1.

Record Nr.

UNISA996247877803316

Autore

Adelman Jeremy

Titolo

Republic of capital : Buenos Aires and the legal transformation of the Atlantic world / / Jeremy Adelman

Pubbl/distr/stampa

Stanford, California : , : Stanford University Press, , [1999]

©1999

ISBN

0-8047-6414-X

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (393 pages)

Disciplina

342.82029

Soggetti

Constitutional history - Argentina

Property - Argentina

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Nota di contenuto

Front matter -- Contents -- 1. Toward a Political History of Economic Life -- SECTION I. The Age of Revolution, 1780's- 1820's -- 2. Imperial Reconstitution and the Limits of Political Property -- 3. The Quest for Equipoise in the Shadow of Revolution -- 4. From Revolution to Civil War -- 5. Rosas Agonistes, or the Political Economy of Cronyism -- 6. Chains of Obligation: The Duress of Merchant Law -- 7. Reconsidering the Republic -- 8. Constitutional Persuasions -- 9. The New Property of Merchant Capital -- 10. Making Money: The Battle for Monetary Authority -- 11. The Unfinished Revolution of the Republic of Capital -- Notes -- Bibliography -- Index

Sommario/riassunto

This book is a political history of economic life. Through a description of the convulsions of long-term change from colony to republic in Buenos Aires, Republic of Capital explores Atlantic world transformations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Tracing the transition from colonial Natural Law to instrumental legal understandings of property, the book shows that the developments of constitutionalism and property law were more than coincidences: the polity shaped the rituals and practices arbitrating economic justice, while the crisis of property animated the support for a centralized and executive-dominated state. In dialectical fashion, politics shaped private law while the effort to formalize the domain of property directed the course of political struggles. In studying the legal and



political foundations of Argentine capitalism, the author shows how merchants and capitalists coped with massive political upheaval and how political writers and intellectuals sought to forge a model of liberal republicanism. Among the topics examined are the transformation of commercial law, the evolution of liberal political credos, and the saga of political and constitutional turmoil after the collapse of Spanish authority. By the end of the nineteenth century, statemakers, capitalists, and liberal intellectuals settled on a model of political economy that aimed for open markets but closed the polity to widespread participation. The author concludes by exploring the long-term consequences of nineteenth-century statehood for the following century's efforts to promote sustained economic growth and democratize the political arena, and argues that many of Argentina's recent problems can be traced back to the framework and foundations of Argentine statehood in the nineteenth century.