My encounter with Sergio Bagú, and I mean his books, was prompted many years ago by my old teacher Carlos Lessa. He mentioned Bagú's classic work on the colonial economy and was surprised that an Argentine didn't know who Bagú was. I have been reading him ever since. I was reading the book in the photo for something I've been writing, and I posted it on Instagram. In part, because they discuss economic views in a similar period, I also posted the one by Rodolfo Puiggrós, who shares some theoretical and methodological assumptions related to Marxism.
Someone noted that the Puiggrós book emphasizes the famous (notorious?) Plan of Operations often attributed to Mariano Moreno, and certainly that is the position in that book.* In my view, this has been debunked decisively by Diego Bauso's book, Un plagio bicentenario. El "Plan de operaciones" atribuido a Mariano Moreno. Mito y realidad. Bauso's argument is that Moreno could not have written the Plan as we know it, because it contains material dating from after his death, and the evidence for that is strong. The text would therefore be a later construction, probably originating in Carlota Joaquina circles (the Spanish born, Portuguese queen, in Rio de Janeiro), intended to portray the Rio de la Plata revolution, and Moreno in particular, as a Jacobin and dangerously radical.
But, as I noted in replying to some comments, the fact that the document is a forgery does not make it historically uninteresting. Its authors evidently thought that this was a plausible representation of Moreno and of the revolutionary current associated with him. In fact, plausible enough that others would believe it, as many in fact did and some still do. Bauso removes the Plan as a direct source of Moreno's ideas, but he does not eliminate the problems of the "Moreno era" that Puiggrós interpreted through it. The fundamental disputes between the free trade groups and the defenders of the old monopolies, and the meaning of political independence.
At any rate, I noted too that my favorite book by Puiggrós is his Historia Económica del Río de la Plata, a more ambitious work than the one on Moreno. Incidentally, Puiggrós lived in the same street as my father's family in the 1930s or 1940s (I'm not exactly sure), around the time he was writing these books. I should write a longer post on this book. But it is worth saying a few things.
For Puiggrós, economic facts do not exist autonomously. He doesn't write a history of what would become Argentina. Instead, he defines the Río de la Plata as one of the "vital arteries of world trade," whose contradictory development constitutes the subject of the book. More importantly, after the second founding of Buenos Aires it became clear that the Río de la Plata could serve as the most economical outlet for the silver of Potosí. It made considerable more sense that the traditional route through the Pacific, the Panamanian Isthmus, and the Caribbean. Puiggrós argues that, once this was recognized, the river became integrated into global trade, initiating a long struggle between protectionism and free trade. It implied the rise of the Atlantic economy, and the slow eclipse of the Peruvian Vice-royalty.
Potosí produced the silver and generated enormous demand. The regions that would later become northwestern Argentina (Córdoba, Tucumán, etc.) became integrated into that market by supplying mules, food, textiles, wine, and other goods. Buenos Aires connected this area to the Atlantic. And this is where Brazil entered the network. The Spanish imperial monopoly tried to force trade through official channels, but economic geography pushed it in another direction. The Portuguese and Brazilian commercial networks offered a much more direct link between the Atlantic and the South American interior.
This may be one of Puiggrós' strongest points. He does not treat smuggling and contraband as deviations from the normal colonial economy. Contraband was a structural response to the contradiction between the Spanish legal monopoly and the economic space that was actually taking shape. The economy of the Río de la Plata, and what would become the Argentine territory was forged in the nexus between the silver mining economy of the Alto Peru, and the slave economy of Brazil and Africa. He analyzes what would be later discussed by Luiz Felipe de Alencastro in his great book O Trato dos Viventes.
That is how the contraband of the port of Buenos Aires was the essential nexus between the mining economy of the Altiplano with the Atlantic world. It connected Potosí-Baires-Rio-Angola in a chain of international trade, with silver and slavery flowing in opposite directions. If the Brazilian economy was forged outside of Brazil as Alencastro suggests, in the economic space of the South Atlantic, between Rio and Luanda, one could retrospectively say that the point of Puiggrós, even though he doesn't say it quite so explicitly, is that Argentina's economy was forged outside of Argentina, in the nexus of those two spaces, the silver-mining economy of the Alto Peru and the Southern Atlantic slave-economy.
This is why I tend to think that Historia Económica del Río de la Plata is Puiggrós' best book. In some of his other works he falls more easily into relatively rigid Marxist categories. In this one, although the Marxist analytical apparatus is still present, the historical subject takes precedence over the framework. He sees networks, regional complementarities, the circulation of silver and enslaved people, ports, customs revenues, and waterways. He sees that the relevant economic region does not necessarily coincide with the nation state.
Puiggrós recognized early on that the colonial Río de la Plata could only be understood as part of a trans-imperial economy linking Potosí, Brazil, and the Atlantic through silver, goods, contraband, and enslaved labor. Half a century later, Alencastro reconstructed the South Atlantic side of that same space with far more extensive documentation and the slave trade as its organizing principle.
* If I'm not wrong, in his book on Moreno, Bagú sides with those that think that Moreno did not write the Plan of Operations.
