Book Review

Jeremy Adelman's Republic of Capital weaves an eloquent and instructive narrative of nation-state formation in Argentina between 1810 and the 1860s. Adelman's focus is to chart the development of law in the new republic as it applied to the institutionalization of contracts, markets, and monetary policy. The book demonstrates a mutually reinforcing dynamic between market and state formation. Law, particularly relating to contracts and monetization, provided a means for politicians to construct consistent and predictable social relations that, in turn, gave merchants a grounding for commerce. Both groups worked together. Nevertheless, constructing a legitimized state and stable markets took fifty years to accomplish.	1
Adelman's intent is to infuse good faith into the slow, Fissiparous process. He does so by insisting that liberalism, defined as "[l]egal equality of political subjects and the autonomy of private agents," always remained central to the project and its outcome (110). His view diverges sharply from dependentista and neo-liberal historiography, which sees the failure of early state formation after independence to mark the disembowelment of liberalism leading either to over-politicized markets and/or a state captured in the service of propertied interests. Adelman treats the fifty-year unfolding with greater nuance and less cynicism.	2
The book is divided into three sections. The first reviews the breakdown of the Spanish colonial system in the River Plate. Specie flow from Potosí had become the economic mainstay of the region in the process of establishing the River Plate viceroyalty. While merchants remained loyal to the Crown to sustain their privilege, revolutionary tumult in North America and France plunged the silver economy into crisis. Ensuing European war and resultant commercial disorder pushed merchants to reevaluate their status in terms of the currency of their profession: property. Mercantilism licensed them to own, move, and trade property, but as the ground of that privilege began to crumble, new, physiocratic notions of private property captured the imagination of merchants and aspiring entrepreneurs alike. As the nineteenth century opened, so, too, did debate about the nature and justification of property. Was property the possession of the monarch claimed on the basis of divine right and allocated according to loyalty, or was it, as John Locke asserted, the natural return to an individual for labor applied to land?	3
Events overdetermined the answer. Napoleon's aggression against the Iberian peninsula in 1808 left authorities in Buenos Aires without recourse. A coalition of politicians, merchants, and military men tried forging a revolutionary state only because there was no alternative. The effort to place sovereignty in the "people" through the provision of universal rights and liberties, in conformance with the contemporary path of constitutionalism, confronted an economy decimated by the loss of specie trade and forced to exact loans from the merchant class. Poverty descended upon the whole society. Liberty turned to libertinism and government legitimacy faded into wishful thinking. As Adelman cogently observes, "the state enjoyed a monopoly over a power it could not yet wield" (96).	4
The second section of the book engages the age of caudillismo. Out of the vacuum of the revolution emerged Juan Manuel de Rosas, South America's archetypal caudillo. In keeping with Marxist analysis of the primacy of the material base--or with Bill Clinton's 1992 catch phrase, "It's the economy, stupid"--Adelman locates the cornerstone of social stability in market forces. Accordingly, the rules regulating property exchange take precedence over those concerning political decision making. From this premise, Adelman describes the evolution of "cronyism" under Rosas in which he conferred newly conceived property rights to elites in return for their political support. The immediate object was social order, albeit within the geographic confines of Buenos Aires.	5
Eventually, though, the exclusivist nature of the Rosas regime in relation to the Argentine interior generated too much warfare for the new Buenos Aires elite to support. Nevertheless, Adelman characterizes the period as a transitional necessity during which familiarity with "will theories" of contract law, absolute private property, and abstract public justice gained a sufficient foothold to inspire a renewed push for constitutional liberalism under the leadership of the "Generation of 1837."	6
In a remarkable treatment of Juan Bautista Alberdi and Domingo Sarmiento, Adelman uncovers a fascinating difference in their outlook. Alberdi applied "cognitive relativism" to the fate of Argentina after 1810 to conclude that what the nation needed, and in some sense deserved, was not an "ideal republic" but rather a "possible republic," attainable not through "perfect liberty" but by "imperfect liberty" (170, 203, 214). Alberdi perceived himself building upon the foundation laid by Rosas who he called "the man of America" (182). In contrast, Sarmiento detested Rosas, as his famous book, Facundo, makes clear, though his plan for civilization was no less violent. Adelman writes, "[t]he only solution [for Sarmiento] . . . was to be demographic annihilation through the settlement of European farmers, and later, in the 1860s a war of unparalleled brutality against the gauchos of the interior" (186). Nevertheless, both men were decisive in shaping a constitutional republic that achieved public legitimacy.	7
Section three narrates the development of law in the emerging republic after the Battle of Caseros in 1852. For Adelman the goal was "to create a republican regime for the political capital while concocting a monetary regime for private capital" (254). In this pithy phrasing, Adelman expresses the contingent nature of market and state formation. Rosas helped generate autonomous relations of private capital no longer organized under mercantile license, but he failed to construct public institutions capable of stabilizing the market. The Constitution of 1853 set the stage for such institutions, but state legitimacy and market stability still required commercial codes and courts. Adelman demonstrates his conceptual and linguistic acumen best in this section. Though diminished expectation pervaded the intellectual environment, a "constructionist" state emerged capable of demanding popular sovereignty and conferring regularity to commercial relations (288). It was not the ideal republic imagined in 1810, but it surpassed the reality of caudillismo and permitted Argentina entrance into a vibrant Atlantic system by 1860. Without apology, Adelman concludes that the revolution was real, that the long struggle for coherence delivered results, and those who would see an inorganic process are not looking clearly.	8
Republic of Capital walks a line between structuralism and agency to fashion a more subtle understanding of market and state formation in Argentina. Adelman suggests along the way that analytical schools miss the trees in seeing the forest. Few historians are so adept.	9
Nick Biddle Appalachian State University

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