The humid pampa of Argentina displays a series of social and economic characteristics that clearly mark it off from other rural areas of Latin America. Relatively speaking, the pampa farm or ranch (empresa rural) has a very high technical level by the standards of the rest of the continent. Its system of social stratification is notably more flexible and diverse than is to be found in the other Latin American republics. At the same time, the existence of a very favourable relationship between the amount of cultivable land and the size of the population means that the Argentine pampas have some features in common with the temperate grasslands of the western United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

These particular features of the pampa region are certainly not of recent origin - on the contrary, many of them have been present at least since the time Argentina became independent. The causes of this situation were naturally very various. Here I shall confine myself to dealing with three of the most important factors. Firstly, millions of hectares of highly fertile natural pasture land were available in the mid nineteenth century for agricultural development. Secondly, these territories were thinly populated both before and after the Conquest. Moreover, at the beginning of the nineteenth century most of the pampa was practically unexploited, being occupied only by roaming herds of wild cattle and a few tribes of nomadic Indians. The agricultural colonization of this immense frontier of fertile land kept land prices comparatively low throughout most of the nineteenth century, and this enabled various social groups, most of them immigrants, who had grown rich in urban or rural commerce, to acquire a stake in it.

In northern Mexico, where population was sparse and land plentiful, large estates predominated; their size, roughly speaking, increased with aridity and distance from Mexico City. In the state of San Luis Potosi, situated in what might be called the middle north, haciendas covered an average area of about fifteen square leagues; that is, between 25,000 and 30,000 hectares each. The few Indian villages that existed – there had been no sedentary population in northern Mexico before the Conquest – were also well endowed with land, some of them originally having been granted some thirty-six square leagues each by the colonial government. Estates naturally made frequent inroads into these communal holdings, thereby expanding at the expense of the Indian villages. The opposite process also took place occasionally, at least after Mexico became independent in 1821.

The population of the old-established Indian villages was not very large, and it would seem that in the early nineteenth century they did not supply the haciendas with much of the required seasonal labour; instead the estates had to rely almost entirely on their own permanent labourers. Another source of seasonal labour arose in time, eventually replacing the old villages. The estates were enormous, and in the beginning only the land around the casco – the farm buildings – was cultivated, and the rest was given over to extensive cattle-grazing. The peones or farm labourers lived in the casco, leaving the rest of the estate virtually uninhabited, except for a few small, scattered ranches where the cattle herds were kept and where the herders lived.

Plantations, peasants, and proletariat in the West Indies: an essay on agrarian capitalism and alienation

GEORGE BECKFORD

This paper explores the origins of rural poverty in the West Indies. Beckford's discussion of the transition from slavery to free labour illustrates many of the points brought out in Part IV of this book. In particular the author distinguishes between, on the one hand, the Leeward Islands – where the shortage of cultivable land threw the ex-slaves back onto the plantation system for subsistence – and, on the other hand, the larger territories, such as Jamaica, Trinidad, and Guyana, where the greater availability of land outside the plantation system provided the basis for the emergence of a peasant-farmer group from among the ranks of the ex-slaves.

The emancipation of the slaves in 1838 generally forced up the cost of labour in the West Indies, and together with certain other economic difficulties this change in the relations of production gave a strong impetus to the search for more efficient forms of production and an improved technology in the sugar industry. This development of a modern sugar industry in the latter part of the nineteenth century can be compared with the changes which were taking place simultaneously in other sugar-producing areas such as northeast Brazil and coastal Peru.

However, the condition of the rural sugar proletariat and the small farmer class remained extremely depressed, and major agrarian unrest occurred in 1865 (Jamaica), 1935 (St Kitts), and 1938 (Jamaica). Beckford argues that the peasant-farmer group played a key role in these rural revolts.

The problems of the transition from one social formation (or mode of production) to another have not yet been seriously tackled. A few attempts have been made to give them some systematic formulation, but they are on too high a level of abstraction to be of much use as guides to empirical research. As far as the concrete evidence available on the passage of traditional societies to capitalism is concerned, for example, it often comes from analyses carried out from a perspective which is too narrowly evolutionist to make generalizations possible. The authors responsible for these studies seem to agree, for the most part, that, as capitalism is a higher social formation, traditional societies are inevitably condemned to break up on contact with it and fall in a passive and mechanistic way, into the moulds established by it. Hence, no doubt, the importance given to the phenomena of destruction and deculturation which arise from these relations, which are certainly real enough, but which cannot be taken as a general rule.

Latin America is a particularly rich field for the study of the many responses which traditional societies of a colonial and seigneurial nature can make to capitalism, which has historically been built up on a broadly agrarian base. These responses from time to time result in some sort of provisional compromise, but they sometimes also result in long-lasting adjustments by which the two social formations come to articulate and consolidate themselves over a period of time, without consequently having to modify their structures.

The final chapter sets the preceding papers in the wider context of the general social and economic history of Latin America in the independence period, and in this way it provides a useful framework within which to place each of the individual essays. After a consideration of some of the theoretical problems underpinning any definition of the peasantry, Magnus Mörner poses some major questions concerning the nature of Latin American economic development and the attempts at diversification in the second quarter of the nineteenth century. His analysis of the differing characteristics of each of the major crops or crop/livestock combinations considered in this volume highlights some of the general theoretical issues raised in the Introduction. He stresses, for example, how the ecological and demographic variables associated with coffee production have allowed the development of a great variety of forms of social and economic organization and modes of production. This contrasts markedly with the case of sugar cultivation, where the technological imperative has been so much more compelling, and where a more uniform system of production and labour relations has been evolved. Clearly ecology and demography are two major explanatory variables to be considered in any analysis of the process of agrarian change. Their importance is emphasized in the final part of the discussion, on the evolution of the traditional hacienda, when Mörner considers the nature of the relations between ‘landlords’ and the internal and external peasantry.