False Economy - Alan Beattie [9]
Argentina brought the same conservative and oligarchic tendencies to industrialization that it had to the agricultural sector, preferring cozy, safe monopolies protected by government fiat and regulation to the brutal riskiness of the marketplace. Nascent Argentine industry was, in essence, carried by the rest of the economy. It had little momentum of its own.
Argentina's development during the Golden Age was rapid but precarious. Its well-being depended on farm prices' continuing to hold their own against the prices of manufactured goods, and on global markets' remaining open. A boost from new technology and new export markets would be no guarantee of a secure place on the escalator that would take the economy past agriculture and into manufacturing.
Many of the manufacturing industries that did spring up were adjuncts to the farming business, such as the Fray Bentos canneries. They became not replacements for farming but offshoots from it; they did not lead but were towed behind agriculture. Argentina's manufacturing was small-scale—handicraft workshops, not factories—and used imported capital and technology. Its labor force was unskilled, and remained that way. The wealth and status of the Argentine elite, while they also owned some service industries, such as banking and transport, were still based on landowning. Manufacturing was regarded as a little vulgar.
Often, or at least often in the narratives of historians, we find a symbolic moment—a pivot—when it became clear that the investors and industrialists of the cities would be the future rather than the landowners and farmers of the countryside. In Britain, the defining moment was the repeal, in 1846, of the Corn Laws, the import tariffs that had protected British grain from foreign competition and artificially buoyed the value of land. In America, it was the Civil War, with the industrial North defeating the agrarian South. The closest Argentina came was the symbolic burning down of the Jockey Club by urban supporters of Juan Peron (of whom more later), more than a century after Britain had repealed the Corn Laws.
If the South had won the Civil War and gone on to dominate the North, America might have looked a lot more like Argentina. The antebellum Southern states would have been very familiar to an Argentine: large estates with a few rich landowners and some badly paid laborers. (Thanks to the low productivity, which could not attract enough labor, it also had a lot of slaves.) They exported crops, principally cotton, to the rest of the world, but with little ability to expand and diversify. The cotton was shipped to Liverpool, to be made into textiles in Lancashire; the financial powers of the South did not make clothes themselves.
In fact, though the war itself could have gone either way, in reality this is a "what if?" turning point imbued with more significance than it deserves. A Southern victory in the Civil War might have slowed and skewed American industrialization but not halted it. Even if the North had lost, and failed to bring the South back into the Union by force, it would likely have gone its own way, building an economy based on manufacturing and commerce and leaving the South to wallow in its victorious stagnation. Manufacturing and finance were supplanting farming. No country was going