Hora, Making of BsAs Elite, Los Senillosa

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite in the Nineteenth Century: The Example of the
Senillosas
Roy Hora
Using a reconstruction of the history of Felipe Senillosa and his family as a

point of departure, this article examines the nineteenth-century Buenos Aires entrepreneurial elite, with particular reference to the way this group developed and evolved over time. An migr who ed from the restoration of absolutist rule in Spain after the fall of Napoleon, Senillosa arrived on the shores of the River Plate as this area moved toward independence, and in the span of a few years he worked his way into the porteo socioeconomic elite. Senillosa was able to leave his heirs a signicant fortune that included not only estancias in the province of Buenos Aires but also several other economic undertakings. Senillosas two sons, Felipe Bonifacio and Pastor, occupied notable positions within the late-nineteenth-century Argentine upper class and were esteemed among the most prestigious rural entrepreneurs of their time. However, they did not emulate the economic success of their father and as a result began to lose standing among the truly rich. Lacking entrepreneurial talent, the members of the next generation found it difcult to maintain their social position, and they continued on a downward trajectory. By the 1910s, the Senillosas were no longer among the wealthiest families in Argentina. The Senillosas are a particularly noteworthy example of the ascent of an immigrant family to the center of the Argentine economic elite and of the opportunities for social and economic advancement present in the River Plate
An earlier version of this article was read at the V International Congress of Business History, So Paulo, Brazil, 2 5 September 2001. For comments on earlier drafts, I would like to thank Ezequiel Gallo, Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Tulio Halperin Donghi, and Hilda Sabato. This text was translated into English with the help of Kristina Boylan. The research was partly funded by a grant from Fundacin Antorchas. I would also like to thank Stephanie Bower.
Hispanic American Historical Review 83:3 Copyright 2003 by Duke University Press
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after independence. No less important, their story also reveals much about the pressures that forced some members of the late-nineteenth-century upper class to descend from their former lofty positions a phenomenon that, despite its signicance, has been largely neglected by historians. Considered as a whole, the Senillosas rise and fall turns out to be highly illustrative of the strengths and weaknesses of the nineteenth-century propertied class and allows us to advance some hypotheses regarding the characteristics and evolution of this group. A brief reference to the historiographic debate on the Argentine economic elite may provide a useful introduction to this issue. Traditionally, historians have argued that the nineteenth-century propertied class was a parasitic, rentseeking elite that based its economic and social supremacy on control of the fertile pampean land. This negative view of large rural entrepreneurs, which socialist and other left-leaning thinkers developed at the beginning of the twentieth century, gained wide currency after the Great Depression, as the export sector entered into a long period of decline and the economy lost momentum. In the last 30 years, however, this interpretation has been called into question. Despite the rural sectors weak performance after the Great Depression, this portrait of the pre-1930 landed elite as lacking entrepreneurial spirit and as an impediment to economic growth precludes a coherent explanation of the formidable agrarian expansion that stretched from the early nineteenth century to the 1920s and made Argentina one of the worlds leading agricultural exporters. This fact explains why most current views on the nineteenth century rural entrepreneurs emphasize their dynamism, entrepreneurial spirit, and business acumen.1 Jorge F. Sbatos La clase dominante en la Argentina moderna is perhaps the most powerful indictment of the traditional conception of the Argentine economic elite to date. Sbatos work not only questions the supposed backward-
1. See, among others, Guillermo Flichman, La renta del suelo y el desarrollo agrario argentino (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 1977); Jonathan Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Ezequiel Gallo, La pampa gringa: La colonizacin agrcola en Santa Fe, 1870 1895 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1983); Eduardo J. Mguez, Las tierras de los ingleses en la Argentina, 1870 1914 (Buenos Aires: Ed. de Belgrano, 1980). Reviews of this literature can be found in Eduardo J. Mguez, Expansin agraria de la pampa hmeda (1850 1914): Tendencias recientes de sus anlisis histricos, Anuario IHES 1 (1987); and Hilda Sabato, Estructura productiva e ineciencia del agro pampeano, 1850 1950: Un siglo de historia en debate, in La problemtica agraria: Nuevas aproximaciones, ed. Marta Bonaudo and Alfredo Pucciarelli, vol. 3 (Buenos Aires: CEAL, 1993).
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ness of the major landholders of the pampas but also seeks to reject the very denition of the turn-of-the-century economic elite as a landed class. Sbato did not look into the earlier period, and thus for the most part he accepted the depiction of the postindependence business elite as a landed class. But he insisted that between 1880 and World War I large-scale entrepreneurs formed an extremely dynamic business group whose economic interests encompassed a wide range of activities from agriculture to industry, from commerce to finance. For Sbato, the sharp n de sicle Argentine businessmen obtained supernormal prots by diversifying their assets into activities that were just opening up or where barriers to entry allowed for the accumulation of prots above the normal level. In this light, Sbato suggests, it would be more accurate to describe the large entrepreneurs of the turn of the century as an economically diversied elite rather than as a purely landowning class.2 Sbatos view lacks sufcient empirical testing. However, his ideas have had a marked inuence on recent Argentine historiography, to the extent that they may constitute the most widely accepted point of departure for any analysis of the countrys larger entrepreneurs.3 Signicantly, Sbato has described Pastor Senillosa, one of the most distinguished members of the family under consideration here, as a paradigmatic example of a turn-of-the-century businessman who, in order to obtain above-normal prots, diversied his assets into various spheres of activity. This article shows that this interpretation requires revision. Until the end of his days, Pastor Senillosa held most of his assets in rural enterprises. Although it is true that he also invested in other sectors of the economy, it is important to note that this decision was not oriented, as
2. Jorge F. Sbato, La clase dominante en la Argentina moderna: Formacin y caractersticas (Buenos Aires: CISEA/Imago Mundi, 1991). Sbatos work has merited several specic studies; see Hilda Sabato, La cuestin agraria pampeana: Un debate inconcluso, Desarrollo Econmico 27, no. 106 (1987); Larry Sawers, Agricultura y estancamiento econmico en Argentina: A propsito de las tesis de Jorge F. Sbato, Ciclos 4, no. 7 (1994); and Eduardo Sartelli, El enigma de Proteo, Ciclos 6, no. 10 (1996). 3. Sbatos ideas have had a marked inuence on Argentine historiography over the past two decades. Studies such as Hilda Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadera en Buenos Aires: La ebre del lanar (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1989); and Jorge Schvarzer, La industria que supimos conseguir (Buenos Aires: Planeta, 1996), develop several of his hypotheses. Among the general works that adopt Sbatos point of view, it is worthwhile to mention Luis A. Romero, Breve historia contempornea de la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Fondo de Cultura Econmica, 1994), esp. 23; David Rock, Argentina, 1516 1987: Desde la colonizacin espaola hasta Alfonsn (Buenos Aires: Alianza, 1988); and Alain Rouqui, Hegemona militar, estado y dominacin social, in Argentina, hoy, ed. Alain Rouqui (Buenos Aires: Siglo XXI, 1982), esp. 38 44.
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Sbato suggests, toward the prospect of obtaining higher prots; Senillosas diversication of investments can be better understood as an economic strategy aimed at creating new sources of income for his numerous heirs, given the insufciency of his territorial holdings. Furthermore, it is not the case that the Senillosas were an exception among large Argentine entrepreneurs. Comparing the Senillosas with a sample of other large-scale businessmen at different points in the nineteenth century allows us to conclude that the family was rather typical and that Sbatos interpretation should be discarded. This does not mean, however, that the traditional view of the nineteenth-century economic elite as a landed class provides full understanding. Recent work on the subject, and the evidence produced here, suggest that, if anything, economic diversication was an important economic strategy in the immediate postindependence period, rather than during the later period as Sbato suggests.
Felipe Senillosa: A Diversied Postindependence Entrepreneur
Felipe Senillosa, the rst member of this family to set foot in America, arrived in the River Plate region more by ill fortune than by design. Senillosa was born in Valencia in 1790 and, following his fathers lead, took up a military career. In the early 1800s, he was sent to the Royal Academy of Alcal de Henares to train as a military engineer. In 1808 his studies were interrupted by the French invasion of the Iberian Peninsula, and Senillosa marched to the front. Shortly afterward, his unit surrendered to the French army in the siege of Zaragoza. It did not take much to convince this deeply republican young ofcer to put himself at the service of the French. After completing a new course of studies in military engineering at Nancy, he served Napoleon until the latter was defeated and captured after the battle of Leipzig in 1814. Senillosa returned to his home country, but the restoration of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain made things difcult for a former French ofcer. He soon decided to emigrate to London; there he met Bernardino Rivadavia and Manuel Belgrano, who would invite him to move to the River Plate. Senillosa arrived in Buenos Aires in 1815, with little more than the skills he had acquired in the barracks. However, his knowledge of engineering and mathematics were advanced by contemporary River Plate standards. Senillosa had completed his professional training in the engineering corps of the Napoleonic army, an environment where the prestigious ideas of Enlightenment science and technology blossomed. An ardent propagandist of these ideas, which already had considerable appeal in the Plate, he soon became a respected g-
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ure in Buenos Aires. In fact, Senillosas cultural capital and republican feelings allowed him to rapidly earn a notable place in the porteo society of the revolutionary period. He became the rst professor of the Ctedra de Matemticas del Estado in 1816, director of the Academy of Mathematics the following year, and professor of geometry at the newly created University of Buenos Aires by 1822. By the end of the 1820s, Senillosas intellectual prestige enabled him to acquire a seat in the Buenos Aires House of Representatives, which he held through the long dictatorship of Juan Manuel de Rosas. As a tting expression of the recognition he enjoyed, he was commissioned during these decades to design and build residences (Rosass own, in Palermo, is attributed to him), public thoroughfares, churches, and state monuments. Senillosas career at the service of the state is also linked with the early history of the Department of Topography, an institution of great importance during this period, over which he presided in 1827.4 The foundation of the Department of Topography reveals the growing importance given to the creation of a more accurate registry of rural properties in republican Buenos Aires, which reects the rising value of pampean land after independence. During the colonial period, the countryside was not a high priority for viceregal authorities. Land was cheap and abundant in the pampas, and the state made little or no effort to develop a legal system to enforce property rights. The low economic value of land can be seen in the traditional method of measuring plots, which consisted in measuring just the length of the front side of a plot along a stream of water, without much attention to its depth (and therefore to its surface). Before independence, silver production in Potos and the resultant international and interregional markets were the true motors of the viceregal economy and the major sources of income for its economic elite at whose pinnacle stood not landholders, but wholesale merchants. Urban rents and money lending, rather than rural production, provided additional sources of income.5 Demand for rural produce was meager, largely because the mercantilist economic system banned trade with foreign partners. This forced rural producers to rely on local markets and constrained the expansion of agricultural production, which experienced little change in the century
4. Archivo Senillosa, Archivo General de la Nacin (hereafter cited as AS), 2-5-10; Vicente Osvaldo Ctolo, Nuevo diccionario biogrco argentino (1750 1930) (Buenos Aires: Elche, 1985), 4:67 71; Fernando Aliata, Senillosa, Felipe, in Diccionario histrico de arquitectura, hbitat y urbanismo en la Argentina, ed. Jorge Liernur (Buenos Aires: Ed. FADU-UBA, 1991), 360 63. 5. Susan Socolow, The Merchants of Buenos Aires, 1778 1810 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), chap. 3.
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before the 1810s. The pampean countryside was populated mainly by smallscale grain and livestock producers (owners, tenants, and squatters), whose plight the colonial bureaucrats largely ignored. In fact, up until the revolution of 1810, the viceregal administrations major concern regarding the pampas was to guarantee a regular supply of foodstuffs for urban consumption. It made little or no effort to help develop larger market-oriented rural concerns or to enforce property rights on lands.6 Independence from Spain forced the new government and the economic elite to redene their relationship with the countryside and rural production. The porteo wholesale merchants who had dominated trade with Upper Peru soon lost control of that territory, since it remained in royalist hands until 1825 and then became part of the Republic of Bolivia. The wars of independence and later civil conict created further obstacles to inland trade in the region. Nevertheless, despite its negative effects on mining and its related enterprises, independence also opened new entrepreneurial opportunities. The possibility of free trade oriented the pampean economy toward the Atlantic world, and in particular toward the export of hides and other livestock by-products. From the mid-1810s, and with even more force from the 1820s onwards, the new economic opportunities offered by cattle raising began to draw capital away from the distressed mercantile sector. The local mercantile community faced other pressures, too. The opening of the River Plate to the world market allowed European and U.S. merchants to increase their numbers in the region dramatically. These recent arrivals, who were the masters of new marketing techniques and had close connections with the dynamic markets of the North Atlantic, began to displace local merchants from trade. Hence, local capitalists
6. On the rural history of the Ro de la Plata region, see Jonathan Brown, A Socioeconomic History of Argentina, 1776 1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979); Carlos Mayo, Estancia y sociedad en la pampa, 17401820 (Buenos Aires: Biblos, 1995); Samuel Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism on the Pampas: The Estancias of Buenos Aires, 1785 1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Jorge Gelman, Campesinos y estancieros: Una regin del Ro de la Plata a nes de la poca colonial (Buenos Aires: Libros del Riel, 1998); Juan Carlos Garavaglia, Pastores y labradores de Buenos Aires: Una historia agraria de la campaa bonaerense, 1700 1830 (Tandil: IEHS; Seville: Univ. Pablo de Olavide; Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 1999). Reviews of this literature can be found in Juan Carlos Garavaglia and Jorge Gelman, Rural History of the Ro de la Plata: Results of a Historiographical Renaissance, Latin American Research Review 30, no. 3 (1995); and Mucha tierra y poca gente: Un nuevo balance historiogrco de la historia rural platense (1750 1850), Historia Agraria (Murcia) 15 (1998). Also see Eduardo J. Mguez, El capitalismo y la polilla: Avances en los estudios de la economa y la sociedad rural pampeana, 1740 1850, Boletn del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani 21 (2000).
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were given an extra incentive to try their luck at new ventures, most notably rural production for export.7 As I will discuss in greater detail below, however, the entrepreneurs who turned to rural business did not completely abandon other economic activities. Thus, although marginal in colonial times, rural production for export emerged as the economic dynamo of the Plate and began to attract resources from other sectors of the economy, among which merchant capital was paramount. The republican state encouraged the expansion of the rural export economy in order to lessen the social and political turmoil that characterized this period of acute international and internal conict and to create a new source of revenue (taxes on international trade) that would compensate for the loss of revenues collected on silver and internal trade. Essential to this program were the expansion of territorial control over Indian lands and the consolidation of a legal order that would guarantee property rights in the countryside. The Department of Topography was an important element in this project, and Senillosa by then one of its leading gures played a major role in it. He also approached this venture with personal motives. Throughout the 1820s, Senillosa commanded several surveying expeditions of the frontier lands south of the Salado River (a region that was being opened up for white settlement) in the service of both the state and private interests. In the winter of 1825, for example, he spent several months on the frontier with a party of 60 men, surveying and measuring a huge tract of land in Los Camarones that the Anchorena brothers had bought; by that time, he had already made good money measuring properties for Pieiro, Blas Escribano, Pita, Hildalgo, Ramos, Ezeyza, Segismundo, Macedo, and several other capitalists who were investing in estancias.8 A few months later, in the summer of 1825 26, he again returned to the frontier at the head of one of the most important expeditions undertaken by the government during this decade.9
7. The classic study of this process is Tulio Halperin Donghi, La expansin ganadera en la campaa de Buenos Aires, in Los fragmentos del poder, ed. Torcuato Di Tella and Tulio Halperin Donghi (Buenos Aires: Jorge Alvarez, 1969). For a discussion of more recent literature, see Ral Fradkin, Tulio Halperin Donghi y la formacin de la clase terrateniente portea, in Discutir Halperin: Siete ensayos sobre la contribucin de T ulio Halperin Donghi a la historia argentina, ed. Roy Hora and Javier Trmboli (Buenos Aires: El Cielo por Asalto, 1997), 71111. 8. Felipe Senillosa, Viaje de Buenos Aires Camarones, ms., JuneJuly 1825, AS, 176; Juan Jos de Anchorena to Juan Manuel de Rosas, 22 Oct. 1825, Archivo del Jockey Club, Donacin Carlos Ibarguren (h), red folder. 9. Felipe Senillosa, Diario de la Expedicin de reconocimiento de la lnea de fronteras, ms., n.d., AS, 176.
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These surveying expeditions made Senillosa one of the few porteos with rsthand knowledge of the new lands opening up south of Buenos Aires. He quickly used this knowledge to his own economic advantage. In those years, this immigrants fortune was insignicant; for example, when he married Pastora Botet in 1819 he possessed a mere three thousand gold pesos, less than 1 percent of the estate he would accumulate during the remainder of his lifetime.10 It is not surprising, therefore, that he chose to start his career as a landowner by making good use of Buenos Airess emphyteutic regime (the system of leasing public lands at a low cost conceived by Bernardino Rivadavia in the mid-1820s), which well suited those who wished to develop rural enterprises but did not possess sufcient capital to buy land or were reluctant to bind assets toward this end. In those years Senillosa rented some 32,000 hectares in San Vicente and another 6,000 hectares in Salto.11 During the late 1820s he began to buy land, albeit modestly: some 1,350 hectares in Quilmes and, several years later, some 2,000 hectares in the Arroyo Camarn.12 Rosass land policy helped Senillosa become a great landowner. In 1836, the government promoted the privatization of public lands leased under emphyteusis. Conditions were very advantageous for buyers. During the late 1830s, Senillosa (who was a decided promoter of this land policy from his position in the legislature) acquired some 40,000 hectares: an estate of 32,400 hectares traversed by the Arroyo Chico in Ayacucho and another estate of 8,100 hectares on the southwest bank of the Salado River in Pila, which he called El Venado. It might be useful to examine briey the conditions of the purchase of the estancia Arroyo Chico, the most important of these holdings. By 1836, Senillosa already held the property under emphyteusis. Conditions were
10. During the nineteenth century, several different currencies were used as mediums of exchange. At different periods, pesos corrientes ( paper pesos), pesos fuertes (silver pesos), onzas de oro (gold ounces), pesos oro (gold pesos), and pesos papel ( paper pesos) were widely used in economic transactions. In this article, all currencies have been converted into gold pesos (legal tender since the 1881 monetary law) in order to make comparisons easier. For currency quotations, see Juan Alvarez, Temas de historia econmica argentina (Buenos Aires: Junta de Historia y Numismtica Americana, 1929), 99 100; and Hilda Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadera, 254. 11. Jacinto Oddone, La burguesa terrateniente argentina (Buenos Aires: Lbera, 1967), 88. On emphyteusis, see Mara Elena Infesta, La enteusis en Buenos Aires (1820 1850), in Bonaudo and Pucciarelli, La problemtica agraria, 1:93 120. 12. See Andrs M. Carretero, Contribucin al conocimiento de la propiedad rural en la provincia de Buenos Aires para 1830, Boletn del Instituto de Historia Argentina y Americana Dr. Emilio Ravignani 22 23 (1970): 290; Oddone, La burguesa terrateniente, 135.
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extremely favorable for lessees, who paid a small rent for the use of public land. In a speech in the House of Representatives supporting Governor Rosass plan to sell roughly 4 million hectares under emphyteusis, Senillosa himself noted that the state was collecting barely 8,500 gold pesos annually for lands that were assessed at 0.7 million gold pesos or more.13 It has been estimated that this last gure represented less than 6 gold pesos per square league per year a sum equivalent to the value of one and a half cows per year for the right to exploit 2,700 hectares, an extension that could easily support a thousand cattle.14 The conditions for the sale of the lands laid out in the 1836 law were certainly no less favorable than those for renting them. Thus it should not come as a surprise that once the 1836 law was put into effect, Senillosa moved to buy. For the 32,400 hectares in Arroyo Chico, Senillosa paid a total of around 6,800 gold pesos in three installments.15 Furthermore, the payment was made not in cash, but in livestock; even though the evidence on this transaction is scarce, Senillosa must have paid for the land with some 1,600 2,000 head of cattle, a gure that represented probably less than 20 percent of the cattle that the property could support.16 It is no wonder Senillosa himself argued that the price at which the government was selling land was indeed quite moderate.17 Not only was Arroyo Chico acquired at little expense; like El Venado, Senillosas other large estancia, it was among the best in the region. Both properties were located on important waterways and possessed abundant reserves of water as well as some higher ground. The lowlands were particularly apt for the primitive cattle-grazing technology characteristic of the era (before wire fences, water pumps, and drainage canals began to transform rural enterprises in the 1870s and 1880s). In the fenceless pampa, streams and lagoons were
13. Honorable Junta de Representantes de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Diario de Sesiones, 7 May 1836 (session 527). See also Mara Elena Infesta, El negocio con la tierra pblica: Las ventas en Buenos Aires entre 1836 y 1840 ( paper delivered at the XVI Jornadas de Historia Econmica, Quilmes, Argentina, Sept. 1998). 14. Juan Carlos Garavaglia, La propiedad de la tierra en la regin pampeana bonerense: Algunos aspectos de su evolucin histrica (1750 1863) ( paper delivered at the XVII Jornadas de Historia Econmica, Tucumn, Argentina, Sept. 2000), 12. 15. Sucesin ( probate records of) Pastor Senillosa, Archivo de la Justicia Federal (hereafter AJF), leg. 13,907. 16. Garavaglia, La propiedad de la tierra. 17. Honorable Junta de Representantes de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Diario de Sesiones, 10 May 1836 (session 528), 7.
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important not only for watering the animals but also in preventing cattle from roaming past the estancias boundaries, thus making management easier. Senillosa became aware of the quality of the lands near El Venado thanks to the expeditions he had undertaken to the frontier region in the mid-1820s. The diary he wrote during the winter 1825 expedition indicates this clearly. In the June 7 entry, which refers to the crossing of the Salado along the Venado pass, he writes, [T]he lands immediately surrounding the Salado are hills with good pastures.18 Shortage of capital meant that Senillosas rural concerns grew slowly during their early stage of development. In the late 1820s and early 1830s, he regularly bought small herds of cattle (one or two hundred head every few months) from the Anchorenas and other neighboring estancieros in order to enlarge his breeding stock.19 By the late 1830s, his estates seem to have achieved a more mature form. However, abundance of land in relation to capital still shaped his business practice for decades. By 1842, at a time when sheep breeding in the pampas was in its infancy, he already had Irish and creole sharecroppers raising sheep.20 Also, the overseer of El Venado was employed to manage production there, but he also raised his own livestock on parts of the property and divided the earnings with his boss.21 A dynamic but largely absentee landowner, Senillosa paid close attention to other commercial, nancial, and real estate ventures. Unfortunately, what remains of Senillosas trade-related correspondence, scarce before the early 1840s, does not tell us much about his situation before that date. From that point onward, however, it clearly indicates that he invested simultaneously in diverse areas. By the 1840s, Senillosa possessed a mercantile house that imported wine, cigars, and several other Mediterranean products. In addition, at El Venado he owned a ferry that took passengers and cargo across the Salado. He also ran two pulperas located on his estates that not only marketed dry goods but also collected local produce (hides, wool, furs, and so on) for sale in Buenos Aires or for export to places such as Brazil, London, Cuba, and the Mediterranean.22 The fact that Senillosa actively traded with ports in Spain and her
18. Senillosa, Viaje de Buenos Aires Camarones, 7 June 1825. 19. D. Morete to Felipe Senillosa, 18 May 1826; Manuel Morillo to Juan Jos de Anchorena, 20 Oct. 1830, 20 Nov. 1830, 4 Feb. 1831, in Archivo Anchorena, Archivo General de la Nacin (hereafter AGN), 334. 20. AS, 2-5-10. 21. Contract between Senillosa and Enrique Gubba, 1 Dec. 1857, AS, 162. 22. M. Churchill to Felipe Senillosa, 8 Mar. 1854, AS, 2-5-10. Felipe Senillosa to Pedro Bernal, 14 June 1853, AS, 2-5-10.
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Caribbean colonies suggests that the relations he had left behind in his country of birth helped him gain trade partners. Most probably, these links were reinforced as a result of Senillosas marriage with Pastora Botet, the daughter of a Barcelona-born porteo merchant who had been engaged in commerce with the Iberian Peninsula since the late colonial era. Although Pastora brought a meager dowry to the marriage (some one thousand gold pesos), she gave her new husband something more important: a network of international mercantile relationships. These relationships were of great importance in an age when long-distance trade success to a large extent depended upon links with important and reliable partners.23 In 1845, Senillosa also entered into a partnership in a salting house. As the years passed and the scale of the operations of the saladero El Reloj grew, Senillosa bought out his original partner, Adolfo Mansilla.24 Finally, he also engaged in money lending and discounting bills of exchange.25 Senillosa always remained attentive to new business opportunities. In an unstable economic environment such as postindependence River Plate, the line between aggressive business practice and mere speculation was a ne one. This became especially apparent when civil or international conict disrupted trade. In the latter part of the 1840s, for example, an Anglo-French eet blockaded the port of Buenos Aires for several years, forcing entrepreneurs to divert part of their resources away from rural production in order to continue in business. In November 1845, Senillosa wrote to a correspondent in Montevideo that from this day forward the blockade is in effect and there is little we can do . . . regarding business[;] the only thing that I believe holds promise is the purchase of frutos del pas, the price of which I believe will drop signicantly this summer.26 Several months later, Senillosa remarked that the ports closure offered business opportunities for speculators who had the resources to buy rural products and could afford to wait for prices to rise again: [I]t will be a worthwhile speculation to buy dry hides and keep them until the blockade is ended.27 During those years, Senillosa seems to have invested in urban construction and considered the possibility of erecting a textile factory to process wool from the pampas.28
23. Socolow, The Merchants, chap. 2. 24. Halperin Donghi, La expansin ganadera, 34. Sucesin Felipe Senillosa (hereafter SFS), AGN, 33 34. 25. Senillosa to Jaime Mayol, 25 Nov. 1847, AS, 162. 26. Senillosa to Juan Negrn, 1 Nov. 1845, AS, 162. 27. Senillosa to Juan Negrn, 29 Dec. 1845, AS, 162. 28. Senillosa to Juan Negrn, 5 Jan. 1845 and 18 Aug. 1846, AS, 162.
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In sum, simply describing Felipe Senillosa as a landowner is insufcient. Even though rural production was crucial to the rst stages of his rise to economic success, it was only one part of a larger urban-based mercantile business. In fact, in 1850 this holder of more than 40,000 hectares of grazing land reminded one of his foreign correspondents that my principal occupation today is transatlantic trade.29 A quick look at his estate at the time of his death in 1858 indicates a basis for this self-perception. Senillosa left his wife and four children roughly 450,000 gold pesos. This sum, representing around 6 percent of Argentinas total scal revenue in 1864, was comparable with the estates of other large entrepreneurs of his time.30 For example, when Saturnino Unzu died in 1853, he left an estate of around 350,000 gold pesos, and Eustoquio Daz Vlez passed on to his heirs a similar sum in 1854.31 How was Senillosas money invested? Although the weight of his landholdings is noteworthy, Senillosa was (like Unzu) not just a landowner, but a diversied entrepreneur. His rural enterprises represented 48 percent of the total value of his possessions. He also owned some small chacras in Quilmes valued at 1.5 percent of his estate; two urban properties and a suburban quinta in Barracas were valued at 12.8 percent of his estate. The mercantile house was appraised at 9.3 percent and the saladero at 7.4 percent, respectively, of his holdings. The pulperas, taken separately from the mercantile house, were valued at 3 percent of his estate. Finally, the heirs to Felipe Senillosas fortune received gold and silver coins equivalent to 16 percent of the total estate.32 How exceptional was this pattern of investment among the porteo upper class? A recent work offers a reliable overview of the patterns of wealth accumulation during the 1820 53 period that allows us to place Senillosa in perspective. Juan Carlos Garavaglia undertook a study of large-scale rural entrepreneurs, who owned on average more than 29,000 hectares; he concluded that, for the entire group under consideration, investment in rural ventures barely reached 42 percent of their total wealth. Investment in urban and mercantile concerns accounted for a larger share of these estates: urban property 30.3 percent, cash holdings 10 percent, active credits 5 percent, and chacras and quintas 3.5 percent.33 Even taking into account the peculiarities of each indi-
29. Felipe Senillosa to Angel Caldern de la Barca, 2 June 1850, AS, 2-5-10. 30. Roberto Corts Conde, Dinero, deuda y crisis: Evolucin scal y monetaria en la Argentina, 1862 1890 (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1989), app. I. 31. Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadera, 171; Sucesin Eustoquio Daz Vlez, AGN. 32. SFS, AGN. 33. Garavaglia, Patrones de inversin, 128.
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vidual case, these gures show that Senillosas pattern of investment was typical of the business practices of the large rural entrepreneurs of the rst half of the nineteenth century. It is important to explain why this pattern of investment became dominant among large rural entrepreneurs in the half century following the breakup with Spain in 1810. A recent work suggests that the diversication of investments was a strategy to cope with monetary instability.34 However, problems such as currency depreciation and exchange rate volatility were just one aspect (and perhaps not the most important) of the political and economic instability that the River Plate provinces experienced at that time. More than half a century of blockades, international warfare, civil conict, and political turmoil shaped business practice in a profound and enduring way. For example, the four blockades of the port of Buenos Aires during that period interrupted international trade for long periods of time and encouraged entrepreneurs to shift to either speculation or internal activities to avoid bankruptcy or heavy losses.35 The River Plate provinces also witnessed long and costly international wars and violent civil conicts (which entailed, as in 1839, massive land expropriations). The absence of a stable political order created a climate of economic uncertainty in which stabilizing economic institutions failed to emerge. Thus, capitalists were forced to develop their businesses in an economic environment far more turbulent and uncertain than that of the last period of colonial rule, which itself was disturbed by social upheavals in Upper Peru in the 1780s and almost permanent war from 1779 to 1810, rst with Great Britain and then with Napoleonic France.36 In such a volatile environment, capitalists had to make prots while at the same time protecting themselves against economic and political uncertainty. In rural business, this instability meant that protability was never assured in the short run. Apart from the vagaries of nature (very important, given the backward technology of the time), prots depended upon political and market factors beyond the producers control. The same applies to other ventures, such
34. Mara Alejandra Irigoin, Inconvertible Paper Money, Ination, and Economic Performance in Early-Nineteenth-Century Argentina, Journal of Latin American Studies 32, no. 2 (2000): 342 59. 35. For some examples of the effects of the 1826 28 blockade on rural entrepreneurs, see Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 192, 206. 36. Halperin Donghi, Revolucin y guerra; Ruprecht Poensgen, The Challenge to an Argentine Merchant House in the Late 18th Century, Jahrbuch fr Geschichte von Staad, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft Lateinamerikas 33 (1996): 187 222; Socolow, The Merchants, chap. 3.
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as commerce, which were also subject to unstable market and political forces. Diversication of assets strove to resolve this dilemma by spreading risks across different sectors in order to compensate for sharp, unpredictable uctuations in supply and demand. For most entrepreneurs of newly independent Argentina, long-term success depended, to a certain extent, on the variety of their investments. This is why rural production (though far more dynamic than other ventures) did not displace, but rather complemented, diverse undertakings such as import and export trade, local trade, mercantile and nancial activities, and the rental of urban property. Adaptation to the changing business climate of independent Argentina helps explain Senillosas success. However, it is not easy to give a precise account of the crucial steps that allowed him to amass his fortune. This is partly because Senillosas private papers and other available historical sources do not allow us to compare and weigh various relevant factors such as access to scarce information, entrepreneurial talent, social contacts, or even mere chance in this businessmans rise to fortune. The peculiar historical context of this ascent, however, can be reconstructed in broad brush strokes. If there is one key element in Senillosas success, it was his ability to take advantage of the sudden transformations in the River Plate economy in the decades following 1810, particularly the crisis in the mining economy and the subsequent shift toward agricultural production for export. During the era of traditional technology that prevailed until after the middle of the century, livestock raising in the open pampas was characterized by high (but uctuating) prots and, above all, modest initial investments of capital.37 The low cost of frontier land and the low levels of rural technology opened a eld of opportunity for individuals who, like Senillosa, possessed more ambition and talent than capital.38 Although Senillosa was a new arrival in Buenos Aires society, his intimate knowledge of the territory south of the Salado represented a resource that few of his peers could match. As a consequence, he knew well where to petition the state for
37. Halperin Donghi, La expansin ganadera, 28; Brown, A Socioeconomic History, 154 55; Amaral, The Rise of Capitalism, 211 29. 38. Recent estimates suggest that, after remaining nearly static in the colonial period, land prices began to rise from 1815 onward and peaked in 1828, only to fall again afterward partly as a result of the war with Brazil, followed by several years of drought and bad weather. The values reached in 1828 were not exceeded again until the latter part of the 1840s, when they experienced a sharp increase that, with some uctuations, accelerated throughout the second half of the nineteenth century. See Juan Carlos Garavaglia, La economa rural de la campaa de Buenos Aires vista a travs de sus precios (1754 1852), mimeo., n.d.
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lands in emphyteusis and where to buy public or private lands. Due to this unique convergence a rsthand knowledge of the mechanisms for acquiring high quality lands at a very low price and a context that allowed for the erection of a rural enterprise with minimal initial investment and expertise in the business Senillosa was able to expand his rural operations while at the same time reducing his dependence on rural sources of income by channeling profits into other sectors of the economy. Felipe Senillosa arrived in Buenos Aires at the beginning of the conquest of the new rural territories where the greatest fortunes of the nineteenth century would be amassed. In this initial stage of agrarian growth and frontier expansion, the increase in real estate values was so moderate that the land itself represented a small portion of the initial capital required to establish an estancia. It has been estimated that as late as the 1845 54 decade, land still represented less than 20 percent of the capital necessary to establish a large sheep-raising estancia, while livestock represented almost 75 percent of the total cost.39 This unique context helps us to understand how it was possible for men like Senillosa to amass what later became large landed fortunes. The era of inexpensive lands, however, would not last long. As the Senillosa probate record indicates, by the beginning of the 1860s the value of the land in his rural holdings had substantially increased and equaled his investments in livestock. The increasing value of land indicates that a new stage in the history of agrarian capitalism on the pampas was beginning; this new state of affairs is reected in the fortunes of the next generation of Senillosas.
Felipe B. and Pastor Senillosa: Late-Nineteenth-Century Rural Entrepreneurs
Felipe Senillosa left four children: two sons and two daughters. The daughters, Elvira and Carolina, married into other wealthy families, taking with them their share of their inheritance. As a result of their incorporation into other elite families, their history cannot be followed in the sources of the family archive. It was left to Felipe Bonifacio and Pastor, Senillosas two sons, to manage the remainder of the estate after their fathers death. These brothers developed their business careers in an economic and political climate very different from that in which their father had lived. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the rural economy acquired a new dynamism due to the expansion of a more complex ranching business, stimulated rst by sheep and later by grain
39. Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadera, 151.
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and cattle. Rural technology, which had remained almost static since colonial times, began to change at an accelerating pace after midcentury. Larger capital investments and expert management were required in order to make a rural enterprise more protable.40 The rise in land prices underlay this process. At the same time, the slow, laborious consolidation of the political order after dictator Rosass fall in 1852 created a more favorable atmosphere for long-term investment in the rural sector. This environment gave rise to more-specialized entrepreneurs.41 The history of the second generation of Senillosas exemplies this change. For the founder of this family, rural production was just one part of a diversied business. His sons entrepreneurial strategy was clearly based on other principles, and they are typical of the powerful group of specialized landholders that emerged in the nal third of the nineteenth century. The Senillosa brothers founders and active members of the Argentine Rural Society, the forwardlooking landowners association (Felipe B. became vice president and Pastor secretary toward the end of the 1870s), and regular contributors to its mouthpiece, the Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentinawell illustrate shifting perceptions regarding rural modernization, which in the 1870s and 1880s began to appeal to Argentinas socioeconomic elite. At the same time, they offer two suggestive examples of the reasons entrepreneurs shifted their attention and assets more fully toward rural production. The Senillosa brothers calls for agricultural modernization, repeatedly made in Anales and other organs of the agricultural press, were based upon their own experience as rural entrepreneurs.42 Pastor and Felipe B. took over the family businesses at a very young age, only 16 and 20 years of age, respectively, when their father died in 1858. Unlike their father, an absentee landowner who almost never went to his rural holdings, the young Senillosas visited their estancias regularly and spent much time there providing direct and detailed management. Felipe B. and Pastor also began to invest heavily in improvements, mostly in fences, storage sheds, drainage works, trees, and pedigreed animals.43 The settlement of Felipe Senillosas estate, undertaken between
40. Ibid., 165 68. 41. On this theme, see Hora, The Landowners of the Argentine Pampas: A Social and Political History, 1860 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), esp. 8 14 and 56 68. 42. See Hora, La elite social argentina del siglo XIX: Algunas reexiones a partir de la historia de la familia Senillosa, Anuario IEHS 17 (2002). 43. El Venado, del Sr. Felipe Senillosa, El Campo y el Sport, 18 Mar. 1893, 693 94; San Felipe, del Seor Pastor Senillosa, El Campo y el Sport, 18 Apr. 1893, 808 9. Establecimiento San Felipe, 57173.
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1858 and 1863, gives us an early indication of these changes. Until 1858, the La Fortuna estate (which was part of El Venado) was almost entirely treeless. But in the 1862 inventory one nds 3,282 peach trees and 456 poplars, all four years old. These trees were valued at six hundred gold pesos, which represented one-quarter of the value of all improvements to that establishment. In Arroyo Chico, 1,200 acacias and peach trees were planted as well during those years.44 Trees were intended to provide shade, shelter, and wood for pens and fences, all of which increased the carrying capacity of the land, while also facilitating stock management and improving its quality. In fact, the Senillosa brothers were among the rst estancieros in the River Plate region to pay close attention to stock improvements. In 1859 they bought some purebreds and laid the foundations of a sheep stud farm that began to produce high quality animals for the family enterprise. This practice was not widespread, even among large-scale landholders, and required a considerable investment. It is not possible to establish the precise value of their high quality animals in those years, but by 1862 the stud animals of El Venado were appraised at 2,900 gold pesos. This gure was slightly less than the total value of all the improvements (buildings, fences, pens, and so on) of this property, assessed at 3,500 gold pesos.45 Felipe B. and Pastor poured money into their rural enterprise, despite their mothers growing opposition. During the economic crisis of the mid1860s, the sheep economy suffered as a result of sharply falling wool prices. At the same time, revalorization of the paper peso decreased the protability of the export trade. This drop in the earnings from their rural enterprises affected the family nances and caused Senillosas widow to question the wisdom of continued investment in rural ventures at the expense of other types of investments. In a letter to Juan Negrn at the end of 1865, Pastora Botet painted a pessimistic vista of the state of their business: You know that at this time we are suffering a horrible drought, and so many [of the animals] have sickened, that it has been necessary to borrow money at interest, and the expenditures of the estates are so immense, that at this moment I am still indebted.46 In August 1866 she again emphasized their hardships, remarking that the estates
44. SFS, AGN, 12 and 30. 45. SFS, AGN, 9. Regarding the breeding stations, see Estanislao Zeballos, A travs de las cabaas (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1888), 74, 91100; and Herbert Gibson, The History and Present State of the Sheep-Breeding Industry in the Argentine Republic (Buenos Aires: Ravenscroft and Mills, 1893), 33 36. 46. Pastora B. de Senillosa to Juan Negrn, 21 Dec. 1865, AS, 2-5-10.
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are in very poor condition, we nd ourselves with only half the value they had before and lamenting not having done what I was advised . . . to sell the rural estate and put the money in urban properties.47 Pastora Botets words reect the economic outlook of the entrepreneurs of the rst half of the century; her husband, had he still been alive, most probably would have shared her views. For businessmen of the postindependence period, who developed their undertakings in a climate of profound uncertainty, diversication of assets and diffusion of risks always assumed primacy over specialization in one activity. Although true stability was achieved only in the 1880s, the process of state consolidation and the steady expansion of agrarian capitalism in the pampas began to create powerful incentives for long-term rural investments by the 1860s. Indicators of accelerating development in the sheep economy became more widespread, and several entrepreneurs began to act accordingly, including Pastoras sons. In so doing, the young Senillosas sought to change the course of the family businesses. Instead of following their fathers cautious economic strategy, the young Senillosas placed their bets denitively on the expansion of the rural economy and invested accordingly. They not only kept their estancias but rode out the crisis of the 1860s by deepening their investments in their estates. During the crisis, many cash-strapped property owners sold their best breeding animals. Felipe B. and Pastor took advantage of these circumstances and bought large quantities of high quality sheep at little cost.48 To compensate for the drop in the price of their products, they also established a tallow factory to dispose of lower quality animals. The nancial support they enjoyed surely helped them weather the difcult times. In a period when there were no institutional sources of credit, their economic leverage and social position must have given them better access to money than less powerful rural entrepreneurs.49 Thus nding a way not only to survive the crisis but also to improve the quality of their stock, the Senillosas wools and breeding stock were soon to be regarded as among the best in the River Plate region.50 In 1879 the breeding stud they had established in El Venado, which had previously only produced
47. Pastora B. de Senillosa to Juan Negrn, 22 Aug. 1866, AS, 2-5-10. 48. Felipe Senillosa, La cra del merino y el cultivo de la lana, Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina 19, no. 14 (1885): 314 18. 49. On banking and credit at this time, see (among others) Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadera, 252 85; Charles Jones, British Financial Institutions in Argentina, 1860 1914 (Ph.D. diss., Cambridge Univ., 1983); and Norberto Piero, La moneda, el crdito y los bancos en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: J. Menndez, 1921). 50. Gibson, The History; Zeballos, A travs de las cabaas.
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improved animals for the family enterprise, began to market its products with considerable success.51 In 1885 Felipe B. boasted that their wool had been topping the market for a decade.52 In the 1880s, following the death of Pastora Botet, the Senillosa brothers divided the family business. Felipe B. kept the lands on the Salado and also held a quarter of the large Ayacucho estate, as did his two sisters and his brother. Throughout the years, he continued to make signicant investments in his lands, where, in addition, he built a large country house.53 A renowned estanciero, in 1889 we nd him purchasing pedigreed animals at the International Exhibition in Paris and receiving prizes for his own products.54 By the mid1890s, after more than 30 years at the head of his rural ventures, Felipe B. named Pedro Pags (one of the rst agronomists graduated in Argentina and president of the Argentine Rural Society in the 1920s) to manage his estate and increasingly distanced himself from the day-to-day management. By that time he was alternating time spent in Buenos Aires and on his estancia with prolonged travels in Europe, where he died in 1906.55 Felipe B. offers an example of a character typical of n de sicle Argentina: the estanciero who, having made a large fortune, lived a life of ease or dedicated himself to the pursuit of other public or private goals. Considering the fact that Felipe B. developed his business career in a context that created powerful stimuli for long-term investment in the rural economy, it should not come as a surprise to nd that at the time of his death the structure of his estate was quite different from that of his father. The information provided in his probate record indicates that 95 percent of Felipe B.s wealth, which exceeded 2 million gold pesos at the time of his death, was invested in rural enterprises. Felipe B. willed an illegitimate daughter, who had entered into marriage with a French baron, his eight thousand hectares in Ayacucho. Although not estimated in the probate record, Sofa Senillosas inheritance must have been worth over 0.7 million gold pesos. His only legitimate child, Pastora, inherited the rest of his fortune, assessed at almost 1.3 million gold pesos. El Venado estancia was sold after his death for 1.2 million gold pesos.56 Apart from his
51. Zeballos, A travs de las cabaas, 74, 91100. 52. Felipe Senillosa, La cra, 316. 53. Sucesin Felipe B. Senillosa, AJF, 291, 844 47. 54. Gibson, The History, 195; Seor Felipe Senillosa, 169; Carlos Lix Klett, Estudios, 2:1185. 55. A short biography of Felipe Senillosa, with a summary of his writing, can be found in the Boletn de la Liga Agraria 10, nos. 9 12 (1906): 159 61. 56. Details of the sale of El Venado can be found in La Nacin, 8 May 1907, 11.
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rural holdings, Senillosa possessed only one other sizable property, a residence in Buenos Aires valued at 44,000 gold pesos, or 2.5 percent of his wealth. In summary, unlike his father, Felipe B. had concentrated his assets in rural production, withdrawing from other economic activities. And just as the type of businessman we have analyzed in the case of the senior Senillosa was typical of the rst half of the nineteenth century, so too was Felipe B. typical for the decades at the end of the century. My examination elsewhere of a signicant sample of the largest fortunes in Argentina at the turn of the century conrms this statement. Here I will summarize briey the most important ndings of this study, which analyzed the estates of 26 large-scale rural entrepreneurs who owned at least ten thousand hectares of pampean land and who died between 1880 and the end of the First World War. This sample includes several of the most successful landowners of Argentinas Gilded Age, including Juan and Nicols Anchorena, Leonardo Pereyra, Toms Duggan, Diego de Alvear, Pedro Luro, and Ramn Santamarina. This analysis shows convincingly that rural property constituted the foundation upon which all these fortunes, without exception, were built. Although the weight of investment in urban property tended to be heavier among older wealth, the structure of these fortunes is, in general, quite similar. For the entire group, investment in rural estates represented 76 percent of their total wealth at the time of their deaths, while investment in urban and suburban properties accounted for 16 percent. Investment in liquid assets (credits, bank deposits, stock shares, government bonds, and so on) and commercial and nancial ventures was marginal, barely reaching 6 percent of their estates.57 The turn-of-the-century large entrepreneurs growing specialization in rural activity contrasts markedly with the business strategies dominant half a century earlier. Why did this shift in investment patterns take place? As we have already noted, in the decades that followed Rosass fall in 1852, state consolidation generated more propitious conditions for long-term rural investment. In this period, transformations in rural technology and the ever more exacting demands of the world market also necessitated increased investment.58 Also, the consolidation of a more complex and efcient banking and nancial system in the last quarter of the century gave Argentina the most advanced capital market in Latin America, surpassing even those of Brazil or
57. See my Landowning Bourgeoisie or Business Bourgeoisie? On the Peculiarities of the Argentine Economic Elite, 1880 1945, Journal of Latin American Studies 34, no. 3 (2002). 58. See my Landowners of the Argentine Pampas, 10 14, 45 56.
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Mexico.59 This last development curtailed money lending as a lucrative venture, eliminating what had been a major source of income for merchants and capitalists since colonial times. In addition, during the latter part of the nineteenth century the railway transformed the transport system, closing another field of activity in which large businessmen had participated in the past. Finally, changes in trade networks affected both the Argentine and foreign-owned mercantile houses that had served the import-export trade since independence. The growing sophistication of local and international markets and the formidable increase in export trade created conditions for the emergence of a few powerful (and largely foreign-owned) rms, which came to dominate the nancing, transport, and marketing of livestock and agricultural exports and the import of foreign manufactures.60 All these developments forced landowners to concentrate in rural production. Only a very few large-scale landowners succeeded in maintaining a diminished presence in commerce and nance. However, it is likely that dwindling business opportunities in these areas did not create great anxiety among most native entrepreneurs. The high prots generated by rural ventures and the greater efciency of transport, commerce, and nancial services surely provided incentives for most businessmen with rural interests to concentrate their capital there. In the last third of the nineteenth century, large landowners traveled a path that led from diversication to specialization. By the 1880s, Argentina possessed a group of large-scale rural capitalists who were both more specialized and wealthier than their peers had been at any point in the past.
59. Carlos Marichal, Modelos y sistemas bancarios en Amrica Latina en el siglo XIX (1850 1880); and Andrs M. Regalsk y, La evolucin de la banca privada nacional en Argentina (1880 1914): Una introduccin a su estudio, in La formacin de los bancos centrales en Espaa y Amrica Latina (siglos XIX y XX), vol. 1, ed. Pedro Tedde and Carlos Marichal (Madrid: Banco de Espaa, Servicio de Estudios, 1995). See also Andrs M. Regalsk y, Banca y capitalismo en la Argentina, 1850 1930: Un ensayo crtico, Ciclos 9, no. 18 (1999): 33 54. 60. Carlos Marichal, La gran burguesa comercial y nanciera de Buenos Aires, 1860 1914: Anatoma de cinco grupos ( paper presented at the XVI Jornadas de Historia Econmica, Quilmes, Argentina, 1998). As a result of these changes, in the late nineteenth century foreign-owned import-export houses, which had been active since the 1810s, were failing or moving into other forms of business. British rms, for example, were moving into estancia management or land ownership. Others remained in distribution, but moved out of importing and exporting to handle the products of local industries. Those houses remaining in import-export under local ownership and management became subsidiaries or agents of particular British companies. See Vera Blinn Reber, British Mercantile Houses in Buenos Aires, 1810 1880 (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Wisconsin, 1972), 277.
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Concentrating his assets in rural production allowed Felipe B. Senillosa to live an easy life while enlarging his inherited fortune. However, he did not match the economic successes of his father, and certainly at his death he did not rank among the richest men of his time. This can be seen in a comparison of Senillosas estate (around 2 million gold pesos) with that of the largest landowners of the turn of the century. Mariano Unzu, for example, one of the wealthiest men in turn-of-the-century Argentina, possessed a spectacular fortune, far larger than that of Ernesto Tornquist, the leading Argentine nancier of the time, and comparable to some of the leading estates of the British landowning elite.61 Unzu had received an inheritance similar to that of Senillosa (some 125,000 gold pesos) but had multiplied that fortune more than one-hundredfold during his lifetime to amass more than 15 million gold pesos (equivalent to nearly 3 million, or $15 million) upon his death. Like those of other large proprietors of his time, Unzus estate was composed mainly (79 percent) of rural lands (248,000 hectares), most of which he himself had bought over the course of his life. This great estanciero owned houses and mansions amounting to 8.8 percent of his wealth and liquid assets (mostly bank deposits) worth 7.3 percent of his fortune.62 Like Senillosa, then, Unzu abandoned the mercantile ventures that had made his fathers fortune in the rst half of the century and invested the bulk of his resources in land. There is an element that makes these two histories quite different, however an element of foremost importance in explaining the difference in the size of their estates. Senillosa, who was counted among the most distinguished modernizing landowners of his time, invested his resources, fundamentally, in improvements but did little to enlarge his territorial holdings. In fact, he passed to his heirs just the 16,000 hectares he received from his parents. This decision was not the most propitious for long-term economic success. For as the history of Mariano Unzu (or any of the other leading rural proprietors of the time) shows, the business strategy that led to the pinnacle of the economic elite was not being the most modern and efcient landowner but, over and above all else, being the biggest. In the pampas, size was more important than efciency. Felipe B. Senillosa died in Barcelona in 1906. The fact that he left behind
61. For example, it was larger than those of the marquess of Bute, the duke of Northumberland, or the duke of Sutherland, all of whom ranked high among the wealthiest landowners in Europe. W. D. Rubinstein, British Millionaires, 18091949, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 47 (1974): 206 23. 62. See Hora, Landed Bourgeoisie or Business Bourgeoisie? 604 5.
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only two daughters, each of whom had married men in comfortable economic positions, most likely contributed to his disassociation from the administration of his fortune. In his later years, then, Felipe B. became more of a rentier than an entrepreneur. As we shall see, the history of his brother, Pastor, was quite different. Pastors sizable family of 11 children inevitably forced him to face life, in particular in his latter days, in a manner that contrasted markedly with the serenity in which the landlord of El Venado spent his last years. When the family holdings were divided after Pastora Botets death, Pastor took the mercantile house erected by his father half a century earlier. During the 1880s, this house abandoned the export trade and concentrated on the import of Spanish and Cuban products (cigars, among other things).63 In addition, Pastor owned several rural properties, the most signicant of which was the 8,340-hectare estate in Arroyo Chico he had inherited. There he organized San Felipe, primarily a sheep operation, where he also engaged in some cattle and horse ranching. San Felipes products were well renowned, to the point that in 1895 they obtained the highest prices paid in Buenos Aires for ne wool. Pastor Senillosas purebred horses were also highly acclaimed.64 The agricultural journal La Agricultura afrmed in 1895 that, due to this kind of precedent, the San Felipe establishment has achieved the fame that it merits, and . . . it can justiably be cited as a model.65 However, recognition and entrepreneurial success are not always synonymous. Despite major currency depreciation, the rst half of the 1890s was a difcult period for agricultural exporters due to economic and climatic problems. Some large landholders went bankrupt, and many others, including Pastor Senillosa, faced serious problems.66 The price of wool fell by half between 1889 and 1893, while the price of wheat also plummeted. To further complicate things, the most severe drought in 30 years devastated the Buenos Aires countryside in 1893 and 1894.67 Finally, the Baring Crisis of 1890 contracted credit and precipitated a decade-long commercial depression. Pastors difculties became more acute when his mercantile house collapsed, most probably due to the contraction of the domestic market following the Baring Crisis. Family correspondence suggests that Senillosa liquidated his merchandise at
63. See the houses advertisements published in periodicals such as the Peridico del Estanciero and the Anales de la Sociedad Rural Argentina. 64. Establecimiento San Felipe, 572. La Agricultura, 453, 3 Oct. 1901, 743. 65. Establecimiento San Felipe, 573. 66. Gallo, La pampa gringa, 183 85; Gibson, The History, 96. 67. Noel H. Sbarra, Historia del alambrado en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Eudeba, 1964), 29 31.
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great loss and from then on moved away from mercantile activities. At the end of 1894, Pastors wife painted a sad picture of their economic situation to her brother. That year, the sale of livestock had been especially poor, probably because the drought pushed ranchers to sell off their animals, driving prices down.68 In 1896 Pastors nances were still shak y and his outlook pessimistic: [E]verything I touch turns into shit, he told one of his sons.69 By the end of the decade, Pastors situation had improved, primarily because of the general upswing in agricultural and livestock prices. Although he still held debts that would follow him to his grave, the two long trips he took to Europe with his wife and some of his younger children at the beginning of the 1900s suggest that his nances had stabilized somewhat. His biggest problems, however, had only just begun. At that point, several of his sons had reached, or were about to reach, the age of majority. Argentine inheritance laws, like earlier Spanish laws, called for all property to be divided equally among all legitimate children. If Pastor had had fewer offspring, perhaps his last years would not have differed so signicantly from his brothers. But his 11 surviving children (nine sons and two daughters) put him in a particularly difcult situation, as the number of individuals he felt he was obliged to help far exceeded his resources. Pastors inherited fortune had allowed him to live the life of his upper-class peers, but the division of his landholdings among his offspring would make it impossible for them to rely on land as their economic base. Like his brother, Pastor had been a great landowner, but his children would never enjoy that status.
The Children of Pastor Senillosa: Professionals and Entrepreneurs in the Secondary and Tertiary Sectors
Pastor was aware of this problem. In 1898 his son Eduardo let him know that he wished to study agronomy. In spite of the fact that Pastor saw himself as a modernizing landholder, always keen on improvement, he received this news with dismay, as he believed this choice would preclude Eduardos becoming a man of independent means. The day-to-day management of the familys estancia did not require more than the collaboration of Roberto, one of Pastors eldest sons, who already had taken up permanent residence at San Felipe. In a letter to his son Felipe, Pastor argued that the familys territorial holdings were insufcient to provide his children with substantial income and that if
68. Elvira Chopitea de Senillosa to Juan Antonio Chopitea, 15 Oct. 1894, AS, 2-5-11. 69. Pastor Senillosa to Felipe G. Senillosa, 13 Nov. 1896, AS, 2-5-11.
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Eduardo insisted in following higher studies in agronomy, he would be condemned to working for others and renounce the possibility of making a fortune. Pastors perspective in this matter indicates that he was convinced that a rural enterprise was really worthwhile only if it was large scale. Large property not only generated income but also increased in value over the long term. With a degree in agronomy but without a large property of his own, Pastor insisted, Eduardo would become the overseer of someone elses important establishment, while hell personally occupy some small farm, sowing and reaping the whimsical benets of his studies. . . . [He] forgets that I do not have enough resources to give each of them a business to run. . . . Eduardo should follow his preparatory studies and once nished he should pursue a career whose capital is in its academic qualications, such as law or engineering. Pastor concluded that if his children were to stay at my side, [they] will become nothing, even if I nd some work to give them . . . it is necessary that each one nd a way to help rather than suckling two at each teat . . . either the calves die or the cow becomes exhausted.70 Jorge Sbato has described Pastor Senillosa as a typical example of the n de sicle entrepreneur who sought to invest in different spheres of economic activity with an eye toward skimming the cream of the market and obtaining supernormal prots. This interpretation is largely inaccurate. Pastor preferred investment in land over all other forms of investment. Thus, for example, in 1905 he insisted that whatever capital one invests in land, though it may not produce prot straight away, is a great investment. In just a couple of years one will nd its value intact, plus interest, plus a large prot.71 His son Felipe G., very much like other members of the family, held the same opinion.72 The formidable increase in real estate values in the pampas at the turn of the century helps to explain the Senillosas enthusiasm for buying land. During these years, for example, the young Felipe G. made good money purchasing ve thousand hectares on the frontier. Ortiz wrote to me from La Pampa, he told his brothers around 1904, informing me that La Hortensia is already worth thirty [paper] pesos per hectare, or $150,000!! It cost me $27,000 back in 98.73 Nevertheless, for the Senillosas, the increase in land values was double edged; it increased the value of their existing property but became an obstacle
70. Pastor Senillosa to Felipe G. Senillosa, 15 Mar. 1898, AS, 2-5-11. 71. Pastor Senillosa to Juan A. Senillosa, 9 Apr. 1905, AS, 2-6-2. 72. Felipe G. Senillosa to Juan A. Senillosa, 27 June 1906, AS, 2-6-7. Also see Eduardo Senillosa to J. A. Chopitea, 21 Nov. 1904, AS, 2-6-1. 73. Felipe G. Senillosa to Juan A. Senillosa, n.d. (1904?), AS, 185.
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to further acquisitions. In fact, all the lands the young Felipe G. bought during those years were located in marginal, low quality areas in La Pampa and Chubut.74 The same can be said of his fathers acquisitions, among the most noteworthy of which are the 57,000 hectares that he bought in the subtropical province of Salta in the middle of the decade of the 1900s for 273,000 gold pesos.75 It is useful to put these purchases in perspective. Advertisements published in the press at that time indicate that rural property was being offered in places such as subtropical Salta and semidesert Patagonia at prices that uctuated between 0.5 and 15 gold pesos per hectare, while grazing lands in Buenos Aires province were sold at prices that often exceeded 100 gold pesos per hectare. The much-anticipated land boom in Patagonia and other frontier regions, on which the Senillosas and many others bet, never occurred. Certainly, at the beginning of the century, buying lands outside the fertile pampas offered an attractive deal, but it was not a ticket to prosperity for present or future generations. Pampean land was a secure and protable investment that always increased in value over the long run, and given more resources, it is likely that Pastor Senillosa would have bought more. However, the formidable increase in the price of land in this region meant he could not match the large-scale purchases that his father had made before 1840, at a time when the price of land was almost nothing. It has been estimated that between the 1840s and the beginning of the 1880s land prices increased 20-fold and continued to rise rapidly thereafter.76 After a pronounced drop in the rst half of the 1890s (a consequence of the Baring Crisis), the increase in real estate values continued unabated and only slowed down with the onset of World War I.77 In the rst decade of the century, then, the purchase of large properties on the pampas was simply beyond the reach of most investors. Understandably, in 1909, the only option left for Juan Antonio Senillosa, one of Pastors sons, was based on the hope, never realized, of taking advantage of the great Patagonian land boom.78 The impossibility of expanding his holdings on the pampas, then, helps explain why Pastor encouraged his sons to enter into activities far removed from agricultural and livestock export production. Furthermore, contrary to
74. Eduardo Senillosa to Juan Antonio Chopitea, 21 Nov. 1904, AS, 2-6-1. 75. Ernesto Senillosa to Julio Senillosa, 10 Apr. 1907, AS, 2-6-4. 76. Sabato, Capitalismo y ganadera, 63. 77. Corts Conde, El progreso argentino (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1979), 162 73. 78. Eduardo Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa, 19 Jan. 1909, AS, 15-4-5.
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what Jorge Sbato has suggested, Pastor Senillosas diversication of assets was not intended to increase his prots, but rather to help his sons establish themselves independently, which would allow them to live the elite life he and his siblings had enjoyed. Encouraging his sons to try their hands at new industrial, commercial, and nancial ventures or to go into the professions was not so much an attempt to earn extraordinary prots as to guide his sons toward risk y but less capital-intensive ventures. We will not have the opportunity here to analyze the history of Pastor Senillosas offspring. It sufces to mention that several of them entered the professions: Felipe G. studied law, Julio became an architect, Juan Antonio entered the diplomatic service, and Guillermo studied geology. Others, helped by capital advances from their father, tried their luck in business: Carlos and Eduardo started a reinforced-cement construction company, and Ernesto dedicated himself to food processing. Robertos business interests remained concentrated in the rural sector, and he later entered public service. At the beginning of the century, three of them were studying in the United States at Cornell University.79 The expenses of his numerous children weighed heavily upon Senillosas nances. In 1906 Pastor wrote to his son Julio, studying in the United States at the time, recommending moderation in his expenditures.80 Two years later, Pastor again asked Julio not to incur excessive expenses, in order to preserve the integrity of the name my parents left me.81 The funds that Pastor advanced at various times toward his childrens new ventures put additional pressure on his nances, which already were encumbered by debts dating back to the early 1890s. It is likely that, given these circumstances, Senillosa was spending more than was advisable. As some indexes suggest, this seems to have affected his rural enterprises negatively. In fact, the condition of his ranch in the rst decade of the century was far from robust. During the last third of the nineteenth century, San Felipe had stood among the most modern and prestigious estancias in Argentina. Pastor Senillosas enterprise clearly began to lose ground in the 1890s, however. In these troubled years, investments in San Felipe seem to have slowed down, precisely when stock raising entered into a period of marked technological change. The growth of grain exports and the opening of European markets to live animals and, a short while later, processed frozen and chilled meat drove
79. For a brief biography of some of Pastor Senillosas heirs, see Hora, La elite social argentina del siglo XIX. 80. Pastor Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa, 2 Dec. 1906, AS, 2-6-3. 81. Pastor Senillosa to Julio Senillosa, 18 July 1908, AS, 2-6-5.
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this new stage of development. Cattle and grain displaced sheep from the best lands in the pampas. To raise better cattle, landowners were forced to improve their pastures, which they did by adopting mixed rotational farming techniques. The massive importation of British Durhams and Herefords also contributed to the improvement of the stock. Demand for wire fences, water pumps, and agricultural machinery also increased. Pastor Senillosa did not adapt well to this scenario, which required a new round of investment in capital goods in order to modernize and maintain or increase prot margins. To a certain extent, chance played against him. His estancia was not in a position to make the most of this stage of agricultural development, given that the Ayacucho area where it was located was not well suited for grain growing or for the development of the articial pastures ( particularly alfalfa) that were necessary for raising export-quality animals. The lands that his father had carefully selected based on his in-depth knowledge of the frontier, particularly apt for early-nineteenth-century grazing techniques, proved to be ill suited for later technological stages. The diffusion of windmills and water pumps, for example, downplayed the importance of natural water sources. Thus, by the turn of the century, the low-lying and uneven pasture lands of the Salado River valley, ill suited for agriculture, lost value relative to the higher and drier lands of the southern and eastern pampas. In addition, Pastors enterprise lost ground precisely in the area that until then had been one of its strengths: the raising of pedigreed breeding stock. Although the Senillosas appear to have been aware of the direction that the stock-raising industry was taking, by the middle of the decade of the 1900s it was clear that their competitors were marketing products better adapted to the demands of the export trade. In 1907 Roberto Senillosa, the administrator of San Felipe, insisted that today all the estancieros have good livestock and there are many who have rst rate animals: Alvear, the Unzus, Martinez de Hoz, Ramos Meja, Cobo, Villanueva, Lpez, Urquiza, and a thousand others who have concerned themselves with and spent a fortune on breeding animals.82 Reecting on the prot margins they had obtained in previous years, he observed that their current earnings were only half of what they had hoped they would be. Papa has close to 2,500,000 [paper, or 1.1 million gold] pesos invested in property and livestock, which should have yielded liquid prots of 250,000 [paper] pesos. But as the livestock of San Felipe is not what it should be in class, variety, reputation, and bloodline, and because its operating expenses are enormous, we never manage to obtain a return greater than four or ve percent.83
82. Eduardo Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa, 29 Sept. 1907, AS, 2-6-4. 83. Eduardo Senillosa to Julio and Juan Antonio Senillosa, 19 Sept. 1907, AS, 2-6-4.
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In those years, Pastor Senillosa tried his luck in new areas of economic activity, perhaps aiming to compensate for the drop in his rural income. Together with Alfredo Demarchi and Victorino de la Plaza, two well-known members of the business community, he launched the Banco de Fomento Industrial Americano. This bank did not survive its exploratory phase, as the initial subscription of shares was very limited.84 Signicantly, Pastor remarked that most members of the economically dominant groups believed that land, of secure yield, was a more attractive investment option than were stock shares. Stock societies, he lamented, in great part fail . . . the majority of the wealthy employ their riches in the purchase of properties, mortgages, etc., and do not enter into the business of acquiring shares of nascent companies.85 Pastor also joined the board of directors of an enterprise created to manufacture ax straw products, a project that also failed at an early stage.86 These banking and industrial undertakingslike his other, earlier attempts to attract North American investors in the cold-storage industry suggest that Pastor was limited by capital scarcity; in all of these cases, he was trying to start a business that depended on extrafamilial partnerships. At that time, Pastor found it increasingly difcult to service a mortgage on San Felipe and his other debts. In 1906 his son Roberto argued that it was essential to remedy the nancial situation of the family, as its expenditures exceeded its income. The great loss caused by the failure of the commercial house in the early 1890s, the expenses of the sons studies in the United States, and those of the immense family in Buenos Aires, he afrmed, severely compromised his position: [T]here is debt and it is big; if we do not try to eliminate it, it will swallow us completely.87 Excessive expenditures and lack of income from other sources forced Pastor to adjust. Unfortunately, we do not have sufcient information to evaluate all his options. One can hypothesize, nonetheless, that the large capital investments necessary to improve his livestock and to make San Felipe more protable either were beyond his means or did not appear to be a worthwhile risk to such an indebted entrepreneur. In any case, Pastor who by then was suffering from a serious illness chose to sell almost all of his livestock and to rent the greater part of his lands. In late 1907, some 14,000 cattle, 35,000 sheep, and 1,300 horses went under the hammer. Unfortunately, the returns he obtained on these transactions were not very high, given that drought, which
84. Juan Antonio Senillosa to Felipe Senillosa, 15 Mar. 1907, AS, 2-6-4. 85. Pastor Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa 28 Apr. 1907, AS, 2-6-4. 86. Pastor Senillosa to Juan Antonio Senillosa, 16 Jan. 1908, AS, 2-6-5. 87. Roberto Senillosa to Felipe G. Senillosa, n.d. (1906?), AS, 2-6-7.
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suddenly contracted pastures on the pampas, drove prices down. Pastor used the money to pay off debts and renanced liabilities. He also bought (under mortgage) his sisters share in a family residence located in the center of Buenos Aires, which he put up for rent when he moved with his family to a grand mansion in the new Barrio Norte. He also paid off part of the lands he had acquired in Salta. With the little that remained, Pastor was unable to reequip his breeding stock as he desired.88 From then on, Senillosa was left with some 2,500 hectares of land at his own disposal. Income from the rental of more than 5,000 hectares in San Felipe and the old residence in the city center yielded some 62,000 gold pesos annually, to which should be added the income from his lands in Salta.89 The precise total of his debts at this time is unknown, although they were without a doubt high. No longer an active entrepreneur, by 1906 the physically weakened Pastor had become very much a rentier. Pastor died at his beloved San Felipe in the spring of 1910. Although most of the probate records for his estate have been lost by a judicial system that has not always taken care to preserve its history, information from family correspondence and other sources indicates clearly that his assets, approaching 1.8 million gold pesos, were almost entirety comprised of his estancia and other rural and urban properties. The only other thing he held were debts, which at that point easily exceeded 0.6 million gold pesos. From the early 1910s on it became difcult for his heirs to service this debt. The Great War, which provoked a marked contraction in credit along with a pronounced crisis in foreign trade, made things even more difcult. With the interruption of export activities, rural rents decreased markedly, while expenditures and obligations did not contract at the same pace. At the end of 1914, young Mabel Senillosa commented, [T]here are days of total want, like those that have recently passed. The few rent payments that arrive come late and in minute installments.90 A few months later, her brother complained, [W]e are all feeling the noose around our necks and if things do not improve I do not know how we shall end. There is nothing left to sell or pawn, and if the country does not recover we will all go to hell. . . . We are making great efforts to defend San Felipe and this house.91 Though they were still far from living in poverty, the Senillosas found it quite difcult to adapt to a more modest lifestyle. In 1914 Pastor Senillosas
88. Pastor Senillosa to Roberto Senillosa, 14 Oct. 1908, AS, 2-6-5. 89. Ricardo Senillosa to Roberto and Felipe G. Senillosa, 20 May 1908, AS, 2-6-5. 90. Mabel Senillosa to Julio Senillosa, 15 Nov. 1914, AS, 14-4-5. 91. Eduardo Senillosa to Julio Senillosa, 18 Nov. 1914, AS, 14-4-5.
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widow wrote to one of her sons that the upholsterer has not entered the house once this year, but they remained reluctant to re their eight domestic servants.92 Thus, it is not surprising that their expenditures continued to put pressure on an ever contracting income, which was increasingly less capable of sustaining the widow and her unmarried sons and daughters, above all because their debts loomed larger during the war. Lacking sufcient income and incapable of moderating their spending, the Senillosas found that they had to liquidate assets at an ever increasing rate. In 1919 they sold the breeding stock at San Felipe, and three years later they were pressed to sell more than one thousand hectares of land.93 From that point onward they were only able to retain reduced landholdings and the family mansion, which they did not dispose of until the 1930s.94 Gradually driven from the land and lacking the entrepreneurial talent that made their grandfathers fortune, none of Pastors sons were able to emulate the successes of their ancestors. After the 1910s, the Senillosas were a family that, while preserving the memory of a glorious past and maintaining its links with the Argentine wealthy, slowly descended into the upper middle class. By the end of the 1910s, most of them lived off the fruits of their own labors, public employment, or very meager rents. In an understandable way, the trail of the siblings becomes more diffuse with the passage of time, especially following the death of Pastor and his wife, after which the family ceased functioning as an economic and social unit. At the end of the 1930s, the Senillosas were forced to sell the great family home. Conscious of the familys exceptionality heightened by adversity, they chose on that occasion to donate to the Archivo General de la Nacin the family archive, containing a centurys worth of documentation, from which this history has been reconstructed.
The Economic Elite over the Course of a Century
Felipe Senillosas history offers a typical example of the opportunities for economic and social improvement that opened up with the shift of the River Plate economy from mining to rural production following independence. The end of colonial rule and the initiation of free trade sparked a process of agricultural expansion in which this immigrant, together with other sharp native and for92. Elvira Chopitea to Julio Senillosa, 29 June 1914, AS, 15-4-5; Mabel Senillosa to Julio Senillosa, 24 July 1917, AS, 15-4-6. 93. M. G. Basavilbaso, Las cabaas argentinas (Buenos Aires: n.p., 1919); Cmara de Diputados de la Provincia de Buenos Aires, Diario de Sesiones (1922): 1321. 94. Guillermo Senillosa to his siblings, 2 Apr. 1925, AS, 15-4-6.
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eign entrepreneurs, developed their business careers. Senillosa arrived in Buenos Aires with little more than his intellectual skills and training as a military engineer. He did not possess capital, but in the span of a few years he acquired one particularly scarce resource: information. Senillosas rsthand knowledge of the frontier lands that the republican state would soon privatize, together with his close contacts with the political elite, provided the initial impetus for the purchase of large but inexpensive territorial holdings. This last aspect of the Senillosas history is reminiscent of other economic patriarchs, such as Pereyra, Guerrico, or that of the Anchorena brothers, whose close ties to the state became important elements in their economic success during this same period. Senillosa offers a good example of how, during the rst half of the nineteenth century, vast extensions of land could be purchased without signicant capital, which contributed to the creation of a new group of large-scale estancieros who were richer and more powerful than their colonial predecessors. However, while it is true that rural production was central to Senillosas undertakings, it was not his sole concern. As soon as he managed to accumulate some capital, he invested in other economic activities: internal petty trade, import and export commerce, and money lending. In this, Felipe Senillosas attitude toward business was typical of the period, when capitalists usually reacted to major economic dislocations and political instability by diversifying their assets. Felipes sons, who reached maturity after Rosass fall, developed their business careers in a markedly different economic context. During the latter part of the nineteenth century, the agricultural and livestock economy acquired momentum, and land prices increased. The estancia economy, and Argentine capitalism more generally, also underwent signicant technological change. Finally, the consolidation of the state and the end of civil and international conict helped open a new stage of agrarian development in the pampas. Felipe B. and Pastor reacted to this new context by transforming themselves into full-edged rural entrepreneurs in a way their father had never been. They counted themselves among the most distinguished and progressive estancieros of their time. Unlike the senior Senillosa, for whom rural business was no more than one aspect of a diversied enterprise, for his sons rural production became the heart of their business. The histories of Felipe B. and Pastor illustrate the motives that pushed many entrepreneurs of the second half of the century to concentrate in primary production. The high returns offered by rural business in the pampas golden age surely worked as an incentive for entrepreneurs to specialize in livestock and grain production. It is important to note, however, that these
483
stimuli were not always positive, as the failure of Pastors mercantile house suggests. In the last decades of the century, a new international division of labor enabled a handful of large and powerful rms, mostly of foreign origin, to dominate the bulk of the import-export trade, internal commerce, and banking and nance. The mercantile and nancial practices that prevailed during much of the nineteenth century were rendered obsolete, and entrepreneurs who had acted in these spheres were forced to specialize or move to other areas of business. Felipe B. chose to move away from commerce, but Pastor maintained his import house until he was hard hit by the depression of the 1890s. He then abandoned this activity, carrying away from it a debt that followed him to the grave. We cannot know precisely the total liabilities resulting from the fall of Pastors mercantile house. But it seems reasonable to assert that Felipe B.s healthier accounts were due in part to his quick withdrawal from the mercantile sphere in favor of rural production, which in hindsight proved to be a wise decision. If what is suggested above is correct, it is necessary to conclude that the history of these two generations of the Senillosa family, which encompasses the period from the outset of the expansion of livestock production up to the turn of the twentieth century, offers a revised understanding of the making and evolution of the wealthiest segment of the Argentine economic elite. In the rst place, it challenges the traditional depiction of the porteo elite as a group whose economic superiority was based on control of rural land. In fact, during much of the nineteenth century this group can be better described as a diversied entrepreneurial elite rather than as a purely landowning class. Only in the latter part of the century did economic and political changes create the conditions for the metamorphosis of the postindependence diversied entrepreneurial class into a landed bourgeoisie. This fact requires us not only to modify the traditional interpretation of the nineteenth-century elite but also to reject recent revisionist interpretations of large-scale Argentine businessmen, such as that advanced by Jorge Sbato. For Sbato, the large-scale entrepreneurs of the rst half of the nineteenth century were fundamentally a landed class that, as the economy grew more complex, expanded its investments toward other sectors of the economy until it became, by the turn of the century, a greatly diversied entrepreneurial group. The histories of Felipe Senillosa and his two sons each of whom was typical of the great entrepreneurs of his time can be better understood in a conceptual framework that in many respects is the inverse of that suggested by Sbato. Rather than the evolution of a landowning class into a diversied entrepreneurial elite, it shows the emergence of a landowning entrepreneurial
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class (and presumably, that of businessmen specializing in other spheres) out of the more diversied elite of the immediate postindependence period. The downward economic path of the third generation of Senillosas, who arrived at adulthood at the end of the nineteenth century, allows us to formulate some nal remarks regarding the importance of land for the entrepreneurs of the period. For Pastors children, specialization in rural production became more difcult, as the division of his territorial holdings among so many heirs meant the third generation could not rely on land to maintain its elite status. The Senillosas, however, illustrate in its extremity a problem that affected most large rural entrepreneurs, with variations according to the peculiarities of each landowning family and the size of their landholdings. And this was not just because most wealthy families were large ones, whose ability to transfer large estates to the next generation was seriously impaired by the mandate of partible inheritance. The rapid rise in the price of rural property in the last decades of the nineteenth century made it impossible for turn-of-the-century entrepreneurs to replicate the massive purchases of land that had been typical in the previous period. This latter process substantially modied the horizons within which rural entrepreneurs acted. A brief consideration of this point suggests what was the greatest failure of the second generation of Senillosas as businessmen the one that excluded them and their heirs from the pinnacle of the Argentine economic elite and at the same time reveals why other entrepreneurs of the period were much more successful. In the 1900s Pastor Senillosa and his sons were convinced of the longterm economic advantages of investing in land. At that point, however, it was already too late to act upon this realization, as the only affordable lands were those of inferior quality located beyond the pampas. Unfortunately, Pastor and Felipe B. had passed up the opportunity to buy better, cheaper lands in earlier decades, when it was still within their reach. In the long run, progressive landowners such as Pastor and Felipe B., who invested in improvements rather than territorial expansion, were economically less successful than landowners such as the Duggans, the Duhaus, the Unzus, the Pereyras, or the Anchorenas. It is true that some of these entrepreneurs, who were active in the second half of the nineteenth century, had larger economic resources at their disposal. But as the example of Unzu suggests, the crucial element in explaining their success was their prioritization of land acquisition over modernization. In the early stages of livestock expansion in the pampas, capitalists such as the Anchorenas were already extending their rural holdings in a manner that was clearly beyond the reach of entrepreneurs of more recent wealth such as Felipe Senillosa. There are cases, however (such as the Duhaus or the Dug-
485
gans), of fortunes made in later periods. The major difference between these immigrants and the Senillosas is the single-minded tenacity with which the former invested their resources in land acquisition. Unlike these estancieros of humble origins, Pastor and Felipe B. Senillosa did not buy land in signicant proportions in the 1860s and 1870s. They lost their last opportunity when they abstained from the great land sales that occurred with the last stage of frontier expansion at the end of the 1870s and the beginning of the 1880s. While those who acquired enormous properties at this point were not always able to put the land under production immediately, capitalists like the Anchorenas, Duggans, and Unzus laid the foundation for the accumulation of fortunes comparable to the great landowners of Europe by the turn of the century. In the end, then, the comparison of the Senillosas with the largest landowners of the late nineteenth century invites us to draw a rather unpleasant conclusion: the most innovative rural entrepreneurs, those most committed to technology and modernization, were less successful than those who dedicated themselves, rst and foremost, to land acquisition. This appears to conrm that the key to economic success for a rural entrepreneur in the pampas during the period of agrarian expansion was size rather than economic efciency. The Senillosa brothers failed to realize this truth at an opportune time and consequently lost their standing among the truly rich. The fate of Felipe B. and his two daughters was less dramatic than that of Pastors family. The elder of the Senillosa brothers died with the certainty that his daughters enjoyed a favorable economic situation, although at a signicant distance from the pinnacle of the Argentine elite. Pastors children suffered a more precipitous decline. This was little less than inevitable given the enormous size of his family, which constituted a heavy burden on the family nances. At the turn of the century, the fall in rural income forced Pastor Senillosa to try his luck, with more desperation than enthusiasm, in new spheres of economic activity. In this nal stage of his life as an entrepreneur, he harvested more failures than successes and did not succeed in turning around his economic woes or those of his rural enterprise. Pastors worst fears did not come true while he was alive, but the end result of his difculties was the erosion of the link between the succeeding generation and rural property. The milch cow (this is how he referred to San Felipe) was not completely exhausted, but it did lose its capacity to sustain the third generation of Senillosas. Pastors children had to confront the consequences of the fragmentation of the familys landholdings. Even though they knew land to be secure and protable, most of them were forced to engage in new activities in the secondary or tertiary spheres of the economy or to earn their living in the profes-
486
sions or as civil servants. For this third generation of Senillosas in the River Plate, entry into new areas of economic activity was not an attempt to diversify assets. Rather, it was the necessary result of the contraction of their landholdings and, as a result, of their rural income. In this way, the Senillosas anticipated the path that many scions of other landowning families would follow after 1930, when the Great Depression and the collapse of the pampean export economy magnied earlier problems linked to property fragmentation. The departure of several of the young Senillosas from rural activities did not mean that they were destined inevitably to lose their standing among the wealthy. The burgeoning domestic economy at the turn of the century, followed by the boom of the urban economy in the 1920s, opened new opportunities for entrepreneurs. In fact, after World War I, almost all new fortunes were made in the urban, rather than rural, sector. The youngest Senillosas simply lacked the luck or the necessary talent to succeed in this new setting. Their undistinguished entrepreneurial lives, however, were not exceptional. In fact, in part due to simple factors of family size, it seems reasonable to conclude that over the long term more members of the old elite families lost their socioeconomic positions than succeeded in remaining at the top.

Hora, Making of BsAs Elite, Los Senillosa

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Hora, Making of BsAs Elite, Los Senillosa

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The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite in the Nineteenth Century: The Example of the

Using a reconstruction of the history of Felipe Senillosa and his family as a

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

The Making and Evolution of the Buenos Aires Economic Elite

HAHR / August / Hora

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