport and congestion at the port, therefore, the interior trade continued to contribute to Argentine commercial expansion.
Collection and Distribution
Little is known of the structure and the changes in marketing-systems of nineteenth-century Latin America. Buenos Aires inherited from the colonial period a domestic commercial system featuring three wholesale marketplaces and numerous warehouses. Markets supported both export processing and the growing urban demand while warehouses catered almost exclusively to the export business.
The most important domestic wholesale point of the period was North Market (now the Plaza Británica), located on the road to the agricultural district of San Isidro. Farm wagons delivered vegetables, potatoes, peaches, melons, fish, fowl, kindling, and timber products to the plaza. Crowding in the colonial cart terminals forced relocation of West Market (circa 1820) further outside the expanding city to the new Plaza Once. Wheat and wool, the leading products bought and sold at West Market, reflected the production of farms and estancias west of Buenos Aires. By far the largest market lay to the south of the city. South Market at Plaza Constitución processed the pastoral products brought by oxcarts from ranches of the southern pampa. Perennially, South Market traded more hides, skins, tallow, and wool than did the other two marketplaces.
The markets of Buenos Aires were focal points of expansion in domestic and export commerce. In the three decades before 1860, the amount of export products processed in wholesale markets tripled and, in the case of raw wool, increased 175-fold. Domestic produce, like wheat and com, increased by 200 percent. (See Table IV.) The market system actually processed only twenty-five percent of the hides exported from Buenos Aires. Porteño warehouses and slaughterhouses supplied the bulk of the hide exports. However, a greater portion of the wool, because it was sheared on the estancia, passed through the marketplaces.
Judging from market and import statistics, agricultural production to supply the growing city developed considerably. In 1831, for instance, more than forty-five percent of the city’s flour supply seems to have been imported from the United States. North American ships brought 3,669 tons of flour that year, while local farmers delivered only 5,914 tons of wheat (milled to 4,435 tons of flour) to market. Three decades later, however, North American flour imports had dropped to 236 tons. The three marketplaces wholesaled 14,495 tons of wheat (9,663 tons of flour), and river vessels deposited an additional 1,250 tons of provincial wheat at Boca del Riachuelo.32
The importance of supplying the growing city can easily be overlooked. Yet, statistics for 1829 indicate that one of every fourteen farm carts (not to be confused with overland traffic from the interior) entering Buenos Aires carried export goods. At least ninety-four percent of the wagons from the province’s countryside brought products for the domestic market. Foodstuffs constituted the cargos of 5,386 farm carts; wood and lime products, 3,232 carts; and forage, 2,245 carts. Only 721 porteño wagons arrived with export products in 1829.33
Warehouses (barracas) located in the commercial sections of the city also processed bulk freight destined for export. Warehousemen stored the goods while arranging shipment, then packed the produce for overseas transport. Most charged two percent interest plus storage costs on accounts with an established clientele of ranchers and merchants. Barraqueros also bought produce at the great marketplace and packed the wool, hides, and sheepskins into bales to fill special orders of export merchants. Most barracas were located on the waterfront for easy deposit of products arriving by river vessels. The largest warehouses held up to 80,000 hides and contained bags, rawhide twine, and tools for packing. Hydraulic presses for baling export products reduced the size of bulk goods and saved on overseas freight charges. Though specializing in export goods like hides, skins, fur pelts, wool, and tallow, some barraqueros also maintained substantial stocks of flour and wheat bought during harvest season and stored for retail sales throughout the year.34 Warehousing persisted and expanded as an adjunct to the porteño merchandising system in the era of commercial florescence up to 1860. The British consul general placed the number of operating barracas at forty-four in 1836, and an English traveler a decade later counted sixty.35
Cattle Processing Industry
Argentina’s booming export sector stimulated development of an industrial processing complex which brought new management and production methods to the economy. The saladero, Buenos Aires’ distinctive combination of slaughterhouse and salting factory, served as the crucial funnel of the entire economic system: into it flowed the cattle of the pampa and out of it passed the raw materials of international trade. The salting plants brought to bear larger amounts of capital, labor specialization, mass production methods, and greater utilization of the beef carcass. Yet, entrepreneurs added no technological innovations to this processing industry.36 Despite widespread use of steam vats to extract grease from carcasses, the chief tools continued to be the lasso and knife, wielded by the human hand.
Factory processing, nevertheless, permitted the commercial economy both to diversify its exports and to produce them more cheaply. Industrial nations such as England and France accepted more than half of the saladeros’ production of salted hides and melted tallow. Salted meat, on the other hand, was destined for use in the expanding plantation-slave economies of Brazil and Cuba. Entrepreneurs in Buenos Aires responded rapidly to these new trading opportunities. Two Englishmen set up the first saladero south of Buenos Aires at Ensenada shortly after the 1810 revolution. Creole businessmen soon realized the opportunities, and saladeros proliferated around the city. By 1825, twenty had been established in the vicinity of the port, processing about 70,000 head of cattle a year. In addition, several graserías and mataderos de ovejas were located around the city, specifically to steam oil and tallow from carcasses of sheep and horses.37 One found saladeros north and west of Buenos Aires, but Quilines and Barracas south of the port became the prime meat-packing districts. After mid-century, thirteen saladeros in Barracas alone were processing nearly 250,000 cattle and 90,000 horses a year, for a total sales value of some 4,486,364 pesos fuertes.38
Initial capital outlays for land, equipment, stock, and labor were relatively large but certainly not beyond the means or the technical know-how of creole entrepreneurs. In 1815, three creoles, Luis Dorrego, Juan Nepomuceno Terrero, and Juan Manuel de Rosas, formed a partnership to buy and operate a saladero in Quilmes. Dorrego acted as the silent partner and financier and put up half the capital investment. Rosas handled cattle procurement and ran the slaughterhouse. Terrero, a merchant and accountant, arranged the export of saladero products. Within two years, the company reported gross sales of nearly 14,500 pesos fuertes, nearly fifty percent more than the original price. They paid off the lien and declared their earnings at 4,000 pesos fuertes each.39
Every improvement in the salting operations promoted efficiency and reduced the waste in processing cattle through Buenos Aires. In the late 1820s Antoine Cambaceres, an immigrant French chemist, introduced important assembly-line techniques. He designed cattle shutes in the corrals, a truck and rail system to move carcasses within the sheds, and most importantly, steam vats to extract the animal fat from bones and flesh. Last of all, saladero workers utilized dried bones as fuel and then packed up the ashes to be exported, along with manure from the pens, as fertilizers. The average steer now produced a 60-pound hide, 28 pounds of grease, and 120 pounds of salted meat plus byproducts.40
With its efficient, capitalized operations, a typical salting factory processed from 200 to 400 cattle per day at the height of the season. The entire processing industry required the work of several thousand seasonal laborers. Cambaceres’ saladero alone employed 300 men during peak operations. Porteño salting plants by the 1850s were producing a yearly average of 20,000 tons of salted beef for export. Slaughterhouses in ports on the Uruguay and Paraná rivers contributed another 1,000 tons per year.41 The saladeros’ location in the environs of Buenos Aires, close to foreign shipping, centralized the processing industry. Growth of the salting industry diminished the estancieros’ need to undertake inefficient slaughtering and processing on the ranches, as they had done before 1810.
Factory demand ultimately enlarged livestock wholesaling at Buenos Aires. In the 1820s, public corrals of colonial origin remained in operation near wholesale markets in and about the city. Here one also found the butchering areas (mataderos) which supplied inhabitants with beef and a few merchants with hides for export. Four such mataderos, located to the north and south and even within the populated district itself, existed at the time of independence. By the 1830s, the numbers of municipal corrals had been reduced to three and, after mid-century, to two. Now the corrals and butchering areas—and their offending odors—were removed well outside the growing urban center.42
Growth of foreign and domestic markets not only forced relocation of the butchering industry but also expanded the entire process of wholesaling cattle at Buenos Aires. Beef consumption rose with population growth, but butchers bought only eight percent of the cattle entering public corrals in the 1860s.43 Estancieros sold greater numbers of livestock to the salting factories, whose expanding demand for cattle occasioned the establishment of huge wholesale stock-yards (tabladas) in the 1820s. South Stockyard at Quilmes and North Stockyard between Morón and Flores (really in the western sector) began to market cattle, horses, and sheep in quantity for both saladeros and butchers. At the height of the 1861 slaughter season, as many as 100,000 head of cattle a month were wholesaled through both the public stockyards and the corrals outside Buenos Aires.44 Apparently, not even a major portion of the cattle processed by saladeros were purchased at the stockyards and corrals. Contracts between the big ranchers and factory owners required delivery of large herds directly to the saladeros.45 Nonetheless, the number of cattle wholesaled in all stockyards and corrals, both for local consumption and for export slaughter, increased spectacularly. (See Table V.)
Labor and Entrepreneurship
Expansion of the commercial and processing economy at Buenos Aires opened up entrepreneurial and labor opportunities which attracted European immigrants and provincial migrants. Newcomers always had contributed to the port’s population growth in colonial times. City censuses indicate the continuing arrival of Basques and Galicians from Spain, and Italians from Genoa, along with new surges of French and English. In 1822, only nine percent of the urban population was foreign-born. Three decades later, foreign-born residents constituted thirty-four percent of the urban population.46 Italians predominated among all immigrant groups, followed by French, Spanish, and English. In addition, migrants were coming to Buenos Aires from Córdoba, Mendoza, Tucumán, Santiago del Estero, Paraguay, and Uruguay.47
Most newly arrived foreigners were either bachelors or married men traveling alone; they were usually between the ages of sixteen and thirty-five. Married and single women also came, although females made up only twenty-five percent of all immigrants. The number of foreigners arriving at Buenos Aires by ship increased progressively as the nineteenth century passed the halfway mark. In the late 1840s, more than 4,000 newcomers debarked at the port, but the number of passengers arriving from abroad had jumped to more than 7,000 per year in the late 1850s.48
Population growth certainly solidified Buenos Aires’ position as the chief domestic market and labor pool in the region. The number of urban inhabitants grew from approximately 45,000 persons in 1810 to 120,000 in 1860. The decade following 1850 experienced the most rapid urbanization of the period with an annual population growth rate of 4.8 percent. The rural population of Buenos Aires province, meanwhile, increased at an annual rate of 3.1 percent, from 63,230 inhabitants in 1822 to 148,000 in 1855.49 Migrants, adept at handling horse and lasso, found jobs among unskilled foreigners manning shovels and vats at the saladeros. Provincianos were suited particularly for ranching and agricultural occupations opening up on the pampa, as were Basques and other Spaniards.50 Certainly not all Britishers at Buenos Aires were export merchants or even worked in foreign commerce. Numbers of Scots, Welsh, Irish, and Englishmen labored as tailors, masons, upholsterers, painters, blacksmiths, carpenters, grocers, watchmakers, and shopkeepers. Most sailors in the river trades probably came from the Italian seafaring city of Genoa as names like Repetto, Bruno, Bollo, and Rughi dominated the registry of boat crews. Spanish surnames were hard to find among crewmen, but sailors of Luso-Brazilian extraction like José dos Santos or Clemente da Costa also signed onto riverboat crews.51 One must consider the majority of these foreigners as permanent residents, as distinguished from the few foreign merchants who were transient. According to the documentary evidence, most foreign-born residents did not maintain commercial contacts abroad. Their work and profits, therefore, contributed to development of the domestic infrastructure.
The market complex supporting both domestic and foreign commerce undeniably furnished numerous opportunities for local enterprise. Historians often depreciate the role of the creole in the Buenos Aires’ commercial structure of the first half of the nineteenth century.52 While foreigners headed the merchant community of the city, nearly one-third of those engaged in the export trade may have been creoles.53 In addition, after living in Buenos Aires for many years, some of those foreigners became permanent residents. They married into porteño families and assumed local commercial interests. Judging from the advertisements soliciting export cargos in Spanish-language newspapers, foreigners frankly would have found it difficult to organize shipments without Argentine intermediaries. Moreover, British and other foreigners without local contacts apparently resorted to public auction in order to liquidate the import shipments of their metropolitan clients.54
If not actual partners or retainers in import-export houses, creoles served as important subsidiaries. Rosas’ cousins, the Anchorena merchant family, for example, delivered their goods to Hullet Brothers and Company of London. Patricio Lynch, the Irish porteño, collected pastoral products for the American brokerage firm of Zimmerman, Frazier and Company.55 Without doubt, the foreign traders conducted most export-import functions in the commercial system, but Argentine merchants participated fully in a structure which demanded contributions of both natives and foreigners.
The local marketing system, on the other hand, belonged exclusively to creole entrepreneurs and immigrants who appeared to have had no commercial contacts abroad. Any list of merchants and river pilots introducing goods from the Paraná River basin via coastal craft is replete with Spanish and Italian names. Larger merchant companies, such as Lezica y Compañía, Llavallol e Hijos, Ochoa y Compañía, or Ram y Rubert, handled cargos from many ports, but the river trades offered splendid opportunities for Italian boat owners and small porteño traders to handle traffic from one or two ports only. Individual small shippers dominated the river trades. Porteños maintained correspondence with commercial agents in the river ports and kept them informed of market conditions and transport problems. River pilots delivered most products of domestic consumption, such as yerba or firewood, for sale in the wholesale markets. Export cargos from upriver, on the other hand, usually were consigned to intermediary creole merchants in Buenos Aires. Still, English merchants who were long-time residents of Buenos Aires also established commercial and family relations with creoles and developed trade contacts in the riverine provinces.56
Concurrent with their control of river commerce, creoles owned and operated the greater number of coastal vessels plying those routes. The single inroad of foreign merchants was in the possession of small whaleboats used in port operations. In 1841, half of these boats were registered in lots of two to six under English names, and the rest, under Spanish surnames. Creoles and immigrant Italians, whether pilots or small merchants, owned the majority of the other classes of riverboats. Many of these individual owners probably were merchant boatmen from provincial river ports in Santa Fe and Entre Ríos and from Montevideo. Creole ownership was common even in the schooner and brigantine classes, where Britishers owned only twenty percent of these larger coastal vessels. Only one of every fourteen zumacas, forty-ton vessels, was registered under an Anglo name. It was not uncommon for creoles to purchase boats from foreign owners, or for immigrant Portuguese and Italians, experienced ocean sailors, to own craft made in Brazil and Sardinia.57 The names of these Portuguese and Italian river pilots do not appear in the lists of export merchants. Presumably, they may be considered as foreign-born residents who maintained no business contacts outside of the Río de la Plata region.
A different group of petty merchants, almost as numerous, managed the overland freight trade from the interior provinces. Porteño merchants cultivated commercial contacts in certain interior cities and regularly received consigned cargos by cart or mule train. As in the river trade, individual merchants handled most of the interior freight. Those traders with contacts in provincial cities handled the overland trades either for the retailing of interior products on the domestic market or for passing along export products to foreign merchants.58
Other creoles specialized in comercio del campo, procuring pastoral products from the far-flung hinterland south of Buenos Aires and delivering them to waterfront loading zones. The Anchorenas, for example, collected single shipments of hides from as many as forty different individuals and estancias. The merchant family then arranged the warehousing, weighing, marking, packing, and loading of hide cargos into carts and harbor craft. After expenses, commission charges to foreign exporters amounted to two percent of the wholesale value.59 The Larrea brothers, prominent “camp” merchants, maintained a network of agents in pampa ranching areas as well as in the river ports—in all, some twenty-five active agents in the field. From his storeroom in Buenos Aires, the elder Larrea dispatched letters to his agents to solicit produce, explain market conditions, and arrange freight delivery. He also organized the delivery of cattle to the saladeros south of the city. Larrea and his agents earned equal commissions of two percent for buying cattle, forming cattle drives, and delivering them to the South Stockyard.60 Others engaged in the camp trades as well. Independent freight carriers transported goods to marketplaces while shop owners arranged for their own delivery of goods from the countryside.61 Without exception, camp traders and merchants in the cart trades were creole. The immigrant found his opportunity in boat commerce.
Creoles, together with immigrant entrepreneurs, also dominated the storage facilities and salting factories of Buenos Aires. Foreign merchants occasionally maintained their own warehouses, but natives came to specialize in the storage of goods. More than half of the thirty-five warehouses operating in 1836 belonged to merchants with Spanish surnames who were certainly creoles or Spanish immigrants. Even some foreign-born warehouse owners like Bunge, Harrat, and Langdon were immigrant merchants who had settled in Buenos Aires. Foreigners also were evident among owners of the great salting plants on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, but once again Frenchmen like Antoine Cambaceres and François Baudrix and Britishers like George Dowdall and Patrick Brown were resident immigrants. At the same time native enterprise flourished. Simón Pereyra, Senillosa y Compañía, Santa María Llambí, and Cándido Pizarro all operated important saladeros along the Riachuelo.62
Undoubtedly, much capital used to move goods through the entrepôt of Buenos Aires came from foreign merchants interested in developing the commercial infrastructure of the Río de la Plata. Evidence exists, nevertheless, that creoles themselves generated and invested their own funds in regional commerce. They even utilized letters of credit among themselves in payment of commercial debts and to finance the collection and distribution of goods. First appearing in 1826, Buenos Aires provincial paper currency facilitated local exchange in an era when silver pesos (or pesos fuertes) were becoming scarce. Native merchants carried on trade to other provinces with the libranza, a letter of credit drafted in pesos fuertes or the metallic equivalent in paper pesos.63
A common creole investment device was the partnership. Wealthier merchants often financed others in trade between Buenos Aires and the provinces and in supplying the city with lime, wood, yerba, sugar, brandy, and rice. Others put up the capital to establish general stores and bakeries in the city. Usually, business associations involved a financier who provided the cash needed for a commercial project and a working partner who undertook all the management. Partnerships lasted briefly, usually until the working partner had established himself solidly in a trade or until specific merchandising had been completed. Partners then split the profits. Interest charges on loans between porteños seem high, up to two percent per month in 1840.64 Partnerships and profit-sharing, therefore, were rational alternatives to borrowing investment capital.
Conclusion
Historians who assume that the predominance of export sectors impeded economic development in Latin America may underestimate the extent of domestic commercial expansion and native autonomy in nineteenth-century Río de la Plata. Foreign merchants did not restrict the growth of the economic infrastructure at Buenos Aires. Trade created by international markets fostered expansion of ranching, cattle processing, and regional freight-carrying in Argentina. Increased commercial activity at Buenos Aires also supported a growing population and stimulated domestic consumption. The internal market proved a capable patron of the overland and river trades and of agricultural pursuits in the region.
Moreover, creole businessmen and foreign-born entrepreneurs without outside commercial interests appear as both catalysts and benefactors in developing the region’s economic infrastructure. They managed the transport of all freight on oxcarts and packmules, owned the major portion of the river craft, and operated many of the freight warehouses and salting factories of the city. Documentary evidence shows that these domestic economic enterprises were largely beyond the foreign merchant’s financial and managerial control. Argentina’s traditional technology was relatively inexpensive and well-known among native investors. Indeed, much capital for development in the first half of the nineteenth century came from local merchants themselves.
The arrival of modern industrial technology in the latter half of the century sustained Argentine economic expansion but cost creoles their control of domestic processing and transport. Although modern technology made possible new exports of beef and wheat, it proved expensive. The introduction of iron rails and rolling stock, steam navigation, refrigeration compressors, and harbor construction required vast investments by foreign financiers and the management knowledge of foreign technicians. Most of the new equipment was manufactured abroad. Exports further expanded and diversified to the benefit of economic development throughout the region, but Argentine merchants lost much of their previous command of the commercial infrastructure.65 “Neo-colonialism” and “dependency”—if they ever characterized economic development in Argentina—certainly postdate 1860. In the first half of the nineteenth century, the economy of the Río de la Plata had responded to foreign trade in a way that expanded the locally dominated marketing and processing system at Buenos Aires.
The most recent works in economic “dependency” are Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America (New York, 1970); Osvaldo Sunkel and Pedro Paz, El subdesarrollo latinoamericano y la teoría del desarrollo (México, 1970); James D. Cockcroft, André Gunder Frank, and Dale L. Johnson, Dependence and Underdevelopment (Garden City, N.J., 1972); and Ronald H. Chilcote and Joel C. Edelstein, eds., Latin America: The Struggle with Dependency and Beyond (Cambridge, Mass., 1974). For pioneer works on the theory, see Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina (Lima, 1967); and Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America (New York, 1967). On the application of the dependency model to Argentine history, see Liborio Justo, Nuestra patria vasalla: De los Borbones a Baring Brothers (Buenos Aires, 1968); José María Rosa, Análisis histórico de la dependencia argentina (Buenos Aires, 1974); Andrés M. Carretero, Orígenes de la dependencia económica argentina (Buenos Aires, 1974); and Juan Eugenio Corradi, “Argentina,” in Chilcote and Edelstein, eds., Latin America, pp. 309—407.
Cardoso and Faletto, Dependencia y desarrollo, p. 14; Sunkel and Paz, Subdesarrollo, pp. 322-328; Cockcroft, Gunder Frank, and Johnson, Dependence, pp. 22-23; and Chilcote and Edelstein, eds., Latin America, p. 49.
R. A. Humphreys, ed., British Consular Reports on the Trade and Politics of Latin America, Vol. XLIII, 1824-1826 (London, 1940), 40; Anon., A Five Year’s Residence in Buenos Aires (London, 1825), pp. 159-162, 170-176; and Thomas Baines, Observations on the Present State of the Affairs of the River Plate (Liverpool, 1845), p. 14. On expansion of Buenos Aires’ cattle industry, see Tulio Halperín-Donghi, “La expansión ganadera en la campaña de Buenos Aires, 1810-1852,” Desarrollo Económico, III, (Apr.-Dec. 1963), 57-110.
Clifton B. Kroeber, The Growth of the Shipping Industry in the Río de la Plata Region, 1794-1860 (Madison, 1957), pp. 162-163; and Manuel Macchi, Urquiza, el saladerista (Buenos Aires, 1971), appendix.
Buenos Aires port was blockaded by the Spanish Royal Navy from 1811 to 1816; the Brazilian fleet, 1827 to 1828; the French Navy, 1838 to 1840; and British and French forces, 1845 to 1848.
On blockade-running, see William R. Manning, ed., Diplomatic Correspondence of the United States: Inter-American Affairs, 1831-1860, Vol. I, Argentina (Washington, D.C., 1932), 442-443; and Great Britain, Public Record Office, General Correspondence: Argentine Republic (F.O. 6), microfilm (University of Texas Library), Vol. XX (1827), nos. 273-274. For investment during blockades, see Woodbine Parish, Buenos Ayres and the Rio de la Plata (London, 1839), pp. 355-356.
Adapted from the yearly statistics found in Juan Carlos Nicolau, “Comercio exterior por el puerto de Buenos Aires: movimiento marítimo, 1810-1855,” unpub. ms., tabla II; Kroeber, Shipping Industry, p. 127; and Registro estadístico de Buenos Aires 1857 (hereafter cited as REBA), II, 68; REBA 1858, II, 81; and REBA 1860, II, 105.
Great Britain, Statistical Office, Annual Statement of the Trade and Navigation of the United Kingdom with Foreign Countries and British Possessions (London, 1855-1862); and U.S. Treasury, “Annual Report of Commerce and Navigation of the United States,” 1827—1861, appearing yearly in the Executive Documents series of the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives.
James Bischoff, A Comprehensive History of the Woollen and Worsted Manufactures, 2 vols. (London, 1842), II, 191. The United States took twice as much Argentine wool as did England. While Great Britain imported 17.9 million pounds of Argentine wool between 1856 and 1860, the United States imported 40.7 million pounds. Great Britain, Statistical Office, Annual Statement, 1857-1861; and U.S. Treasury, “Annual Report,” 1857-1861.
See various “Resúmenes del comercio exterior de Buenos Aires” by country for 1842 in Archivo General de la Nación, Buenos Aires (hereafter cited as AGN), Sala X 42-8-5, Censos, 1813-1861. Between 1811 and 1860, Cuba imported approximately 489,400 slaves and Brazil imported 1,145,400 slaves from abroad. See Phillip Curtin, The Atlantic Slave Trade: A Census (Madison, 1969), p. 234.
REBA 1857, II, 60.
Ignacio Benito Núñez, An Account, Political, Historical, and Statistical of the United Provinces of the Rio de la Plata (London, 1825), p. 172. Núñez quotes parliamentary sources.
D. C. M. Platt, Latin America and British Trade, 1806-1914 (New York, 1973), p. 49. J. P. and W. P. Robertson, Letters on South America, 3 vols. (London, 1843), II, 153, mention having to transport their remittances in silver currency by oxcart.
Great Britain, Statistical Office, Annual Statement, 1855-1861; and U.S. Treasury, “Annual Report,” 1827-1861. The British figure for 1854—1860 is given in real value. Between 1849 and 1853, the British deficit totaled £.959,515 in official value calculated by British customs according to 1790 prices. One other scholar supports my conclusion about Argentina’s trade surpluses. See H. S. Ferns, The Argentine Republic (New York, 1973), p. 33.
Kroeber, Shipping Industry, pp. 61, 151n.
Vera Blinn Reber, “British Mercantile Houses in Buenos Aires, 1810 to 1880,” (Ph.D. Diss., University of Wisconsin, 1972). pp. 69-319.
See Sergio Bagú, El plan económico del grupo Rivadaviano, 1811-1827 (Buenos Aires, 1966), pp. 125, 166, 208; Juan Bautista Alberdi, Sistema económico y rentístico de la Confederación Argentina según su constitución de 1853 (Buenos Aires, 1954), pp. 18, 30—31, 51—52; and Hugo Raúl Galmarini, Negocios y político en la época de Rivadavia (Buenos Aires, 1974), p. 108.
H. S. Ferns, Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1960), pp. 134-143. R. A. Humphreys, Liberation in South America, 1806-1827 (London, 1952), pp. 145-162; and F. B. Head, Reports Relating to the Failure of the Rio Plata Mining Association (London, 1826). Also see mining company account books in AGN, Sala X 1-3-1 and -2, Hullet Hermanos y Cía, Gran Bretaña: Correspondencia, 1825-1837.
Herbert Gibson, The History and Present State of the Sheep-Breeding Industry in the Argentine Republic (Buenos Aires, 1893), pp. 18, 242—243; and Platt, Latin America and British Trade, p. 51.
Robertson, Letters, II, 35-41; E. E. Vidal, Picturesque Illustrations of Buenos Ayres and Monte Video (London, 1820), pp. 5-6; and P. Campbell Scarlett, South America and the Pacific, 2 vols. (London, 1838), I, 71.
Kroeber, Shipping Industry, pp. 46, 81-82.
Juan Carlos Nicolau, “Tabla del comercio del puerto de Buenos Aires, 1835-1842,” unpub. ms., p. 3; and REBA 1858, II, 57, 59-60.
Departures generally exceeded arrivals since most cargos of imported goods originated at Buenos Aires. Incoming river vessels, on the other hand, unloaded goods at several points near the city, and porteño customs officials normally did not count riverboats arriving in ballast. See AGN, Sala X 36-8-9, Marina, entradas de buques de tráfico costero, 1809-1814; Sala X 27-1-1, Entradas de cabotaje, 1829-1830; Sala X 36-7-14, Marina, salidas de cabotaje, 1859-1860; and Sala X 36-6-24, Marina, matrículas de cabotaje, 1858-1860. Additional statistics on river traffic may be found in REBA 1854, p. 19; REBA 1855, p. 97; REBA 1857, II, 62; REBA 1858, II, 60; and REBA 1859, II, 109-110.
AGN, Sala X 36-8-2 and 36-9-4, Marina, matrículas de cabotaje nacional, 1841-1857.
AGN, Sala X 27-3-5, Hacienda-Aduana, entradas y salidas marítimas y terrestres, tomas de razón, 1846—1848, lists consignments of goods delivered to Buenos Aires by overland freight carriers.
For road conditions, see Robertson, Letters, II, 61-63; and Charles B. Mansfield, Paraguay, Brazil and the Plate (Cambridge, Eng., 1856), p. 161. On overland freight traffic, see “Tabla general de las tropas de carretas y arrias que han salido al interior en 1829,” in AGN, Sala X 42-8-5; and Silvia Cristina Mallo, Amalia Latroubesse de Díaz, and María Concepción Orrumán, “El comercio entre Buenos Aires y las provincias de 1830 a 1835,” in Academia Nacional de la Historia, Primer congreso de historia argentina y regional (hereafter cited as ANH, Primer congreso) (Buenos Aires, 1973), p. 269. For a comparative study of the cart trades, see David R. Ringrose, “Carting in the Hispanic World; An Example of Divergent Development,” HAHR, 50 (Feb. 1970), 30-51.
“Tabla general. . . . en 1829,” AGN, Sala X 42-8-5.
Adapted from Juan Carlos Nicolau, Antecedentes para la historia de la industria argentina (Buenos Aires, 1968), p. 154; REBA 1858, I, 114; and REBA 1860, II, 83. All statistics are given in arrobas, each of which converts to twenty-five pounds.
Taken from statistics found in REBA 1857, II, 62; and various tables on cart and mule traffic in AGN, Sala X 42-8-5. The historical viewpoint that Buenos Aires’ commercial prosperity, especially during the governorship of Rosas, did not extend to the interior began with a contemporary, Juan Bautista Alberdi. See Alberdi, Bases y puntos de partida para la organización política de la República Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1914), pp. 87-88. Among recent historians who perpetuate this view, see Miron Burgin, The Economic Aspects of Argentine Federalism, 1820-1852 (Cambridge, Mass., 1946), pp. 16, 118-121; James Scobie, Argentina, a City and a Nation (2d ed., New York, 1971), pp. 93-94; and Tulio Halperin-Donghi, Revolución y guerra (Buenos Aires, 1972), pp. 97-126.
AGN, Sala X 27-2-17, Hacienda-Aduana, entradas y salidas marítimas y terrestres, tomas de razón, 1826-1828.
See Oscar Luis Ensinck, “El puerto de Rosario, puerto de la Confederación Argentina, 1850-1860,” in ANH, Primer congreso, pp. 319-333.
REBA 1859, II, 103; REBA 1857, II, 165; and U.S. Treasury, “Annual Report,” in Executive Documents, House of Representatives, 22d Congress, 1st Session, 1832, V, 213; and 36th Congress, 1st Session, 1859-1860, XV, 49. One barrel of U.S. flour equaled 3.9 bushels and weighed approximately 210 pounds or 8.4 arrobas. Buenos Aires imported flour only from the United States.
From “Introducción de productos de industria rural durante el primer y segundo semestres de 1829,” in AGN, Sala 42-8-5. Two carretas de media cargo are counted as one carreta de carga entera. Also see the figures for 1828 in REBA 1858, II, 137-138.
See various warehouse inventories listed in Nicolau, Antecedentes, p. 105; Diana Hernando, “Casa y Familia: Spatial Biographies in Nineteenth Century Buenos Aires,” (Ph.D. Diss., University of California, Los Angeles, 1973), p. 513; and AGN, Colección Biblioteca Nacional 226, Manuel Trelles, Autógrafos donados, doc. 3270/110. Also see the warehouse receipts in AGN, Sala VII 4-3-6, Archivo de Dr. Juan E. Anchorena y sucesores, 1810-1819 (hereafter cited as Archivo Anchorena).
Parish, Buenos Ayres, pp. 34-35; and William MacCann, Two Thousand Miles’ Ride through the Argentine Provinces, 2 vols. (London, 1853), I, 216-217.
David Landes offers a useful critique of technological advance. Technological innovation in production involves 1) the substitution of machines for human effort, 2) the substitution of inanimate for animate sources of power, and 3) the substitution of mineral and chemical substances for vegetable and animal materials. Landes’ definition therefore excludes certain management advances such as the introduction of economies of scale and specialization of labor. See David Landes, The Unbound Prometheus: Technological Change and Industrial Development in Western Europe from 1750 to the Present (Cambridge, Eng., 1970), p. 41.
Alfredo Montoya, Historia de los saladeros argentinos (Buenos Aires, 1956), pp. 33-36; and Horacio William Bliss, Del virreinato a Rosas (Buenos Aires, 1959), p. 118. For graserías, see AGN, Colección Biblioteca Nacional 226, doc. 3270/167.
REBA 1857, II, 46. The total sales value, given as 88,830,000 paper pesos, is converted to the peso fuerte according to the monetary tables found in Juan Alvarez, Temas de historia económica argentina (Buenos Aires, 1929), pp. 100, 109. In 1855, the peso fuerte, or silver peso, was worth one U.S. dollar or four shillings British sterling.
The original partnership agreement and various accounting balances are found in AGN, Sala VII 7-7-12 (20), Libro del establecimiento de carnes en el partido de los Quilmes, 1816.
For production and work statistics, see REBA 1854, p. 47; and “Datos estadísticos de los saladeros en el tercero y cuarto trimestres de 1858 (Barracas al Sud, 8 enero 1859),” in AGN, Sala X 42-8-5.
MacCann, Two Thousand Miles’, I, 211; Montoya, Historia, pp. 73, 78; Montoya, La ganadería y la industria de la salazón de carnes en el período 1810-1862 (Buenos Aires, 1971), p. 152; and Juan Carlos Nicolau, “La industria saladeril en la Confederación Argentina, 1835-1852,” Nuestra Historia, 3 (Jan. 1970), 11.
For information on corrals and beef provision, see Vidal, pp. 35-36; Anon., Five Year’s, p. 83; Scarlett, South America, I, 87-94; Wilfred Latham, The States of the River Plate (London, 1866), pp. 10-11; H. M. Brackenridge, Voyage to South America, 2 vols. (London, 1820), I, 255; and maps of the city in A. Taullard, Los planos más antiguos de Buenos Aires, 1580-1880 (Buenos Aires, 1940). Also see the corral administration papers in AGN, Sala X 36-1-1 and 27-6-4, Policía, reglamento para los corrales de abasto público, 1814–1862; and Sala X 36-4-1, Policía, corrales, 1833.
REBA 1860, II, 101.
“Ganado introducido por las tabladas y movimiento de los corrales, 1861,” in AGN, Sala X 42-8-5.
For an example of such a contract, see “Contrato, Nicolás de Anchorena y Mariano Haedo (Buenos Aires, 22 enero, 1949),” in AGN, Sala VII 16-4-10 (1715), Colección Ruiz Guiñazú.
REBA 1858, I, 67 (for a resumé of the 1822 census); and Almanaque comercial y guía de forasteros para el estado de Buenos Aires 1855, p. 142.
An unusually good census giving occupation, origin, and family information on Buenos Aires’ inhabitants is found in AGN, Sala X 23-5-5, Censo de la ciudad, 1827.
REBA 1857, I, 124, and REBA 1861, I, 94 provide the following statistics on the average annual arrival of passengers at Buenos Aires: 1847-1849, 4,161 net passengers per year; 1854-1857, 8,644; and 1858-1861, 7,196.
See the estimates of Charles S. Sargent, The Spatial Evolution of Greater Buenos Aires, Argentina, 1870-1930 (Tempe, 1974), p. 3; and Ernesto J. A. Maeder, Evolución demográfica argentina de 1810 a 1869 (Buenos Aires, 1959), pp. 30, 35.
Montoya, La ganadería, pp. 162-163.
For occupations of British residents at Buenos Aires, see Great Britain, Public Record Office, Vol. IX, no. 57 and Vol. XX, no. 314. Lists of riverboat crews are found in AGN, Sala X 36-7-12, Salidas de cabotaje, tripulación buques de cabotaje, 1855-1857.
See Roberto Cortes Conde, The First Stage of Modernization in Spanish America (New York, 1974), p. 124; Fems, Britain and Argentina, p. 144; and Aldo Ferrer, La economía argentina (Buenos Aires, 1963), pp. 70–73.
J. J. M. Blondel, ed., Almanaque político y de comercio de la ciudad de Buenos Ayres para 1826 (Buenos Aires, 1825), lists fifty-six negociantes with foreign names and twenty-nine with Spanish names. A count of merchants exporting goods in January 1850 reveals that fifty-one merchants with foreign names and twenty-one merchants with Spanish names were actively engaged in exporting goods. See AGN, Sala X 37-3-7, Aduana-Hacienda, entradas y salidas marítimas, toma de razón, 1849-1850.
La Gaceta Mercantil (Buenos Aires), Apr. 23, 1834; and AGN, Sala X 37-1-9, Entradas terrestres, 1829-1830.
On connections between foreign and native merchants, see Reber, “British Mercantile Houses,” pp. 84, 135; Andrés M. Carretero, Los Anchorena (Buenos Aires, 1970), pp. 66-69; Karl Wilhelm Körner, El Consul Zimmermann (Buenos Aires, 1966), p. 16; and AGN, Sala VII 4-4-1, Archivo Anchorena.
For merchants engaging in the river trades, see various entradas de cabotaje in AGN, Sala X 37-3-7 (1859-1860); Sala X 37-1-4 (1851); and Sala X 36-6-23 (1855-1858).
For boat registries at Buenos Aires, see AGN, Sala X 36-8-1 and 26-8-4, Marina, matrículas de cabotaje nacional, 1840-1857.
El Argos de Buenos Aires, May 29, 1824, p. 4. For merchants receiving freight from the interior, see various entradas y salidas terrestres in AGN, Sala X 27-2-17 (1826-1828), Sala X 37-2-25 (1832-1833); Sala X 35-3-5 (1846-1848); Sala X 37-2-26 (1848-1849); and Sala X 37-3-7 (1849-1850).
See various cuentas de venta y líquido de cueros in AGN, Sala VII, 4-2-1 and 4-3-6, Archivo Anchorena.
See AGN, Colección Biblioteca Nacional 371, Libro de correspondencia comercial, 1847-1849.
AGN, Sala X 37-2-17.
For proprietorship of warehouses and salting plants in Buenos Aires, see Almanaque político y de comercio de la ciudad de Buenos Aires para 1836; AGN, Sala III 33-7-15, Libro de patentes, 1836; and REBA 1857, II, 46.
Copies of libranzas used in trade between Buenos Aires and Santa Fe are found in AGN, Sala VII 4-4-1, Archivo Anchorena.
This information on capital and credit in the native merchant community is derived from various commercial contracts registered with the notaries public of Buenos Aires. Registros comerciales record contracts for payment of debts, business partnerships, loans of money, commercial association, and power-of-attorney. I have used AGN, Registro 73 (Comercio 1), Manuel J. Saine de Cavia, 1819-1820; Registro 74 (Comercio 2), Antonio Fausto Gómez, 1840-1849; and Registro 73 (Comercio 1), Pedro Callexa de Prieto, 1860.
Surveys of Argentina’s economic history after 1860 may be found in Cortes Conde, First Stage; Ferns, Britain and Argentina; Carlos F. Díaz Alejandro, Essays on Economic History of the Argentine Republic (New Haven, 1970); Scobie, Revolution on the Pampas (Austin, 1964); Peter H. Smith, Politics and Beef in Argentina (New York, 1969); and Horacio Juan Cuccorese, Historia de los ferrocarriles en la Argentina (Buenos Aires, 1969).
Author notes
The author, who recently received his Ph.D. from the University of Texas, is a lecturer at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He would like to thank the Department of Health, Education and Welfare for the Fulbright-Hays Fellowship which supported his research in Argentina in 1974.
