Following a review of primary source documentation, the paucity of the era’s economic history, and historiography’s neglect of the countryside, this highly technical monograph proceeds to describe the Río de la Plata’s influence on Paraguay’s rural economy. Herken emphasizes the need to develop a solid base of historical material, a task he accomplishes admirably. He demonstrates the possibilities offered by existing documentation to conduct relatively sophisticated studies in his analysis of the 1890-1920 devaluation of Paraguayan currency, combining a simple regression analysis with monetarist inflation theory, for which he provides the necessary methodology and equations.
The author draws a clear relationship between Paraguay’s three major geographic sections and the overall economy of the Río de la Plata (i.e., the North’s yerba trade with Brazil, the Chaco’s tannin extract industry, and the South’s commerce with Argentina in agricultural products). In turn, he reviews the internal economic factors, including population, work force, and infrastructure, and concludes with an explanation of how Paraguay’s migratory agricultural structures were shaped by the requirements and opportunities provided by the greater regional economy.
Although this work contains some fascinating contemporary accounts in the appendixes, its extremely narrow subject matter presented in tediously technical jargon reduces its primary value to just what the author claims: it is one piece in a shamefully incomplete historical puzzle. As such, its usefulness is largely limited to those few scholars working to compile other building blocks, so that eventually enough of the historical picture will be reconstructed to write a comprehensive social and economic history.
