Frontier Development: Land, Labour, and Capital on the Wheatlands of Argentina and Canada, 1890-1914.

Bell, Stephen

This contribution to Oxford Historical Monographs is a bold attempt to revise our understanding of how two important frontier regions developed in the heyday of liberalism based around the production of a common staple yet under very different property regimes. Keeping his focus on property relations, Jeremy Adelman points up the stresses in the family farming system of western Canada and finds strengths in the tenant farming complex as it unfolded in Argentina. The book deals with big issues and is profoundly revisionist.

Adelman argues that too much has been made in Canada of the superior design of the homestead system. He demonstrates convincingly the important role of the private land market and has assembled abundant evidence that farmers were drawn into speculation. The boom came only after 1900 and lasted but a few years. To a large degree the system was undercut by its own success. Competition for land pushed up prices, increasing the cost of establishing a farm, a problem eased by the provision of liberal credit. The study shows very effectively how the system that unfolded in Canada left little room for flexibility. By the eve of the First World War, farmers were mired in a sea of debt. With the bloom off the prairie economy, much discussion was taking place of the need to diversify land use. This study goes so far as to argue that the government had displaced ranching when that might have provided a more secure base. Surprisingly, there is no mention of markets in the discussions of potential alternative forms of land use.

Most of Adelman's analysis of wheat farming in Argentina is directed to Buenos Aires, where the cereal was mainly an adjunct to the business of ranch intensification. The author takes issue with the earlier books of James Scobie and Carl Solberg particularly for "populist" interpretations, namely their depiction of the lives of tenant farmers at the whim of capricious landowners. Rising land values closed off opportunities for landownership here too but the study lays great emphasis on a key difference between the two cases. While Anglo-Saxon migrants in North America held firm to the expectation that they would own land, the great bulk of the most important group heading for Argentina, the Italians, kept their perspectives short. They, it seems, dreamt less of the capital gains that might flow from landownership than quick and high returns from a tenant-farming bonanza. Contracting with large landowners for the use of land and even equipment reduced risks for migrants; it also eased the entry costs to farming in a region where land was very expensive. The golondrinas, those harvest labourers who caught the imagination during the period of the study and have done so ever since, are shown to be rather more myth than history; many fewer Italian seasonal migrants could afford to cross the equator on an annual basis than some earlier historians have allowed.

The book's structure recognizes distinct audiences. An outer shell is mainly devoted to theoretical discussions, including a useful review of the limitations of neo-classical economic, staple, and dependency approaches in explaining the character of development on the frontiers of the two areas chosen. Adelman makes a convincing case for a focus on what he terms endogenous variables of development. The inner sections of the volume re-examine land, labour, and capital, this last through the lenses of agricultural credit and adoption of machinery. A huge quantity of data is presented in the study's sixty-five tables. The author has combed the archives and libraries very broadly, including official publications and probate records for both countries - in an earlier age the book could have been titled "From Coronel Pringles to Regina." Portraits of individual farm development, long a feature of western Canadian scholarship, also enliven the discussions of Argentina. But the editing of this expensive volume could have been stronger and the book is free neither of factual errors nor of awkward sentences. Inclusion of pagination for articles and chapters in the rich bibliography would have been helpful to future scholars.

Comparative studies of this type are valuable for opening up research themes. This book demonstrates the extreme importance of alfalfa in the economic intensification of grassland systems. The backbone of the Argentine system but mainly a vain hope in western Canada, alfalfa's contributions to the development of the Americas would make a valuable study. Using Adelman as our guide, the scope for comparative work on the roles of women and farm development is also clear; he has been able to synthesize a substantial literature in Canada but the theme has far to go in Argentina. In addition, the important transborder speculation identified for Canada, where American farmers cashed in their investment and moved north to cheaper land, had its broad parallels in South America - Argentine investment in Uruguayan ranching for example.

The study raises issues that urgently require more attention, some of them resulting from its relatively few backward and forward glances outside the period treated. Since so much of the wheat cultivated in Argentina was incidental to the pasture improvement needs of the ranching economy, a closer analysis of the spatio-temporal dynamics of estancia intensification is required. There are strong links between the timing of the establishment of the first successful packing-plants, the drawn-out process of crossbreeding, pasture improvement, and the planting of wheat. Closer attention to this topic, including its regional environmental components, would probably have altered the author's intuitions about the spatial patterns of land distribution and credit flows in Buenos Aires. A focus on that province is understandable but future scholars need to tell us more about what was taking place in other regions of Argentina, such as Cordoba, which emerged as the country's second most important producer of wheat well before the close of this study. Since the motives for Italian emigration to Argentina are so central to the argument but the evidence remains rather slippery, could studies connecting both ends of the migration chain shed any further light?

This study deserves a wide readership. It provides the most focused treatment of its topic to date. Following on the heels of Carl Solberg's fine comparative work, Adelman has also been successful in narrowing the historiographical distance between north and south, a major achievement. Set up essentially as a model, some of the assumptions of the book are problematical. For example, the early assertion that differences of geography and climate can be dismissed as of "minor" import in explaining divergent development runs against much of the evidence presented later. This book provides valuable analysis of the economics of frontier development but the interpretation of Argentine tenancies seems uncoupled from the important psychology of migrant farming. For this, the reader is forced to turn back to the contributions of those late "populists" Scobie and Solberg. Jeremy Adelman has filled in major pieces of what he terms the "complicated tapestry" of development but for this reviewer the process requires a broader analysis than he allows.

Stephen Bell McGill University