Fluent Essays

Hi, I am looking for someone to help me with my presentation script. It will be around 500 words. The aim of the presentation is to raise some discussion question base on the assigned readings for the class to discuss. It is an economic history classAttached also is the expectation from the professor. Please also cover things from each chapter of the reading. Thanks! screen_shot_2020_05_23_at_16.14.56.png john_weaver_2003_the_great_land_rush_copy.pdf ch5_world_trade.pdf Unformatted Attachment Preview 108892.book Page 11 Tuesday, March 18, 2003 6:25 PM chapter one Concepts: Empires and Perspectives on Land The ensuing chapters deal with upheavals that introduced property rights among British settlement colonies and the United States. There is a practical reason for concentrating on these Neo-Europes. It is humbling to explore the history of several jurisdictions, and there are limits to how much work a researcher can dedicate to a project. There are also reasoned justifications for an emphasis on British colonial and American settings. First, the regions selected include most of the foodexporting Neo-Europes mentioned by Alfred Crosby. They are located mainly in the mid-latitudes, where summer’s extended sunlight hours provide excellent conditions for crop photosynthesis. Second, these places were exposed to a particular cultural understanding of land. An early-modern English elite culture – laden with obsessions about landed property and the power or profits that it could convey – provided ideas about land improvement and the possibilities for increasing income through rents and greater production. Summarizing the character of the business community of seventeenth-century England, Richard Grassby wrote that “the assimilation of all potential rivals by the landed gentry created a united propertied interest which embraced business, agriculture and the professions.”1 Merchants and landed gentlemen interacted in England, and one outcome was the application of ideas of business management to some agricultural estates. A number of ideas about land apportionment and improvement arrived with colonizers in a few locales favoured by climate for the successful introduction of European settlers, domestic animals, and crops. These places include five constellations of settlement colonies: colonial America and its successor, the United States; colonial British North America and its inheritor, Canada; the Cape of Good Hope and its offspring, southern African colonies and the boer republics; the colonies of Australia; and New Zealand. The British preoccupation 108892.book Page 12 Tuesday, March 18, 2003 6:25 PM 12 Scanning the Horizon with land was important for world history. From the appetite for owning land evinced by aristocracy and gentry sprang an urge, found among some people from all classes in British and American jurisdictions, to secure tracts and legal interests. With legal interests came credit and thus leverage for supposed improvements. Third, governments in British colonial and American locales avoided enforcing the placement of people at specific places on frontiers – slaves, convicts, and soldiers excepted. Mobility and a lack of supervision enabled free subjects and citizens to scout for prospects and to squat. Effective freedom of movement was not unique to British and American frontiers, but it was a necessary condition for the great land rush and was constrained in territories seized by the Russian empire. Fourth, a powerful cultural ideal of improvement – a non-legal doctrine that influenced the drafting of property laws – had a British lineage. The creed that land should be improved was not exclusively British; French Enlightenment prophets of measureless progress expressed similar ideas. In Western secular thought by 1800, civilization was generally regarded less as a steady state than as a matter of continuous advance. By application of effort, societies, it seemed, could escape a cycle of decline and recovery and could progress incessantly. The British contribution to a cultural fixation on improvement emerged from schools of domestic rural practice and from fear of decline, not from continental theories. Fifth and most distinctive, as an outcome of democratic aspirations and manhood suffrage, the United States and subsequently British settlement colonies institutionalized access to land ownership by people of modest means. These initiatives were invariably compromised, and large landholders, including favoured individuals and pampered companies, acquired and retained immense estates, sometimes contrary to the spirit, if not the letter, of laws about land allocation. Yet if codified measures to widen access were subverted, they were not erased. In the early nineteenth century, prior to other colonizers, the British and the American authorities endeavoured to distribute a substantial amount of land systematically with good titles to common people. In these jurisdictions, actual distribution of assets to ordinary folk was often undermined in practice, and railways (“railroads” in the United States) and associated land corporations benefited from major grants; however, compared to what happened in many other parts of the world, laws providing access to allotments for smallholders pointed to an effectual democratic insurgence. U.S. railway grants stopped in 1871, and in 1872 “there was not a party platform which did not condemn the whole system and insist that the public domain be held for settlers.”2 There ensued judicial and political fights to recover certain railway lands. 108892.book Page 13 Tuesday, March 18, 2003 6:25 PM Empires and Perspectives on Land 13 When applied in dry regions, concessions to smallholders were environmentally unwise, since they allowed too many people and too much livestock into fragile ecological zones. Major allocations transpired in an age of emergent Anglo–American democracy and European migrations, not in an era of prudential land management informed by science. The eastern and midwestern public domain that the United States first organized for distribution on easy terms in the early nineteenth century included extensive tracts suitable for small farms, and that accidental circumstance strengthened a trust in the viability of small land parcels. That faith coincided with populism in the United States. This alignment of an environmental circumstance and politics was momentous for the rest of the American public domain, and also for Australia, New Zealand, and Canada. The small-farm ideal would burst onto the political scene in Australia and New Zealand, thanks in part to American migrants in the 1850s and 1860s. To secure immigrants, the colony of Upper Canada and later the Dominion of Canada had to pay attention to their neighbour’s land policies. Sixth, and almost as distinctive as allocation to smallholders, landholders on British and American settlement frontiers experienced political stability and security of property during epochs of liberal land allocation. It is true that ineptitude, favouritism, corruption, and haste meant that one of the greatest distributions of resources in history was shot through with wrong-doing. Still, apart from the momentous seizure of land from first peoples – a major exception – British and American governments did not divest people of property without some due process; even the dispossession of most first peoples engaged legal processes, though ones manipulated by colonizers. The importance of legal packaging conjoined with good surveys should not be slighted, because the capitalization of animal husbandry and agriculture required that borrowers and lenders feel secure about the future and the solidity of assets. The legal foundations of property strengthened confidence. When security was presumed, investments could render tangible the doctrine of improvement. Metropolitan financiers and colonial administrators worked in a culture of legality that influenced events during the great land rush. Moreover, that early attention to legality has in recent times enabled indigenous people in a few places to force negotiations to rectify early land grabs. the curious example of argentina Below in this chapter, I analyse the anglophone world’s dominant place in the great land rush, and I compare six empires in order to draw out the place in world history of the British and American frontiers’ 108892.book Page 14 Tuesday, March 18, 2003 6:25 PM 14 Scanning the Horizon distribution of assets. However, to underscore now the role of British and American laws that promised distribution to smallholders, and to explain more cogently the historical importance of stability and predictability in property rights, I say a few words about Argentina, which, of all the Spanish-American republics – perhaps of all NeoEuropes – has an environment and economic history resembling the five constellations of British settlement colonies considered in this book. Argentina provides a good contrast with them, because it was similar in many respects. Like Australia, Cape Colony, New Zealand, and the U.S. west, Argentina, through much of the nineteenth century, experienced a grazers’ sprawl. In the first decades of independence, this outcome was not what the country’s liberal politicians, who framed republican land laws inspired by English classical economics, would have desired. They had hoped to create a class of investing agriculturalists along English lines. The influence of English thought was natural, for Argentina was connected by trade and by a liberal intelligentsia to western Europe, especially England. Pervasive Albion, as John Lynch called it, contributed stock-raising expertise and capital to advance sheep-raising in Argentina, as it did on the other frontiers. As was also the case elsewhere, British capital flooded the country in the mid-nineteenth century with “bubble enterprises; – and of course one day the bubble burst.”3 Land booms and busts were common during the great rush. Additional parallels and ties with other Neo-Europes were evident in the actions of land reformers in the second half of the century. They examined and copied elements of British colonial and American landallocation laws.4 Los leyes de la tierra pública of the late nineteenth century contained little that had not already appeared in the statute books of British colonies or the United States. Public land was sold both before and after survey, with and without improvement conditions, in large and in small parcels, and with and without credit arrangements. Land scrip was granted to soldiers, and land was sold to raise funds for public works. A land act of 1884 even introduced “en cierta forma el homestead americano.”5 This law came late in the history of the great land rush. Ideas for land allocation and national development typically flowed from British commentators and American legislators to Argentina and Brazil, not the other way. Momentous events in Argentina intervened, as we see below, between independence and this late imitation of American practice. Despite connections with the great land rush in the English-speaking world and despite the presence of liberal intellectuals and politicians, colonial Spain’s generous grant practices and the freedom to occupy grazing land remained ideals for a few politicians in the immediate post- 108892.book Page 15 Tuesday, March 18, 2003 6:25 PM Empires and Perspectives on Land 15 independence decades. No Neo-Europe escaped concentrated landholding – not the United States, and definitely not Argentina. Accumulations of freehold land, leaseholds, and grazing rights occurred around the world; however, in Argentina, capricious presidential orders, which were abundant and occasionally extreme, contributed to the formation of huge estates. Major executive interventions damaged the country’s reputation as a secure place for investment. Above all, General Juan Manuel de Rosas reversed Argentina’s course of development. After Argentina became independent, the province of Buenos Aires, to promote investment in cattle-raising, granted land on generous terms for estancias. In 1822, the modernizing politician Bernardino Rivadavia – an admirer of British and French liberalism, of the writings of Jeremy Bentham and Jean Charles Léonard Sismondi – instituted enfiteusis, a form of leasehold that anticipated the land-reform proposal of Henry George. Under enfiteusis, the government attempted to calculate the intrinsic value of plots of land and to levy a tax on that assessed value rather than on improvements.6 Grazers opposed this cumbersome but sophisticated experiment, and in a few years it gave way to generous land grants to cattlemen – a practice wholly at odds with the goals of Rivadavia. At a critical juncture in its history, Argentina’s economic development was bumped onto an unconventional path during Rosas’s years in power (1829–32 and 1835–57). An estanciero, Rosas was not an improving landlord, but a grazer who “stood for size and numbers rather than technology and quality.”7 Favouring stock-raisers with generous terms for land purchases, suspending recruitment of immigrants, and suppressing small squatters, Rosas bound Argentina to the pastoralists, who comprised a political force even in liberal, progressive times. Administrators on other landrich frontiers – notably Australia, Cape Colony, New Zealand, and the United States – laboured at around the same time to rein in grazers in the name of improvement, welcomed immigration, and started to come to terms with small squatters. Rosas did more than invert Argentine priorities and divert Argentina from practices on British and American frontiers. He did more than accelerate land consolidation. Rosas undermined European faith in Argentine land tenure when he expropriated his enemies’ property. He allowed the provinces leeway to distribute land, which several did by reverting to Spanish colonial practices. In the estimation of a liberal historian, the Rosas regime resorted to anachronisms and cronyism because enfiteusis had alienated powerful interests in the state of Buenos Aires.8 Rosas and his fellow estancieros assigned the countryside a social and economic pattern before Argentina received its waves of immigrants. “Before modernization even began, the system of landholding, 108892.book Page 16 Tuesday, March 18, 2003 6:25 PM 16 Scanning the Horizon the size of the estates, and in many cases the personnel, all had been permanently fixed.”9 In the same period, the country – like many others in Latin America – was fragmented for decades by civil strife, which postponed national development until the late nineteenth century, whereas in the United States the survival of the public domain helped the national government assert a presence before and after its relatively brief, if exceedingly bloody, civil war. Jeremy Adelman argues that Argentina was not an exception to the liberal norm but that civil strife and war with neighbours “wreaked havoc in the larger political economy” and Rosas inserted cronyism.10 The government that replaced Rosas’s threw property rights into confusion by nullifying some of his grants and by freezing land distribution until the land question could be studied.11 In common with counterparts in southern Africa, Australia, New Zealand, and the United States, grazers in the province of Buenos Aires expanded remarkably during the early nineteenth century; like stockmen on the other frontiers, these estancieros at first appreciated the benefits of open land, held without property titles. Open access was cheap and permitted expansion as well as scouting for better pastures. However, as Hilda Sabato found when studying the pastoral age in the province, “this situation proved more and more inconvenient for large estancieros, who wished to ensure their rights to a tract of land, the possibilities to expand and improve it, and the elimination of the competition.”12 In other countries, comparable anxieties and ambitions, as we see below in chapters 7 and 8, provoked grazers into cunning acts that subverted reforms – for example, forcing station operators in Australia and ranchers in the United States into compromises with poorer people, including making payouts for their homestead entitlements. Argentine estancieros did not have to combat either a culturally significant adulation of the small farm or a purposeful administration of laws aimed at dissolving large estates. In land-allocation practices, British colonial and American governments were more amenable to populist movements than were regimes in Argentina. Along the River Plate in the nineteenth century, the owners of livestock-raising operations – the latifundia, which resembled Australian stations and American ranches – realized relatively early a security of tenure, something denied initially to Australian or American counterparts, which had to buck smallholder land acts; Argentine reformers who championed U.S.-style land-allocation laws were by comparison ineffectual.13 Estates, at least in the province of Buenos Aires, were broken up in the late nineteenth century, not by reforms but by fragmentation among heirs who sold their bequests rather than reconsolidating them. Rich families transferred their assets 108892.book Page 17 Tuesday, March 18, 2003 6:25 PM Empires and Perspectives on Land 17 from countryside to city.14 Reforms also failed to break up many large holdings in Australia and the United States, but at least a large percentage of the crown land or public domain was never alienated, and, equally important, innumerable settlers with little cash or credit participated in the great land rush and derived earnings from farming or selling out, even though many Australian selectors and North American homesteaders abandoned their entry claims. All the same, who was permitted to participate in the rush near the outset remains significant, because policies that allowed some access denoted both the political sinew of striving people who lacked wealth and grudgingly given sanction to their yearning for land. Land allocation in Argentina was, relative to American and British regions, overwhelmed by presidential orders, which helped form extensive estates. During the half-century after independence, civil strife, wars against indigenous peoples, and a war with Paraguay advanced the militarization of political life, which supported government by executive action and rewarded the army and militias with a series of primios (grants of land scrip).15 Wars and railway schemes forced land sales to cover debt obligations. Public lands were exposed to impulsive interventions, and the wealthy added to or protected their latifundia by acquiring secure tenure cheaply. There were, of course, places on American and British frontiers where landed estates were similarly organized thanks to recklessness, corruption, and environments that could best support grazing; however, in these jurisdictions, laws allowed homesteaders – whether true farmers or small speculators – to obtain benefits from the public domain or crown land. The scope for productive linkages between immigrants’ expectations and initial allocation of land was not as extensive in Argentina as in the United States and Canada, or, after mid-century, in British colonies in Australasia. While there are parallels between land-taking in Argentina and its manifestation in British settlement colonies and the United States, Juan Carlos Rubenstein points out, with dramatic licence, the object of expansion: “En Estados Unidos lo realizó el hombre. En Argentina, la vaca.”16 land, property rights, and improvement: the anglophone dynamic edge Rubenstein’s comment evokes the buoyant nationalism of Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis. However, there are “significant elements of westward expansion that received little or none of Turner’s attention.” Richard Hofstadter’s list (1968) of these omissions included “the careless, wasteful and exploitative methods of American agriculture; … the 108892.book Page 18 Tuesday, March 18, 2003 6:25 PM 18 Scanning the Horizon desecration of natural beauty; … the failure of free lands to produce a society free of landless labourers and tenants … ; the frequent ruthlessness of ... Purchase answer to see full attachment