David Rock’s second major book is an exploration of the course of Argentine history “from Spanish colonization to the Falklands War.” These two events are seen not so much as chronological limits but (if the second is to be understood as the most representative episode in a period of global crisis) as decisive moments in that history. It is not surprising to see Rock emphasize contemporary history: his previous studies, which decisively influenced our current views of twentieth-century Argentina, already shared that emphasis. It is equally unsurprising to be invited by him to an exploration of the past in order to understand the present, not only because he is a historian, but also because recent developments have given an added currency to the notion that the keys to the tragic enigma that is Argentina today are hidden somewhere in the nation’s past.
More surprising is Rock’s assumption that the most decisive of these keys are to be found in the very early moments of that past. Here he parts company not only with those “neoliberal” scholars who see a new nation being born in the late nineteenth century, but with all the historians who since Mitre saw the 100 years from the inception of the Bourbon reforms to the start of the agricultural export boom as the truly formative period of Argentine nationhood and of modern Argentine society. Rock believes that by neglecting the early colonizing era, Argentine historiography has missed the basic clue to the current Argentine illness, namely, the creation at that early stage of a system of “exploitation of indigenous peoples by a white elite through tribute institutions” whose legacy is the “enduring colonial tradition” that supports the “inflexible economic structure” of twentieth-century Argentina.
It is difficult not to sympathize with Rock’s impatience with a historiographic tradition that hasn’t renounced the view of the Argentine past created to explain the most successful national experience in Spanish America. However, it is not easy to believe that tributary institutions that had the most limited impact on the areas of the future country where that drama was to unfold offer the key to Argentina’s stunted development. If Rock is so ready to accept this improbable notion, perhaps it is because, while rejecting the conventional view of Argentine historiography, he has not submitted his theory to the thorough revision it clearly needs. This is particularly the case with the century opened by the Bourbon reforms, in which General Mitre placed the epiphany of an Argentina made great by its adherence to liberal institutions and a liberal economic order. For Rock, independence opens instead “another long cycle of decline,” marked by diminishing economic opportunities, and the exacerbation of social conflicts that is their usual consequence. But this is precisely when the dominant class of the agricultural-export era emerged in what was practically empty territory, with no roots in any earlier colonial experience than the creation of the Bourbon mercantile and bureaucratic elite. Perhaps Rock is more in thrall than he is aware of to the historiographic views he so rightly rejects, and didn’t make enough allowances for every socioeconomic order’s ability to invent its own inequalities and readiness to sacrifice its potential for growth in the indeterminate future to the immediate economic and sociopolitical aggrandizement of its dominant groups.
As these comments suggest, Rock’s book offers both an immensely suggestive and controversial exploration in the historical roots of the current Argentine crisis and an authoritative, searching, and thorough presentation of that crisis unfolding in time. It is not in Rock’s style to write one of these chronologically arranged historical encyclopedias that too frequently usurp the name of national history, and since he entered the field of Argentine history, his stubborn independence from conventional wisdom has decisively added to the excitement and challenge of doing work in it.
