Dynamics and Autonomy of a Traditional Marketing System: Buenos Aires, 1810-1860
BUENOS AmEs-the city and the province-experienced a nineteenth-century trade boom that expanded cattle raising over much of the virgin pampa long before the age of railroads and chilled beef. The emergence of pastoral exports differentiates nineteenth-century commerce from the staple trade in Potosi's silver bullion duling the colonial era. Following de facto independence in 1810, Spanish and portefio merchants lost their dominance in foreign commerce. Englishmen and other Europeans residing in Buenos Aires now linked Argentine pastoral production to new industlial and non-industrial markets in Europe and America. Foreign merchants also assumed the continued import of manufactured goods and certain processed foods. Foreign shipping in the estuary, which increased despite the region's political and diplomatic disorders, stimulated an impressive expansion of cattle and sheepraising on the prairies south of Buenos Aires. Exportation of pastoral raw materials could not have proceeded without the corresponding development of Buenos Aires as freighthandler for the entire region. The local economy obtained its dynamism from foreign trade and the export sector, but the domestic market at the port city grew in importance as a result. The marketing system of the early nineteenth century exemplifies the relative autonomy of one Latin American economy often attributed to be "neocolonial" or "dependent" in the historical literature.1