Had Argentina Been an Anglophone Country, Would It Have Been More Prosperous and Populous Today?

[Riain]

I recently read Niall Ferguson's 'Civilisation' and he had a bit on the Spanish and British colonialism in the Americas, his idea was that the different types of settlement pattern played out with different results over the centuries. The Spanish having wealthy haciendas tying up most of the land and having a more limited scope for political power and participation but the British having a much wider system of land ownership, spread of wealth and political participation in the form of local assemblies so that the success of the US and Canada went from there.

Given what little I know about Sth America that didn't strike me as a totally bizarre theory and perhaps can partly explain what happened in Argentina.

 

[corditeman]

Another useful thought...

...Hacienda owners were the Rebel Leaders in Chile and Argentina. Reminded me of aristocrats in the Wars of the Roses and the Anglo-Scots Civil War between Royalists and Parliament - the aristocrats' tenants filled the ranks of armies on each side. Not an ethical decision - you fight, or you lose house and livelihood. Appalling.

 

[Saci]

Until the 40's and 50's Argentina had a quality of life similar to Switzerland.

 

[Salem_Saberhagen]

There was a discussion about this in Chat I believe; I don't know the details, but someone pointed out that while yes, Argentina was in the top 7 economies around the beginning of the 20th Century, the disparity of wealth was great. Argentina didn't turn to protectionism and corporativism for no reason, after all; the country had some serious issues, which likely stemmed from their beginning as a Spanish colony (given Spain was far more autocratic than Britain).

This is a good point, Argentina indeed had a more unequal distribution of land and wealth than Australia, Canada or New Zealand. The middle class in Argentina was more urban, whereas in the British Dominions (particularly Canada) you had most of the land in the hands of small middle class farmers that united via Farming Co-operatives and pools, in Argentina much of the land was in the hands of large landowners, upper class city dwellers that lived off renting their properties to lower class Italian immigrants.

However, gini coefficients measuring inequality in 1930s Argentina were on par with France or the United States at the time. High inequality was the norm in most of the world at the time, and Argentina was no exception.

I imagine that if democracy managed to survive the Great Depression and WW2, Argentina would have implemented social welfare programs like other Western countries did, but without disrupting free trade like Peronism did in OTL.

The two largest parties (in terms of membership and support) in Argentina before the 1940s were the centrist UCR and the Socialist Party, both supported welfare reforms and introduced labor legislation and welfare projects in Congress, but were unable to implement their ideas due to the coups and electoral fraud of the 1930-1940 period. Between 1930 and 1946 both parties were effectively shut out of power by electoral fraud and coups, despite being first and second respectively in popular support throughout the period.

In the end it was Perón who implemented much of the ideas of these parties, but in more extreme statist versions, and after getting the labor ministry through a coup.
This won him the support of the Argentine working classes which until then had supported and looked up to the democratic UCR and Socialist Parties to protect their interests.

If Argentine democracy manages to survive the rocky Great Depression and WW2 period, it is not hard to imagine UCR leaders like Amadeo Sabattini or Crisologo Larralde getting elected to the Presidency and implementing more moderate versions of these reforms instead, while keeping the market system intact, avoiding the protectionism and nationalizations of the Perón government.

 

[Deleted member 97083]

Of course, if Britain had conquered Argentina from Spain during the Napoleonic Wars or earlier, then they'd be taking over a 'native' population, so it might end up more like Rhodesia than Canada.

Not like Rhodesia, but probably like Boers in South Africa.

This is a good point, Argentina indeed had a more unequal distribution of land and wealth than Australia, Canada or New Zealand. The middle class in Argentina was more urban, whereas in the British Dominions (particularly Canada) you had most of the land in the hands of small middle class farmers that united via Farming Co-operatives and pools, in Argentina much of the land was in the hands of large landowners, upper class city dwellers that lived off renting their properties to lower class Italian immigrants.

Wasn't part of that due to the British policy of restricting industrialization and supporting cash crop, large landowner agriculture in South America?

 

[Salem_Saberhagen]

Wasn't part of that due to the British policy of restricting industrialization and supporting cash crop, large landowner agriculture in South America?

No, I think that part can indeed be blamed on the Spanish legal tradition. In the British Dominions and the USA, once the natives were displaced, it was first come first served for the immigrants. Whoever staked a claim on the land became the owner.

In Argentina, once the natives were displaced, the State took over the land, and distributed it as reward to the generals in the campaigns against the natives, though there were also projects to settle European immigrants as small farmers, particularly in Santa Fe and Entre Rios provinces, it wasn't the most common practice nationwide. As a result, the land ownership was more concentrated.

It is telling that in Santa Fe and Entre Rios provinces where most of these colonization schemes took place, you can find the earliest Argentine farming pools in the 1920s following the Canadian experience, as well as in Chubut province where the Welsh settled the land by themselves (with government approval) and agreed to join the Argentine state.

Edit: I should add however, that by the 1930s part of this concentration of land had dispersed due to immigrant tenants eventually buying plots, some large landowners going bankrupt in the 1890s, 1910s and the Great Depression had to fraction and sell their plots of land, and so on. Land concentration was decreasing naturally that's why I don't think it was such a big issue as it was solving itself.

Clearly it did affect the country in terms of political stability and the uneven distribution of the population in the territory however. A POD that improves this would certainly help, but I don't think it's essential.

 

[corditeman]

Why force Britain to be in charge?

Why not Germany or France? Let them know the price of colonialism in the South Cone!

Wicked, aren't I?

Cymru am byth, perhaps? Remember Welsh Patagonia!

 

[Dan1988]

I recently read Niall Ferguson's 'Civilisation' and he had a bit on the Spanish and British colonialism in the Americas, his idea was that the different types of settlement pattern played out with different results over the centuries. The Spanish having wealthy haciendas tying up most of the land and having a more limited scope for political power and participation but the British having a much wider system of land ownership, spread of wealth and political participation in the form of local assemblies so that the success of the US and Canada went from there.

There's one problem with that theory. While it might hold for southern Spain, it falls apart when you look at Spain as a whole. Much of northern Spain also had a much wider system of land ownership and a spread of wealth (in fact, in some cases, like Galicia and Asturias, land ownership was too wide - hence why so many Galicians emigrated to Argentina that in Argentina all Spaniards are called "gallegos"). Indeed, while we usually tend to focus on southern Spain as representative of Spain as a whole, and as a result as a major source of emigration to the Americas, the reality was that all regions in Spain suffered from emigration in one form or another. The Canary Islands was as influential to Spanish America as the Azores were to the Portuguese (even though a good portion of those who went west to Brazil were from the older, poorer northern part of Portugal), true, but it's also equally true that there were high amounts of Basque, Catalan, Galician, Asturian, Extremaduran, and Castillian immigration westward to America. To reduce Spanish America to wealthy haciendas misses the point of the reality on the ground; while haciendas did exist, not all of them were wealthy and even then they really only happened where cheap sources of labour were readily available. Even then, not really - Potosí, for example, had no need for haciendas because it's near a silver mine. That theory also doesn't work in terms of colonial Argentina; it only works largely after the colonial period, with the estancias and the like. Por qué? Because colonial Argentina for much of the Spanish period was largely on the periphery. Those on the periphery tend to be restless regardless, hence the image of the gaucho which endures not just in Argentina but also in Uruguay and (with the addition of an accent on the <u> to make it more Portuguese-looking) in southern Brazil. So yeah, on this one point Ferguson's theory is problematic.

 

[yulzari]

There's one problem with that theory. While it might hold for southern Spain, it falls apart when you look at Spain as a whole. Much of northern Spain also had a much wider system of land ownership and a spread of wealth (in fact, in some cases, like Galicia and Asturias, land ownership was too wide - hence why so many Galicians emigrated to Argentina that in Argentina all Spaniards are called "gallegos").

I just wonder if the fact that Northern Spain remained independent whilst Central and Southern Spain were part of the Islamic world had some role to play in the difference. I am too ignorant of the details to point to some inherent tendency in El Andalus or to any distribution of land following the Reconquest. Visiting NW Spain I was struck by how the landscape, weather and it's assorted culture and gastronomy seemed slightly more reminiscent of SW England or Brittany than the hints of North Africa to the south. Spain is a complex country and I acknowledge that this is a very broad brush impression.

 

[Dan1988]

It's more complex than that. In any case, I have to go - I have Church in a couple of hours and a Super Bowl party to set up for.

 

[Joseph Solis in Australia]

@Salem_Saberhagen: The another reason on why 1930 coup happened was that right-leaning people became sick of democratic processes in Argentina as they always lost since Yrigoyen became president in 1916. Do you think UCR would evolve into a center-right party given that there would be competing Socialist Party (in OTL it is limited to Santa Fe province).

 

[rfmcdonald]

Not like Rhodesia, but probably like Boers in South Africa.

It would look like Québec. We are talking about Britain conquering a territory that was already very densely populated, by people of a different cultural tradition. It's unlikely you could get enough British immigrants to go to overwhelm the Hispanic population of the region, not without PODs that would change the dynamics of the British empire generally. This is especially the case since counting on some of the immigrants will assimilate into the Hispanic population--Irish Catholics come to particular mind. You'd end up with a situation like Québec where most of the population descends from French colonists, the French language predominates, and Anglophones are concentrated in a couple of major cities.

 

[rfmcdonald]

It would look like Québec. We are talking about Britain conquering a territory that was already very densely populated, by people of a different cultural tradition. It's unlikely you could get enough British immigrants to go to overwhelm the Hispanic population of the region, not without PODs that would change the dynamics of the British empire generally. This is especially the case since counting on some of the immigrants will assimilate into the Hispanic population--Irish Catholics come to particular mind. You'd end up with a situation like Québec where most of the population descends from French colonists, the French language predominates, and Anglophones are concentrated in a couple of major cities.

For that matter, it would look like western South Africa, specifically the provinces of the Western Cape and Northern Cape. There, speakers of Afrikaans predominate throughout the this long-settled territory, with Anglophones predominating particularly in Cape Town. The solid Afrikaansophone majority is not necessarily clear on account of the deep racial divisions between white and non-white speakers of Afrikaans, but it is there.

 

[rfmcdonald]

More broadly, I think that an argument can be made that high-income countries in the Southern Hemisphere generally, not just Argentina and not even the Southern Cone, performed relatively badly in the second half of the 20th century. In Australia, New Zealand performed particularly poorly income-wise, but Australia also slipped down the income tables as other countries in the Northern Hemisphere grew more rapidly. Something similar may have happened in South Africa, but that country's economic history is too divergent from the other neo-Europes for me to know how to compare it.

It's plausible that an Argentina that was part of first the British Empire then the Commonwealth might have done better economically, if only because an Argentina that was constitutionally part of the British community would be less at risk of sudden protectionism. That's not an inevitable outcome, though, and it certainly doesn't require Argentina to be Anglophone. Québec's still Francophone despite still being part of a former British dominion, after all.

 

[Timaeus]

Had Argentina been an Anglophone country (for instance, let's have the British invasion of Argentina in 1806 succeed), would it have been more prosperous and populous today? Also, if so, by how much?

*looks at own country, mostly Anglophone thanks to America*

*starts laughing*

 

[Salem_Saberhagen]

@Salem_Saberhagen: The another reason on why 1930 coup happened was that right-leaning people became sick of democratic processes in Argentina as they always lost since Yrigoyen became president in 1916. Do you think UCR would evolve into a center-right party given that there would be competing Socialist Party (in OTL it is limited to Santa Fe province).

I am convinced the 1930 military coup is what completely retarded the proper development of Argentinian democracy and led to the cycle of political instability.

Yrigoyen irritated the Conservatives by abusing the Constitutional resource of "Federal Intervention", under our Constitution the President has power to replace the governor of a province if constitutional guarantees or basic human rights had been violated. However, Yrigoyen used this to remove freely-elected Conservative governors, while Alvear, his UCR succesor as President, was completely respectful of Republican institutions, allowing democracy to function normally even when his party lost provincial elections. This led to the 1920s UCR split between "Personalists" (followers of Yrigoyen who believed he was in the right as leader of the party) and "Anti-Personalists" (followers of Alvear who believed democratic institutions are more important than the whims of a leader).
It is telling that after the death of Yrigoyen the more Conservative anti-personalists became dominant in the party with figures like Alvear, Melo, Tamborini, Ortiz, Mosca and so on. Still, I don't see the UCR going full Conservative, since its roots were in French 19th century "radicalism" (liberalism) with some social democratic leanings.

The party that truly had the potential to become a Conservative bulwark was the Democratic Progressive Party. Despite the misleading name, this party was basically a market liberal party focused on respect for the institutions and anti-corruption. By the 1930s and 1940s it was third in terms of nationwide support and membership, and in the post-coup 1931fraudulent elections it ran in an odd anti-fraud coalition with the Socialists, with the formula De La Torre President (PDP) Repetto Vice-President (Socialist), coming out second in the elections. (And probably first had there been no fraud)

In the 1950s this originally market liberal party veered into a proper Conservative party, but by then its membership had dwindled and its "time in the sun" had passed.

It is likely that had the 1930 military coup not happened, traditional Conservative support would have poured into this party. Instead, the Conservative elites of Argentina got used to using the military as "their party" and knocking the doors of the barracks when things weren't going this way.

After all, the 1930 coup was legitimized by a Supreme Court ruling! Had that not happened the institutions of the country would have been much stronger, the country had gone 70 years with unbroken Constitutional successions and no coups ever before that point.