J. Valerie Fifer has produced a book that should be praised for its restraint and careful focus. Despite its grand main title, this volume’s scope is captured by its subtitle. Between 1850 and 1930, some observers from the United States advocated economic development in the temperate lands of the Southern Cone, most especially in Argentina and Chile, that would parallel what they believed was being accomplished in the United States’ own trans-Mississippi West. These advocates of development insisted that railroad expansion, especially a transcontinental line from Santiago to Buenos Aires, would open up the drier lands of the interior to agricultural settlers and community organizers.
It didn’t happen that way, so a “new West” of boosters, traders, tourists, and immigrants never appeared south of Capricorn. The critical reason that southern South America did not develop in the same manner as western North America is explained primarily in the book’s longest chapter, which details the “failure of the railroads in the Southern Cone” (pp. 32-111). Argentina depended on European financing and adopted a British model of railroad development that guaranteed higher returns to investors than the riskier approach taken in the United States. Rather than rapidly laying rails into undeveloped lands to stimulate settlement and economic growth, the British system involved slower and more costly construction expanding into regions that already had become economically viable. For this reason, by 1914 Argentina’s network of railroads had not grown much beyond the established settlements of the humid pampa. For the most part, Argentina’s railroad companies did not try to attract immigrants or to encourage small-scale land ownership. If the railroads received land grants from the government—and only six did—they sold the land in large blocks to speculators instead of in small allotments to settlers. As for a transcontinental line, an ineffective route opened in 1910; but crossing the Andes did not remove the greatest barrier to an integrated railway system—the political boundary between Chile and Argentina.
Much like the British system for railways, Fifer has constructed her book carefully and safely. She has taken the U.S. advocates of western-style expansion on their own terms, with their own view of western history, which they misapplied to Argentina and Chile. Her book does not incorporate the scholarly assessments of the U.S. West, which increasingly have recognized the social, political, and environmental cost of western expansion. For this reason, hers is not a comparative history. Nonetheless, it is a solid study that will allow many readers to consider differing models of economic development in a historical context.
