Uruguayan Rural History

Bibliographic Data

ID2840647
AuthorsJosé Pedro Barrán, Benjamín Nahum
Year1984
Volume64
Issue4
Pages655
Publication date1984-11-01
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessNo
TypeARTICLE
VenueHispanic American Historical Review (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0018-2168 • E-ISSN: 1527-1900
PublisherJSTOR (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.2307/2514749
OpenAlexW4249044348
LanguageEN
Citations received7

A ROUND the middle of the nineteenth century, Uruguay was dominated by the latifundium, with its ill-defined boundaries and enormous herds of native cattle, from which only the hides were exported to Great Britain and part of the meat, as jerky, to Brazil and Cuba. There was a shifting rural population that worked on the large estates and lived largely on the parts of beef carcasses that could not be marketed abroad. Often the landowners were also the caudillos of the Blanco or Colorado political parties, the protagonists of civil wars that a weak government was unable to prevent. When World War I erupted, vast properties still existed, but they had been fenced. The small landowners, who had previously restricted large estates' expansion, had been evicted. Sheep raising had been established and had given rise to a middle class of tenants and landowners of relative strength. Although native cattle had survived, crosses with English strains predominated. Refrigeration plants owned by the Chicago Trust and English companies had taken over the Uruguayan-owned salteries, frozen meat from jerky, and the European markets from the Latin American ones. All parts of animal carcasses had taken on economic worth; and food had become a monopoly of the proprietors of the land and the owners of the livestock. The old floating population was tied to day laboring (peonazgo), was alienated in so-called rat towns, or was beginning to be driven to Montevideo or abroad. The state had consolidated its power and terminated the civil wars (which were now opposed by the landownerentrepreneurs). These changes and continuities were analyzed in our seven-volume study entitled Historia rural del Uruguay moderns, published between 1967 and 1978. The last of those volumes contains the general conclusions of our study, which we present, in essence, below. They are intended to give an overview of the most important characteristics of long-term Uruguayan rural history. All the bibliographical and statistical data have been

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