Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World.

Randall, Stephen J.

Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World, by Jeremy Adelman. Stanford, California, Stanford University Press, 1999. x, 293 pp. $55.00 U.S.

Republic of Capital is an engaging, well-researched and important contribution to our understanding of the political, intellectual, and legal changes that occurred in the Buenos Aires region from the late eighteenth century through the mid-nineteenth century, with a brief afterword on twentieth-century developments. The study is much broader than some readers might conclude from its title. Students of economic history, even those who are not Latin Americanists, as well as political historians will find the volume extremely useful. Although the focus is on the evolution of law, the book provides an insightful analysis of the intellectual and political changes that occurred as the Buenos Aires region underwent a war for independence from Spain and its economy evolved from a mere entrepot for Bolivian silver exports to a more complex one dominated by merchant capitalists. In the course of his analysis, Jeremy Adelman traces the changing views of what constituted property and outlines the search for new economic and political institutions that would be adequate to meet the exigencies of a transitional economy emerging from the shadows of eighteenth-century mercantilism. Adelman identifies this transition as one from colonial Natural Law to instrumental legal understandings of law and as a dialectic in which politics shaped private law at the same time that the efforts to "formalize" the domain of property shaped political debate and consequences.

Conceptually, Adelman has been influenced by, among others, the work of the United States economic historian Douglass North, for whom an understanding of economic history is embedded in a much larger social, intellectual, and political context. Adelman identifies his approach as being part of the "new institutionalism" in economic history or "public choice" theories of macro social change, although he challenges the assumptions of the "new institutionalism" in several ways: agents are "not simply wealth maximisers under constraint" (p. 13); institutions are "settings" within which the principal contending parties seek to reconcile their differences; and over the long term political ideas "mattered." As he concludes, this "self-reflective intellectual process shaped meanings of property and the terms for encoding them into law" (p. 15).

The years under consideration were critical ones in the emergence of the modern Argentine state as the leaders of Buenos Aires sought to establish those political and economic institutions that would serve their interests over the short and longer term. In the pre-revolutionary years the ideas of the Enlightenment prevailed, gradually giving way to Romanticism and then the instrumental political theories that emphasized order over liberty and gave rise to the caudillismo associated with Juan Manuel de Rosas, who dominated Buenos Aires politics from the end of the 1820s through the early 1850s. Although unstable and transitional in nature, the Rosas years provided the new property holders of Buenos Aires with a degree of protection until a more formalized, constitutionalist structure emerged in the course of the 1850s. The Rosas approach as governor of Buenos Aires or as the power behind the throne was essentially a form of cronyism, or personalist politics that were less dependent on stable and objective institutions and laws than on the capacity of Rosas to provide what property holders required in return for which those property holders lent him their support. Yet, such a system operated on the basis of executive decrees rather than a formalized legal system and as such was destined to give way to the constitutionalism that followed as the more modern state emerged. This is thus a history of the transition from private privilege to a republican legal order in which the rights of all are provided with at least formal protection before the law. Yet, as his afterword indicates, the tensions between property and sovereignty and between individual and collective needs and goals have remained at the heart of the politics and legal structure of modern Argentina.

Adelman has conducted exhaustive research for this study, drawing not only on the extensive secondary literature in English and Spanish but on a wide range of archival sources, including among the principal sources: the British Public Record Office; the University of London's holdings of the papers of the Buenos Ayres and River Plate Bank; the Argentine National Archives; the Provincial Archives of Buenos Aires; and the Argentine Congressional library.

Stephen J. Randall

University of Calgary