Uruguay’s twenty-year economic crisis, which culminated in the 1973 military takeover, discredited the doctrine of Uruguayan exceptionalism, the belief that democratic Uruguay was different from the rest of Latin America. Even the justification of the emergence of independent Uruguay, the principal concern of earlier historians, has taken on very different contours. The great debates in Uruguayan history, which centered on defending the actions of either the Colorados or the Blancos, the traditional political parties, have receded and are being replaced by economic interpretations. These six short books, written by leading historians of this generation, designed for students and general readers, have been selling well. And they are a good indication of the present state of Uruguayan historiography.
La Banda Oriental en la lucha de los imperios by José Claudio Williman and Carlos Panizza Pons demonstrates the new departures. The Banda Oriental gets limited coverage in a description of the vice-royalty of the Río de la Plata and of an empire whose function is primarily economic. The book, though conceptually a departure, is not innovative in content. The descriptions of the empire are taken mostly from sources like Haring and Hamilton; the explanations of the settlement of the Banda Oriental and the rivalries between Buenos Aires and Montevideo are traditional. The José Artigas who appears in Washington Reyes Abadie, Artigas y el federalismo en el Río de la Plata, is not traditional. Reyes Abadie emphasizes Artigas’ equalitarianism but the major focus is geopolitical. Artigas’ Liga Federal is seen as a natural economic unit with Montevideo as the overseas port for the Argentine upriver provinces, for Paraguay, and for Río Grande do Sul. Buenos Aires does not fit easily into this unit, and it, together with Portuguese Brazil and Francisco Ramírez, the caudillo of Entre Ríos, selfishly bring Artigas down. The cult of Artigas, though revised, is not yet being criticized by Uruguayan historians.
In La Cisplatina, la independencia y la república caudillesca, 1820-1830, Alfredo Castellanos describes the Portuguese-Brazilian occupation and the subsequent establishing of an independent Uruguay. On the issue of whether independence was thrust on the Banda Oriental by British mediation or desired by Uruguayans, Castellanos argues for the latter though his evidence argues for the former. The Brazilian occupation is presented as harmful, especially because Brazilians took possession of large land tracts—regret at the formation of ranch latifundias runs through all the books in the series—and drove off cattle. A weakened economy, a politically divided populace and “la sórdida ambición de los estados vecinos, Argentina y Brasil . . .”.(p. 122) make up the beginnings of independent Uruguay.
José Pedro Barrán’s Apogeo y crisis del Uruguay pastoril y caudillesco, 1838-1875, is the series’ most important book. Barrán, coauthor with Benjamín Nahum of the multi-volume Historia rural del Uruguay moderno, the major historical undertaking of this generation, here branches out from socioeconomic history. He attempts a balanced appraisal of Blancos and Colorados and the international ramifications of the Guerra Grande. For Barrán, Brazil is the exploiter of Uruguay in the postwar years. Barrán’s efforts to mesh socioeconomic and political history are a major, if not entirely successful, achievement. For example, he argues that an oversupply of cattle which brought prices down made ranchers willing to tolerate Venancio Flores’ Brazilian-sponsored Colorado invasions in 1863 because livestock destruction now caused little economic harm; yet later on he argues that this was the decade when ranchers introduced sheep and needed stability. Barrán is conscious of his meshing difficulties and concludes, “Cuando se producía un desajuste entre la vida política y las otras manifestaciones de la actividad humana, se tardaba tiempo en lograr un nuevo equilibrio. Ese tiempo siempre era crítico para el país” (p. 104). I take this to mean that while political differences produced physical and economic destruction, the exigencies of economics ultimately prevailed.
Barrán explains the emergence of militarism as the confluence of the failure of politics, the need of “las clases altas” for order, and the corps spirit created in the Uruguayan military by their service in the Paraguayan War (an explanation which better fits the Brazilian army than the Flores-led Colorados). Enrique Méndez Vives, in El Uruguay de la modernización, 1876-1904, carries on Barrán’s analysis. For Méndez Vives, who acknowledges that his book is not based on original research, the dependent modernization of Uruguay, the fencing of ranches, the improvement of livestock, the building of railroads, and the modernization of Montevideo, required stability. The rise and fall of militarism and all the shifts in politics were responses to the interests of the upper classes and of British capital. Aparicio Saravia’s revolutions do not fit into this explanatory framework and Méndez Vives explains them as the exception which proves the rule. Neither does the election of José Batlie y Ordóñez as President of the republic in 1903, which Méndez Vives simply narrates and avoids explaining.
Benjamín Nahum’s 1905-1929: La época batllista, sees the defeat of Batlie’s constitutional plan for a plural executive (the colegiado) in the July 1916 elections as the dividing line between the reform era and the later política de compromiso when the absence of clear electoral majorities prevented further reforms. Nahum explains the 1916 defeat principally as the result of the basically urban character of batllismo. Yet in that election the pro-colegiado Colorados got more votes outside Montevideo than in Montevideo, while the combined anti-colegiado vote in Montevideo was almost two-thirds that of the pro-colegiado Colorados. Nahum is somewhat inconsistent on Batlie. He argues that Batlie had limited interest in rural questions but also argues that the rural upper classes, fearful of Batlie’s rural program, combined against him. Nahum, who admits that this book is based solely on published works, is not completely at home with the material and makes factual and interpretative errors. Nevertheless, by centering attention on 1916 as the point of division, Nahum brings insight to the batllista era.
It is indicative of the constraints which the present government imposes on historians that there is no book in this series on the period from 1930 to the present and that none of the six books make overt comparisons between past and present. Even so, a clear thread, expressed in the language of dependency theory in the last three books, but really going beyond dependency theory, unites all the authors. While earlier generations of Uruguayan historians described the country as transcending crises and achieving successes, this generation sees Uruguay as a perennial victim, of Buenos Aires, of Brazil, of Argentina, of Britain, of the United States, of its own upper classes, and of the workings of international capitalism.
