STOREP is pleased to announce that the 2024 STOREP grant of 2,000€ for innovative small-scale research projects is awarded to
MATTIA STEARDO (Università di Torino)
Buenos Aires, Atlantic Trade and the Making of a Republican Political Economy (1810-1835)
Keywords: Buenos Aires; Trade Policy; Republicanism; History of Economic Thought; Latin America
JEL codes: B19, F19, N96
Project outline
What were the fundamental concepts guiding the commercial policy of republican Buenos Aires? How did the peculiar meanings attached to “free trade” and “protection” affect local economic debates? What were the ideological connections between Buenos Aires and the pan-European debate over economic growth, development and external trade? My research wants to provide a nuanced answer to these questions by analysing a variegated set of archival and published sources, connecting the case of republican Buenos Aires with the updated literature in the history of political economy. This way, it will be possible to isolate common characteristics structuring the Buenos Aires elite’s attitude toward commercial issues during the first decades of republican independence.
Building on the influence of Spanish Enlightenment tradition in Buenos Aires, my PhD research underscored the importance of political economy as the necessary science to drive local economic development. It highlighted the role of agricultural exploitation, including husbandry and the expansion of the commodity frontier against sovereign Native groups, in post-1810 economic debates and state policies. The STOREP Grant will help me to start a new phase of my research. Specifically, I will delve into debates on external trade opening and commercial regulation at different stages of local institutional development following the collapse of Spanish rule in 1808-1810.
My diachronic analysis is structured into four distinct periods, each representing a significant phase in the evolution of commercial policy in republican Buenos Aires. These periods are: (1) the Revolutionary Years (1810-1815), (2) the Directorate (1815-1821), (3) the Unitarian and National Governments (1821-1827), and (4) Provincial Federalism (1827-1835). This chronological framework allows for a comprehensive understanding of the changes and continuities in the intellectual arguments sustaining the Buenos Aires changing commercial policy during the early 19th century.
The liberalisation of external trade was a necessary but not sufficient issue pushing the breakthrough of the 1810 May Revolution. The resulting commercial regulation incredibly favoured British traders at the expense of local merchants, who petitioned the government for equal treatment in respect to foreigners from 1815 onwards.
In 1817, the Directorio increased import duties and prohibited salted meat exports, damaging the developing meat industry. This decision sparked a fierce debate on whether trade in the local basic staple food (cattle meat) should be protected or liberalised.
Import duties were lowered again in 1821, an antechamber to more radical free trade proposals and policies, such as the bilateral treaty signed with Great Britain in 1825 and the never-enforced creation of a free port in Buenos Aires.
Bitter attacks on foreign-oriented economic and trade policies followed the fall of the national government (1827). The provincial executive swung between free trade and protectionist policies until the sanction of a new regulation in 1835, which increased import duties.
The analysis of relevant debates in the four periods allows us to test the working hypothesis that the adaptation to changing economic conjunctures rather than ideological coherence oriented local policymaking aimed at economic growth.
Motivation
The project “Buenos Aires, Atlantic Trade and the Making of a Republican Political Economy (1810-1835)” falls into the category of projects in the history of political economy, the history of economic thought, and the history of economics. Specifically, building on unexplored archival material and other important sources, it insists on the role played by political economy as a science required to drive local development and adopts an intellectual history perspective in a “global (economic) history” framework with a double ambition. First, it wants to explore the trade-off between adaption to changing circumstances and internal theoretical and practical consistency in analyzing the principles guiding the trade policies of republican Buenos Aires, which may produce relevant and much more general theoretical insights as to our understanding of the relationship between theory and policy as regards development; but it may also make a not-reductionist and therefore valuable contribution to the booming literature on neo-mercantilism.
Mario Cedrini