Latin America and the World Economy since 1800
Published by EH.NET (February 2000)
John Coatsworth and Alan Taylor, editors, Latin America and the World
Economy since 1800. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. xv +
484 pp. $49.95 (cloth), ISBN 0-674-51280-4; $24.95 (paper), 0-674-51281-2.
Reviewed for EH.NET by Richard
Salvucci, Department of Economics, Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas.
Welcome to the Cliometric Revolution, Latin Style
When I started graduate school in 1973, there were no textbooks on Latin
American economic history. Today, depending on your definition of a textbook,
there are 3 or 4 in English alone. In 1973, we argued about the Asiatic mode of
production and precapitalist economic formations. Today we discuss conditional
convergence. In 1973, bourgeois economists were the enemy. Today a bourgeois
economist is your dissertation supervisor. Welcome to the Cliometric
Revolution, Latin style. It’s been 25 years in coming,
but now that it’s come, it’s come with a vengeance.
The present anthology is an artifact of that revolution and like all
historical artifacts, it requires a bit of study to appreciate its meaning in
full. And so to begin, I’m going to quibble with the idea that what you read
here is really all that novel. After all, there’s always been some cliometric
work on Latin America, as the outstanding books of Carlos Dmaz Alejandro on
Argentina or Clark Reynolds on Mexico might attest. In my primary field,
Mexican history, you could point to things done by Luis Tellez or by Jaime
Zabludovsky as recognizably cliometric, but Tellez and Zabludovsky have gone
on to major careers in government service rather into careers as economic
historians. What’s more unusual is to find suitably trained professionals doing
purely academic work-doing economic history for a living. For that we can
thank, at least partly, a sea change in development ideologies in Latin
America, where economists in universities can now spend their time thinking
about conditional convergence (whose acquaintance they may have made in some
gringo institution) rather than about the Asiatic mode of production. And I
think I have some idea why.
For my generation, it was the fall of Allende in 1973 that was critical.
For this one, it is the fall of the Berlin Wall. That makes all the difference
in the world. You can write sympathetically about the economic history of
Cuban sugar mills without espousing the labor theory of value.
You can study the history of financial markets in Brazil without being
implicated in the overthrow of Joco Goulart in 1964. For
now, at least,
there are no gangster regimes advocating “market friendly” policies while
energetically murdering their own citizens. The ideological and political
baggage of the 1960s and 1970s is, for want of a better phrase, just so much
history. Hence
what we read here by so many relative newcomers to the field. Their authors
are students, not prisoners of the past, and that’s what makes their
scholarship worthwhile. I do have a small bone to pick with the volume’s title.
This is not a book about Latin America since 1800.
It is mostly about Argentina, Brazil and Mexico since 1870, which is not quite
the same thing. There are no Indians. There is no Caribbean or Central America.
No Andes. But worse, there are really no papers that engage with the period
before 1870 and that is a real problem. As John Coatsworth’s perceptive essay
on the nineteenth century puts it, “the available quantitative evidence shows
that Latin America became an underdeveloped region between the early eighteenth
and the late nineteenth century” (p. 26). In other words, most of the papers
in the volume-Carlos Newland’s excepted-do not address the principal issue of
Latin America’s economic history, namely, the origins of what Lant Pritchett
has called
“divergence, big time.” Even
if you argue in reply, that X (what existed before 1870) causes Y (what changed
later), the historian is liable to wonder why X occurred when it did and not
before, especially if Y is extremely profitable, the proverbial big bill on the
sidewalk.
I think
I know why. Sensible historians avoid the period before 1870 because it is a
Hobbesian world where life, not to mention some of its major actors, was nasty,
brutish and short. For most of Spanish America,
the era before 1870 (and after Independence in the 1820s) is much, much harder
to work in, let alone understand. The archives with which I am familiar (mostly
Mexican, to be sure) are a mess-disorganized,
uncatalogued, impenetrable-and very nearly impossible to utilize. Of course,
the messiness of the sources faithfully reflects the messiness of economic and
political life at the time, with unending coups, countercoups,
invasions, constitutions, blockades, wars, partitions, regulations,
proclamations, declamations, you name it. There’s no stable structure for
understanding, essentially. Unfortunately, this is where the action is,
unless you regard disorder itself as the proximate cause of poor economic
performance. As anyone reading this is probably aware, there’s really no
consensus about that either.
For this reason, I take claims made for the cliometric potential of Latin
American economic history the way I take tequila: in limited doses, and with
many grains of salt. Still,
triumphalism only infects the blurbs to the volume, for the “Introduction”
by John Coatsworth and Alan Taylor is conspicuously moderate in tone. So maybe
I shouldn’t complain. Besides, the papers are generally very good and a couple
are outstanding. One of the most coherent themes here is the importance of
financial markets and institutions in facilitating or accommodating economic
growth. This really is a new direction, at least in the Latin American context,
for I can think of little in the older historiography that makes this point
with any cogency. A very interesting paper by
Michael Twomey provides the relevant context in arguing that
“[t]he general trend of direct foreign investment [in the twentieth century]
has been downward relative to income and, probably, total capital stock” (p.
192). Portfolio investment aside, which
Twomey identifies as mainly, until 1990, loans to governments, the implication
is that domestic sources of capital were increasingly important between 1913
and 1950, the years when foreign direct investment fell sharply relative to
GDP. Twomey’s argument
frames papers by Stephen Haber, Anne Hanley, Leonard I. Nakamura and Carlos E.
J. M. Zarazaga, Gerardo della Paolera and Alan M. Taylor, and Gail D. Triner.
First, Brazil. Anne Hanley’s study of business finance and the Sco Paulo Bolsa
offers a good point of departure. In the spirit of Twomey’s conclusions,
Hanley argues that the role of foreign capital in direct investment “while
sizeable, mainly played a supporting role in the domestic business formation
that was the cornerstone of Sco Paulo’s development.”
The industrial and utilities sectors “actually found their base in the domestic
capital market” (both quotations, p. 126). And it was the impersonal mechanism
of the stock exchange rather than traditional kin-based finance that fueled “a
type of financial Big Bang” between 1905 and 1913 (p. 131). Similarly, Gail
Triner finds that the recharter of the Banco do Brasil in 1905 created a
“natural infrastructure for financial transactions” (p. 224) that supported a
“strong, centralized role for the national government in the economy.” And
like Hanley, Triner emphasizes that “[t]he banking system increasingly
accumulated and reallocated financial resources of the private sector at the
expense of either personal or other institutional channels” (p. 226, both
quotations). After 1905 the real money supply and the monetized economy grew
rapidly even as the economic predominance of Sco Paulo was consolidated.
The evolution of a modern financial infrastructure for Brazil had measurable
implications for the growth of industrial productivity in Brazil after 1890.
Stephen Haber’s sophisticated analysis of capital market regulation and the
development of a securities market argues that “one crucial piece of the puzzle
explaining the lack of industrial development
before 1890 and rapid industrial growth after 1890 was access to capital”
(p. 279). The maturation of debt and equity markets along with the
establishment of limited liability laws and mandatory financial disclosure
lowered the cost of capital. As a result, the cotton textile industry,
which is Haber’s focus, grew more quickly than it would have had traditional
patterns of kin-based and other less formal avenues of finance been maintained.
In short, “entrepreneurs who could best combine the factors of production and
choose the optimal output mix were able to mobilize capital that otherwise
would not have been available to them” (p.
279).
Argentina has always seemed baffling. Between 1870 and 1900, real per capita
product there doubled, but after 1900, it would not do so again until 1958. In
other words, the rate of real per capita growth fell from 2.3 percent per year
to 1.19 percent per year, which is some slowdown. For Gerardo della Paolera and
Alan Taylor, a capital constraint is (part of)
the answer
. The domestic financial system was simply unable to replace the dwindling
supply of British capital after World War I. Caught between the gold standard,
international convertibility, and repeated financial crises,
the monetary authority, the Caja de Conversisn, was unable to support domestic
banks and maintain convertibility at the same time. For this reason, Argentine
banks “had to maintain a higher capital cushion” than their foreign
counterparts who could borrow abroad much more easily.
“[D]omestic banks could not fill the void left by the retreat of foreign
capital after 1914″ (p. 163). A paper by Leonard I. Nakamura and Carlos E.
J. M. Zarazaga raises some questions about this argument by looking at returns
to Argentine debt instruments, which don’t
seem particularly high.
Daniel Dmaz Fuentes’ chapter on the gold standard in Argentina, Brazil and
Mexico reminds us that the Argentine peso was inconvertible between 1914 and
1927, an awkward point for della Paolera and Taylor as well.
Nevertheless, their discussion of the non-monetary aspects of financial crises
in Argentina is very stimulating. I have heard it said by some historians that
there is nothing “new” in the findings of the new economic history of Latin
America. I defy them to read della Paolera and Taylor and then tell me that. I
doubt the critics have read Bernanke’s 1983 paper and the subsequent work it
inspired. The remaining papers are somewhat more difficult to characterize
because they deal with a wide variety of subjects. Let me give
some examples.
Students of Mexican history will welcome the chapters by Graciela Marquez and
Aurora Gsmez-Galvarriato. Both make extensive use of archival data and both
question commonly held beliefs about Mexico between 1890 and 1920, the last
years of
the Porfiriato (the dictatorship of Porfirio Dmaz from 1876 through 1910) and
the opening decade of the Mexican Revolution (which lasted until 1920, 1938,
1968, or last week, depending on how you view Mexican history). Marquez shows
that it is not enough
to simply label Porfirian Mexico a high-tariff country since nominal
protection fell sharply during the 1890s. It never recovered its former levels
before the outbreak of the Revolution. Gsmez-Galvarriato looks at real wages in
the Santa Rosa textile factory in Veracruz. Stability in real wages through
1907 gave way to a sharp decline between 1907 and 1911. A marked recovery
occurred between 1911 and 1913, only to fall sharply during the bitterest years
of the civil war (1914-1916). From 1917 through 192 0, real wages recovered,
but did not rise much above their level in 1907. I think Marquez and
Gsmez-Galvarriato are saying that the stories we tell about Dmaz and the coming
of the Revolution are not likely to hold up under the careful scrutiny of a new
historiography informed by detailed industry and firm-level studies. Where
this leaves the big studies of the Revolution,
such as Alan Knight’s, which retells many of the old verities, remains to be
seen.
Both William Summerhill and Alan Dye contribute chapters that represent
aspects of larger projects. Dye’s study of the contracts between sugarcane
growers and millers in Cuba lays to rest the myth that the contracts between
growers and millers evolved to exploit the growers, upon whom they were
coercively imposed. Summerhill’s paper on Brazilian railroads concludes that
“The direct impact of the railroad in Brazil places it comfortably within the
top tier of the cases for which economic historians have constructed social
savings estimates” (p. 391). Interested readers can certainly learn more from
Dye’s Cuban Sugar in the Age of Mass Production
(Stanford, 1998) or Summerhill’s forthcoming Order Against Progress:
Government, Foreign Investment and Railroads in Brazil, 1854-1913
(Stanford, scheduled for Summer 2000).
Papers by Lee Alston, Gary
Libecap and Bernardo Mueller; Andri A. Hofman and Nanno Mulder; and Carlos
Newland round out the volume. All are well worth
reading.
A final observation. It’s ironic that economic historians of Latin America
stress the study of institutions, a theme that features prominently in this
volume as well. For those of us trained in the early 1970s, “institutional
history” was something to be avoided, the province of dullards and the
unimaginative. It was a matter of faith, enshrined in a famous article by
James Lockhart, that the only real historians of Latin America were social
historians, and, well, social historians had better things to do than pay
attention to, of all things, institutions. Institutions didn’t affect the
behavior of real people. And real historians studied real (read: ordinary)
people. My how times do change. There isn’t much doubt about who’s doing the
interesting history of Latin America these days. Not a few of them are
represented in this excel lent collection. Now if only I could get them to
explain the Asiatic mode of production to me, my life would be complete.
Fat chance.
Richard Salvucci teaches at Trinity University. He is co-author with Linda K.
Salvucci of “Cuba and the Latin American
Terms of Trade in the Nineteenth Century: Old Theories, New Evidence,”
forthcoming in the
Journal of Interdisciplinary History in Autumn 2000.