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The Platt-Stein Controversy Over Dependency: Another View

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2022

James H. Street
James H. Street*
Affiliation:
Rutgers University
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The lively exchange in the Latin American Research Review between D. C. M. Platt and Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein over dependency and autonomy in nineteenth-century Latin America raises a number of significant questions in the field of historical interpretation. It illustrates once more how difficult it is to support sweeping generalizations about so large and complex a region as Latin America, especially in a time period so filled with changes (in at least parts of the region) as the nineteenth century. The controversy over sources of action and their motivation, which characterizes dependency analysis, is unresolved. The argument is flavored with attributions of moral blame for events that may turn out, in a broader historical view, to have been highly fortuitous. The present comment is an attempt to insert and assess the force and direction of a vector usually passed by in the controversy. The case will be confined to Argentina, the country most often cited by Platt, and certainly the Latin American country most affected in its emerging pattern of economic development by marked shifts from Spanish to criollo to British influence over the century.

Type
Communications
Information
Latin American Research Review , Volume 16 , Issue 3 , 1981 , pp. 173 - 180
Copyright
Copyright © 1981 by the University of Texas Press

References

Notes

1. D. C. M. Platt, “Dependency in Nineteenth-Century Latin America: An Historian Objects,” LARR 15, no. 1 (1980):113–30; Stanley J. Stein and Barbara H. Stein, “D. C. M. Platt: The Anatomy of ‘Autonomy’,” pp. 131–46; Platt, “The Anatomy of ‘Autonomy’ (Whatever that May Mean): A Reply,” pp. 147–49.

2. Stanley J. and Barbara H. Stein, The Colonial Heritage of Latin America: Essays on Economic Dependence in Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 155. Cited by Platt, “Dependency,” p. 120.

3. Platt, “Dependency,” p. 127.

4. Michael G. Mulhall, Industries and Wealth of Nations (London: Longmans, Green, and Co., 1896); p. 391. Cited by Carlos F. Díaz Alejandro, Essays on the Economic History of the Argentine Republic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), p. 1.

5. Díaz Alejandro, Essays, p. 3.

6. Stein, The Colonial Heritage, p. 136.

7. Platt, “Dependency,” p. 120.

8. Aldo Ferrer has recognized the impact of technical progress on the integration of the world economy, especially as it affected Argentina, in The Argentine Economy (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1967), pp. 77–90. See also James H. Street, “The Ayres-Kuznets Framework and Argentine Dependency,” Journal of Economic Issues 8, no. 4 (Dec. 1974):707–28.

9. For a revealing account of ordinary life in the interior of Argentina as late as 1877–80 by a contemporary traveler as related to his son, see Diego Newbery, Pampa Grass (Buenos Aires: Editorial Guarania, 1953).

10. James R. Scobie, Argentina: A City and a Nation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1964): pp. 82–87.

11. Stein, “Anatomy,” p. 138.

12. Manuel A. Romero Aguirre, Ganadería Argentina: su desarrollo e industrialización (Buenos Aires: Compañía Swift de La Plata S.A., 1957), pp. 64–84.

13. Simon G. Hanson, Argentine Meat and the British Market (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1938), pp. 11–16, 100–1, 117–18. The French and British breeds of sheep, cattle, and swine must be included as “technological” innovations, as they represented the products of generations of selective breeding, a process completely unknown to the gaucho. See Newbery's description of a saladero in Pampa Grass, pp. 72–74.

14. Platt, “Dependency,” p. 121; Stein, “Anatomy,” pp. 139–40.

15. Alejandro E. Bunge, Las industrias del Norte (Buenos Aires, 1922), 1:34–35.

16. Scobie, Argentina, pp. 144–46.

17. Hanson, Argentine Meat, pp. 18–47.

18. Carl C. Taylor, Rural Life in Argentina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1948), pp. 143–45; James R. Scobie, Revolution on the Pampas: A Social History of Argentine Wheat, 1860–1910 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1964), pp. 82–84.

19. James R. Scobie, Buenos Aires: Plaza to Suburb, 1870–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1974), p. 71. Ensuing passages describe the construction of the port of Buenos Aires (pp. 72–91).

20. Ibid., pp. 62–63 and passim.

21. Platt compares Britain at the end of the eighteenth century and Japan after the 1860s as countries that achieved “rapid and easy industrialization.” He explains that “Britain and Japan were thrown in upon themselves; if they wanted to develop, there was no alternative to manufacturing” (“Dependency,” p. 123). But this overlooks the fact that in the British case, manufacturing had become an indigenous, self-sustaining activity; in Japan, the industrial technology utilized was exotic and required a deliberate strategy as well as great pains to obtain. It is curious that historians so frequently take the availability of advancing technology so much for granted, when users in developing countries so often complain about the cost of obtaining it.