This book enters the debate on the causes of Argentina’s decline during the past generation. The debate itself, as Gravil defines it, may be paraphrased as follows: did Britain, as nacionalistas have contended, exploit Argentina to the point that it destroyed Argentina’s future prospects? Or, as some “liberals” have argued, was the decline the result of the liquidation of the British presence by Perón? Gravil’s study of the Anglo-Argentine link during the early twentieth century up to the eve of World War II focuses on trade, its substance, organization, and structure, and especially on two periods of severe commercial strain: 1914-18, and the depression of the 1930s. He also discusses British investment and Anglo-American rivalries in Argentina, while examining facets of Argentine agriculture and cattle ranching.
The book is densely laden with statistics and references, and draws upon an impressive range and quantity of archival and secondary sources. Much of it is tightly argued and well written. It contains an excellent description of the organization of the Argentine grain trade under the notorious Big Four” exporters led by Bunge y Born, and the extent of British commercial-cum-diplomatic pressures on Argentina during World War I (including a plan endorsed by Lloyd George’s cabinet to bribe the Argentine government to favor British interests). Gravil roundly denounces the Roca-Runciman treaty of 1933, which he calls “a program of assistance to British manufacturing exports,” and “an abject posture towards Britain, adopted essentially for one tenth of Argentine export trade.” Elsewhere Gravil introduces new data and interpretations on other familiar topics: he again demonstrates the vulnerability of Argentina’s immigrant agricultural tenantry; he illuminatingly reexamines the Baring crisis of 1890 and its aftermath; he adds many new insights on the creation and growth of the meat trade; he takes yet another look at the Argentine tariff, while sharply contradicting Díaz Alejandro.
The book maintains a successful balance between exclusively Argentine issues, and a concern with the equally dismal saga of British decline since the late nineteenth century. Unlike most recent studies of the Anglo-Argentine link by British writers, Gravil’s is engagingly irreverent toward British policies, indeed almost to the point that he becomes the first-ever British revisionista. Another of the book’s claims is that, quite contrary to orthodox dependency analysis, during war and depression, British imperialistic pressures on Argentina grew rather than receded, and that both periods brought regression and not expansion in Argentine manufacturing.
The virtues of this study lie in its ebullient iconoclasm, and its mastery over the abstruse technicalities of international trade. But in a general sense it falls a little short of its declared objectives. It is difficult to discuss Perón and his consequences in a study concerned largely with trade that concludes in 1939. Gravil continually castigates the improprieties of British policies toward Argentina. Yet he also shows that such policies were essentially the result either of Britain’s international competitive weaknesses, or of Britain’s desperation during the war and the depression. In sum, does Gravil regard imperialism as a moral or ethical category, or as the inevitable, and thus morally neutral, consequence of nonexistent historical alternatives?
