In this work, Roberto Cortés Conde describes and explains the decline of the Argentine economy in the 20th century, its evolution, and its consequences. At the beginning of the century, the economy grew at a sustained rate, a modern transport system united the country, a massive influx of immigrants populated the land and education expanded, leading to a dramatic fall in illiteracy. However, by the second half of the century, growth not only stalled, but a dramatic reversal occurred, and the perspectives in the median and long term turned negative, and growth eventually collapsed. This work of historical analysis defines the most important problems faced by the Argentine economy. Some of these problems were fundamental, while others occurred without being properly considered, but in their entirety, Cortés Conde demonstrates how they had a deleterious effect on the country.

The study of 20th-century Argentine history is undergoing a radical transformation. Both Argentine and U.S. historians of Argentina are recasting the great debates in historiography by challenging the Buenos Aires centered focus of most of the existing historical scholarship and offering a new perspective on the country's modern history. Argentina's supposed exceptionalism is being challenged by these historians. The persistence of political clientilism and oligarchic rule, enclave economies and pre-capitalist social relations, the role of traditional institutions such as the Church and family, intense class conflict and working class militancy, all approximate Argentina closer to the Latin American experience than the previous historiography would suggest. This book is a collaboration between Argentine and U.S. historians of this other Argentina.

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.

A History of Argentina in the Twentieth Century, originally published in Buenos Aires in 1994, attained instant status as a classic. Written as an introductory text for university students and the general public, it is a profound reflection on the “Argentine dilemma” and the challenges that the country faces as it tries to rebuild democracy. Luis Alberto Romero brilliantly and painstakingly reconstructs and analyzes Argentina’s tortuous, often tragic modern history, from the “alluvial society” born of mass immigration, to the dramatic years of Juan and Eva Perón, to the recent period of military dictatorship. For this second English-language edition, Romero has written new chapters covering the Kirchner decade (2003–13), the upheavals surrounding the country’s 2001 default on its foreign debt, and the tumultuous years that followed as Argentina sought to reestablish a role in the global economy while securing democratic governance and social peace.

This book explores the problem with a dialectical interpretation of contemporary Argentinian history, examining crucial economic and political developments since 1930 from the standpoint of class interests in conflict and discussing early government strategies for industrialization.