Braulio Costa was a porteño businessman and legislator who is not well known in Argentine historiography. But Hugo Raúl Galmarini focuses on Costa as the leading figure of an economic interest group which influenced the government’s efforts in the 1820s to create a modern economic infrastructure throughout the United Provinces. Without ideological interpretation, the author outlines the participation of prominent Buenos Aires merchants in port-building projects, the Banco Nacional, the Baring Brothers loan, the Famatina Mining Company, and the Casa de Moneda. Among his varied archival materials, Galmarini develops a source of significant potential—the protocolos or public registries in which notaries recorded all types of business transactions.
The author’s unique contribution appears to be his description of the Buenos Aires capitalistas as a social group. A list of Costa’s associates reads like a Who’s Who of Argentina’s old-guard oligarchy: among others, Sáenz Valiente, Haedo, Alzaga, Capdévila, Trapani, and Aguirre. Most had inherited their commercial wealth and were interrelated through marriage, compadrazgo, and partnership. As the city’s most powerful businessmen, they engaged in retailing, wholesaling, and the import-export trade. Some had commercial connections abroad and maintained business ties with resident British merchants as well as with agents in the interior provinces. Members of the grupo costa owned urban real estate and increasingly invested in rural property, cattle, and cattle processing. Galmarini’s study suggests that, though having important connections with foreigners, creole businessmen possessed substantial capital resources and actively sought to develop investment opportunities.
During most of the 1820s, porteño merchants supported Bernardino Rivadavia’s policies of state-aided economic expansion. The default of the Baring loan, failure of mining ventures in La Rioja, and inflation of the Bank’s paper currency, however, soon discredited these economic policies. By 1830, the group had disintegrated.
Galmarini proposes that the era’s political conflicts be re-evaluated in terms of urban versus rural interest groups instead of the traditional federalist-unitarian split. Unfortunately, he fails to explain the urbanrural dichotomy at length. It may be untenable anyway since city merchants invested heavily in rural enterprises. Yet Galmarini’s research certainly documents the decline of the structuralists and the rise of the cattle interests as personified by Juan Manuel de Rosas.
