A Continent of Immigrants: Postcolonial Shifts in the Western Hemisphere
2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1215/00182168-86-1-1
ISSN1527-1900
Autores Tópico(s)Cuban History and Society
ResumoLatin Americans usually conceive the Western Hemisphere as a single continent. Geographically, the notion is no more, or less, arbitrary than Anglo-Americans’ mapping of two continents separated by the Panamanian isthmus. But the Latin American viewpoint highlights the most basic and distinctive historical commonality of the Americas: they are a “New World,” a continent populated by arrivals from all the other continents. Its “indigenous” population came from Asia long after the rest of the globe had been settled by hominids, including Homo sapiens. About 15,000 years later, others began to arrive from the opposite direction. Close to three million came from Europe between the beginning of the colonial enterprise in the Americas in 1492 and its near end in 1820. Three times as many were brought against their will from Africa during the same period.1Although humans have been moving across continents ever since our direct ancestors came out of Africa about 100,000 years ago, the transatlantic wave that came next was historically unprecedented in its dimension. This movement began modestly after the end of the Napoleonic/Latin American wars of independence, gathered steam after midcentury, reached massive proportions after the 1870s, and lasted — with a pause during World War I — until the Great Depression. In the process, more than 51 million Europeans (and about 2 million Asians) arrived in the New World.2 Nothing remotely resembling this massive movement had ever happened before anywhere on the planet. By the outbreak of World War I, more people had come to the New World during the preceding decade than had done so, from both Europe and Africa, during the entire colonial period. Indeed, by then more Europeans had disembarked in the port of Buenos Aires alone during the previous three years (1.1 million) than had arrived in all of Spanish America during more than three centuries of colonial rule. Nothing like it would happen again until a second wave of global migrations began in the last decades of the twentieth century, when the intensity of the pre – World War I years was matched in absolute numbers, but not proportionately to the world’s population.Historians on both sides of the “pond” (and the contributors to this issue are no exception) have normally dealt with this vast transnational phenomenon from a national perspective. At one point, this may have reflected visions of national (particularly North American) exceptionalism. These notions have not disappeared, although they are increasingly more likely to originate in scholarly parochialism than in nationalist visions. But today, the principal reason for the persistence of national perspectives is more mundane, having to do more with academic institutional inertia than with ideological blinders. Despite the postmodern fascination with the transnational, we continue to be trained not as historians of social processes (in this case migration) but as historians of countries, or at best “areas” (e.g., Latin America). This disciplinary particularity (not shared by the social sciences or cultural studies) has its virtues. It makes historians particularly sensitive to local specificities. We would not presume to study, say, the political economy of two dozen countries where we have never been and whose languages, cultures, and histories we are not familiar with (a common practice in other disciplines).The approach, however, has many drawbacks. It focuses exclusively on the receiving country as if immigrants were tabula rasae whose history began only after they got off the boats or crossed a border. This leads to a form of hyper-environmentalism that attempts to explain everything in reference to the host environment, while disregarding the premigratory cultural background and the modes of migration, both of which greatly affected the adaptation of arrivals to their new surroundings. The host-nation-centered approach also treats migration as a one-way flow, when in reality it represents a series of movements that included permanent and temporary settlement, return, back-and-forth traveling between sending and receiving societies, and relocation from one destination to another outside the place of origin.The resurgence of interest in political and intellectual history in the last two decades has tended to reinforce the myopia of the nation-centric approach. Immigration to Latin America, in particular, is routinely attributed to the racism of the region’s elites and the national policies they implemented. During the nineteenth century, and in particular during the peak of liberal activism after the mid-1800s, formulating schemes to import Europeans did become a regular endeavor among ruling classes from Mexico to Chile. But elite desiderata had actually little to do with the inflow of people. Porfirian científicos concocted all sorts of plans — from giving free passages to granting free land — to recruit Europeans as an antidote to “native indolence.” In contrast, their counterparts north of the Rio Grande tended to disdain the new arrivals and favor the native born. Yet more Europeans arrived in the United States in a busy week than arrived in Mexico during the entire 35-year-long Porfiriato. The científicos’ contempt for the indigenous masses and their efforts to attract Europeans were echoed by politicians from Guatemala to Bolivia. But all of these countries together received fewer immigrants in a century of national history than a single Argentine province in a month. And most of the newcomers to the latter country arrived when its political class had long ceased to intone the Alberdian dictum “to govern is to populate” and other old chants about the civilizing force of immigration and had instead turned rather xenophobic. The “whitening” and “civilizing” rhetoric of Latin American leaders obviously has more to do with the intellectual history of the region’s elites — not a particularly understudied topic — than with the demographic and sociocultural history of its peoples. Political rhetoric, like bananas, is sometimes just that, and migration clearly obeyed mightier laws than those produced in national legislatures.This introductory article aims to place the three case studies in the present issue in the broader context of these “mightier laws.” Mass migration resulted from, and formed part of, vast transformations that remained mostly Atlantic-based during the nineteenth century and later became global. Indeed, these transformations produced (to borrow the title of Ken Pomeranz’s recent book) the “great divergence” in socioeconomic development between the Atlantic world and the rest of the globe.3 They also produced an equally great divergence, or shift, within the Western Hemisphere.The most primary of these transformations had to do with human reproduction: the transition from a demographic system of high birth and death rates to one of low fertility and mortality in Europe during the long nineteenth century. This transition produced — as mortality fell faster than fertility — the first sustained population explosion in human history. The continent’s population tripled, from 140 million in 1750 to 430 million in 1900, and its share of the world’s inhabitants rose from 17 to 25 percent. This was not just a continuation of previous trends whose genealogy can be traced back in time.4 It was an unprecedented phenomenon in the history, and apparently prehistory, of our species. Before the eighteenth century, growth had been slow (around 0.2 percent per year) and intermittent (with growth spurts rarely lasting more than two decades). The aptly named Vital Revolution involved not only high growth rates (more than 1 percent per year in Europe during the nineteenth century) but also, for the first time in human history, continuous, unbroken expansion virtually unchecked by decimating plagues or — as long as the Pax Britanica endured — devastating wars. This “revolution” directly fed the massive transatlantic exodus. It also facilitated that exodus indirectly by creating a vast market for New World temperate foodstuffs that had not existed in the colonial period. Migration and trade became intimately tied. Europe exported people mostly to the regions from which it imported grain and, later, meat. Indeed, over 90 percent of the 56 million Europeans who left their native continent during this period headed for those wheat- and beef-exporting regions.The massive European flow that, after the mid-1800s, replaced the African slave trade as the dominant type of transatlantic crossing formed part and parcel of a wider process that included a series of other revolutions.5 The industrial one fueled the exodus in a variety of ways. During its early stages, it displaced more workers than it could employ. It promoted internal mobility and urbanization, which often served as a stepping-stone to overseas movement. Urbanization, in turn, further increased the demand for American staples, as fewer people grew their own food. Industrialization made possible the general international division of labor that underlay the commercial integration of the Atlantic world. It created direct demands for a variety of American raw materials: hides for machine belts and tallow for soap and lubricants from the huge feral cattle herds of the River Plate early in the century; cotton from the U.S. South; wool from Argentina (which had the largest sheep flock in the world by the 1880s) after the industrialization of woolen production in the mid-1800s; natural rubber from the Amazon after Charles Goodyear developed vulcanization around the same time; timber from Canada; copper from Chile, northern Mexico, and the U.S. West; flax for textiles, oil paints, and printer’s ink from the pampas and the prairies. The increasing variety of articles churned out by industry generated a different set of demands and desires, particularly among the young who would form the principal font of transatlantic migrants. Contemporary popular theater in Europe abounds with characters who blame the exodus on this consumer culture — on the younger generation’s acquisitiveness and their cravings for factory-made shoes and garments instead of homespun espadrilles and blouses, for watches, guns, phonographs, bicycles, and other gadgets of the industrial age.Emigration “fever” (a metaphor that surfaced in the nineteenth century across Europe from Russia to Scotland) spread mostly through primary transnational social networks, but it could not have diffused so far and so deep without technological and organizational transformations in communication. The appearance of the telegraph (1844), the photograph (1840s), machine-made wood-pulp paper (1850s), modern mail systems and postage stamps (1850s), typewriters (1860s), the Universal Postal Union that unified international postal regulations (1875), the telephone (1876), photoengraving (1880s), the linotype — considered the most important advance in printing since the invention of moveable type four hundred years earlier (1886)—and the radio (1895) spawned a veritable revolution in mass communication that made the mass movement of people possible then and not before. As the Italian parliamentarian Enrico Ferri put it during a trip to Argentina, “the most powerful immigration agent” was not the army of recruiters that governments and companies sent, but “the postage stamp.” Family letters and photographs carried the information and the images of material success that fired the fever “across the pond.”The mail system and the telegraph facilitated the circulation of another essential connective element in mass migration: money. Immigrant remittances flowed eastward and paid for the passages of new streams of people moving westward. European financiers sent much of the surplus capital generated by the industrial revolution to the countries where the remittances were coming from. These investments and loans stimulated economic growth in the receiving countries, which in turn stimulated more emigration to them and more remittances from them. It is no coincidence that the four most important receivers of European immigrants in the nineteenth century (the United States, Argentina, Canada, and Brazil) also became the four most important recipients of British investment and the four fastest growing economies in the Western Hemisphere.Mass transoceanic migration required, however, inexpensive means to move not only information, photographs, and dreams but also people. The special demands of industrial trade provided the impetus for technological innovation. As long as specie and spices remained the main articles of exchange, galleons, the sextant, and the marine chronometer sufficed. As heavy and bulky items with a low ratio of value to mass or weight (such as coal, iron, machinery, timber, cotton, or wheat) became the main commodities of trade, advancements in the means of transporting them became a necessity. The technological innovations that the industrial revolution unleashed made these improvements possible. From the mid-1800s on, steamships increasingly replaced sailing vessels, the screw propeller supplanted the cumbersome paddle wheel, and iron (and later steel) hulls superseded wooden ones. Meanwhile the sequential introduction of the double-expansion, triple-expansion, steam turbine, and diesel marine engines cut both fuel consumption and transit times. Refrigerated ships made possible the export of South and North American beef and mutton to Europe, which previously had been limited to standing cattle. Trains extended the pool of prospective emigrants from a few port areas into the European hinterland. Trains then dispersed them across the American continents. In both cases, railroads pushed the boundaries of the Atlantic world inland, making places like Chicago, Toronto, Warsaw, and Mendoza (Argentina) part of this world. Trains allowed the riverless Argentine pampas to become the second major exporter of cereals in the world, with most of that grain shipped across the Atlantic along the same routes, and often in the same ships, that brought the millions who would farm it. The nineteenth-century innovations in marine and land transportation were thus a sine qua non of both massive transatlantic trade and massive transatlantic migration, movements that were intimately connected.The connections between liberalism and migration were equally multifaceted. Although protective tariffs survived and at times even increased in various countries during the nineteenth century, mercantilist restraints tended to diminish overall — the abolition of the British Corn Laws in 1846 being a signpost in the process. The impressive expansion of transatlantic commerce after the 1860s would not have been possible without a significant level of political commitment to free trade. Neither would have the massive human exodus been possible without a similar level of political commitment to freedom of movement. On the western shores of the Atlantic, liberalism provided the ideological fuel for the independence movements that ended the entrance restrictions put in place by colonial gatekeepers. On the other side, liberalism lifted the exit restrictions in one European country after another, in what Aristide Zolberg has called “the Exit Revolution.”6By strengthening property rights, lifting restrictions, and promoting competition, liberalism stimulated the privatization of commons and the commercialization of agriculture in the Old World. This, in turn, encouraged transatlantic ties in various ways. It created a demand for New World fertilizers such as Chilean nitrates. It encouraged migration as a means of earning cash to purchase private land plots in the Old Country. It created, in general, greater opportunities and greater insecurity in the European countryside — elements that normally lead, and led in this case, to increased population movement across the land and across the ocean.These interrelated processes of demographic expansion, transatlantic crossings, technological innovations, and economic transformations dramatically raised the relative importance of the North Atlantic in the world. Demographically, Europe’s and the Americas’ proportion of the globe’s population increased from 24 to 35 percent during the nineteenth century, while Asia’s and Africa’s proportions declined from 65 to 57 percent and from 11 to 8 percent, respectively. When the European expansion into the Americas began in 1500, only one of the world’s ten largest cities (Paris, number nine) was in the Atlantic world. In 1800, seven of the top ten were still in Asia. By 1900, nine of the largest ten were in the North Atlantic, and Buenos Aires would soon join that group. The economic shift was equally drastic. In 1800, Britain, France, and the United States together accounted for less than one-tenth of the world’s manufacturing, while China alone produced one-third. By 1900, the share of the three North Atlantic countries had increased to almost one-half of the world’s output, while China’s had decreased to a mere 6 percent. As Bin Wong, Ken Pomeranz, Richard Von Glahn, and other historians of the “California School” have argued, the “Great Divergence” in economic development between the North Atlantic and the other advanced regions of the world (such as the Yangtze Valley in China and Gujarat in India) emerged in the nineteenth century.7Mass European migration, and the accompanying transition from mercantile capitalism and colonial status to industrial capitalism and republican semi-dependency, also shifted the social, economic, and political centers of the Western Hemisphere. Before 1800, the colonial success stories had been based on a combination of indigenous labor and precious metals, or African slavery and tropical cash crops. The silver of Zacatecas and Potosí had turned Mexico and Peru into the shining stars in the firmament of a Spanish Empire that spread from the Philippines to the Netherlands — the first empire over which the sun truly never set. The Spanish American viceroyalties had become a synonym of wealth in European languages, as when some characters in Mozart’s 1790 opera Cosi fan tutte exclaim “Ah, questo medico vale un Perú [Ah, this physician is worth a Peru]!” Sugar and slavery had turned Saint Domingue into one of the richest colonies in the world in the eighteenth century, worth many times more to the French than the great expanses of Quebec or Louisiana. Cuba’s per capita GDP had been 167 percent that of the U.S. in 1700 and still 112 percent in 1800.8Barbados was more profitable for the British than all the 13 mainland colonies put together; and within the latter, the South was richer than the North.The nineteenth century drastically changed this situation. Prosperous Saint Domingue fractured its transatlantic connections as it became poor and isolated — although also less exploited — Haiti. Postindependence Mexico sank into political chaos and economic decline, from which it recuperated only toward the end of the century. So did postindependence Peru, a country that was more urban in the eighteenth century than it would be in the nineteenth. The new economically booming and socially developing foci surfaced precisely in what had been the most marginal and least successful corners of the European empires: temperate North and South America. The economic gap between Mexico and the United States is illustrative. For most of the colonial period, the former was actually richer than the latter. By 1800, U.S. per capita GDP already doubled Mexico’s. But the big chasm developed in the ensuing decades. By 1870, the United States had become seven times richer than its southern neighbor, a ratio that remains to this day.Of the old colonial centers, only Cuba managed to retain, and even enhance, its prominent position in the Atlantic world during the nineteenth century. Indeed, although the island was one of the oldest colonies in the Americas and had been at the center of imperial trade since the beginning because of its strategic location, it developed a plantation complex quite late. Before the middle of the eighteenth century, it had been an entrepôt between the silver of New Spain and the metropole, with a rural hinterland settled mainly by Spanish farmers and ranchers. The growth of sugar production and exports, particularly after the collapse of the sugar economy in Haiti during that country’s revolution (1791 – 1804), shaped a peculiar form of capitalism during the nineteenth century that combined the labor relations that had come to represent the polar opposites of backwardness and modernity in the political imaginary of the age: African slavery and European wage labor, with an intermediate form to boot, Chinese coolie labor.9 The slave trade lasted longer in the island (until the mid-1860s) than anywhere else in the Americas.10 Abolition occurred later (1886) than in any other country except Brazil (1888). But after midcentury, Cuba also became the sixth-largest receiver of European immigrants in the world and the largest employer of Cantonese coolies. Social relations of production seemed to combine those of the seventeenth-century Dutch East Indies (the originators of the Chinese coolie trade), eighteenth-century Saint Domingue, and nineteenth- century Uruguay.This mixture of “archaic” and “modern” labor arrangements within a dynamic economy was not limited to Cuba in the nineteenth century. Louisiana and the most economically vigorous regions of the U.S. South fit the model before the American Civil War. Cuban hybrid capitalism, however, is remarkable for the vitality of its quasimodernity and the prominent place it gave the island within the Atlantic world. At the start of the nineteenth century, Cuba was already the most urban region in that world, surpassing the Netherlands and England, and three times as urban as the colony’s Iberian metropole.11 By the end of the century, it was still the sixth most urban country in the planet.12 The early introduction of the steam engine in 1794 and its wide use in sugar mills propelled the island into the forefront of the industrial revolution.13 The technological innovations of the Atlantic world’s nineteenth-century modernization reached the island amazingly early. Macadamized roads appeared in 1818, only two years after John McAdam himself had first built them in Bristol and a dozen years before they were built in the United States. A year later, the first steamboat service in Latin America connected Havana and Matanzas, only a dozen years after the inaugural voyage of Fulton’s Clermont between New York and Albany. The railway appeared in 1837, only a dozen years after its English debut, seven after its arrival in the United States, and a dozen before it would reach the imperial motherland. It was the first railway in Latin America and the seventh in the world. Telephone service came to Havana in 1881, just five years after Alexander Graham Bell had patented it, and the gadget itself may have been invented there three decades before by an Italian immigrant who would later sue Bell over the patent.14 Other goods of nineteenth-century modernity, from electric lighting and trams to medical treatises and baseball, reached the island equally early.Economic growth in temperate South America took off somewhat later than in temperate North America and Cuba — after the middle of the century. But it was as dramatic. The River Plate area occupied by eastern Argentina, Uruguay, and southern Brazil had formed, for much of the colonial period, a backwater of the Iberian empires. By 1900, it had become the most developed region of Latin America. In 1800, Europeans were still using “worth a Peru” or “rich as Potosí” to imply great wealth. By 1900, these set phrases survived only in old books and had been replaced orally with “rich as an Argentine.” Economic statistics support the expression. By the early 1900s, Argentina’s per capita income equaled that of Germany and the Netherlands, and it surpassed not only that of southern European countries like Spain and Italy but also that of northern countries like Sweden and Switzerland. The South American nation had become by then the eighth-richest country in the world.This leap rested precisely on the country’s deep integration into the Atlantic economy: on the inflow of European capital, technology, manufactured goods, and labor; and the outflow of the agro-pastoral bounty of the pampas. The country became the second most important receiver of European immigrants in the world after the United States. As late as 1870, Argentina imported most of its cereals. By 1914, it had become the second-largest exporter of grains in the world, after the United States. Its foreign trade surpassed Canada’s. It imported more goods per capita than any other country in the world, with the exception of entrepôts such as Belgium and the Netherlands.Such integration would not have been possible in 1800, and a list of the obstacles can highlight, by contrast, the great transformations of the Atlantic world in the following century. In 1800, Europe had not yet accumulated enough surplus capital or surplus labor to usher in an age of global financial capitalism and mass migrations. That continent’s mostly peasant, and still relatively small, population could not have supplied the farm laborers that the thinly populated temperate plains of the New World required for market production, nor could it provide a significant market for the potential products of the American flat-lands. Even if they could have, mercantilist restrictions on the flow of people and goods on both sides of the Atlantic would have prevented it. And even if such political restrictions had not existed, technological ones would have stood in the way. Ox carts and sailing vessels could not have taken millions of people and millions of tons of cereals, beef, and mutton from the hinterland to the port and then across the Atlantic. Without refrigerated ships, meat could have only been transported “on the hoof” or salted — the jerked beef that had been sent to plantation societies where slaves had little gastronomic choice but had failed to sell in Europe, even among the urban poor. The feral bovine stock of the grasslands provided lean and hard meat, while their ovine neighbors offered short and rough fleece, both with limited external demand. They roamed free through the fenceless plains, making crop farming impossible. And much of the grasslands were still in the hands of seminomadic indigenous people who had no need or desire to exchange their ways for the regimentation of market agriculture.As the nineteenth century progressed, however, these obstacles were steadily surmounted. The introduction of the repeating rifle, the telegraph, and organized national armies after the middle of the century made possible the conquest of the last “Indian frontiers” in the Western Hemisphere (the southern reaches of Argentina and Chile and the West in the United States). Railroads facilitated this expansion, while wire fences facilitated the demarcation of property rights, selective breeding of animals, and the spread of commercial livestock and crop production. The dramatic growth of the European population, its increasing urbanization, the emergence of consumer societies, industrialization, steamers, and the lifting of mercantilist restrictions on trade and migration overcame, as we noted before, many of the other obstacles to postcolonial Atlantic integration.The socioeconomic shift produced by European migration in the Western Hemisphere in general during the nineteenth century can be detected also within specific countries. Within the United States, the South, which until the 1830s, had been the richest region in the country, ended up as the poorest, left behind by the immigrant-fueled industrialization and population growth of the Northeast and Midwest. In Argentina, the once affluent Andean region linked to the colonial silver economy of Upper Peru stagnated, while the Atlantic-oriented littoral became one of the ten richest regions in the world by 1900. In Brazil, the economic center moved from the old sugar-rich Northeast, to the diamonds and gold region of Minas Gerais in the eighteenth century, to the temperate South in the nineteenth.These regional shifts and differences complicated racial inequality within the three countries. Most of the population of color (blacks in the United States and Brazil, and mestizos in Argentina) resided in the once-affluent colonial regions of plantations and mining. Their penury there had been caused not by economic scarcity but by politically sustained maldistribution. Chattel slavery and the semibondage labor arrangements of Andean Argentina had been, after all, legal practices instituted and upheld by the force of government. By itself, the abolition of slavery and coerced labor in the nineteenth century might not have narrowed racial inequalities in a significant way, even if the old colonial regions had retained their economic prosperity. A free market — even if it were truly free — might not have erased inequalities that had been originally produced and maintained not by market relations but by political power. Legal equality and the more open and competitive postabolition economic system might not have equalized the “playing field,” when the starting points had previously been set so far apart by law and force. In the absence of any political rearrangement of the starting line, old inequalities were indeed preserved and reproduced by accumulated privilege, accumulated disadvantage, and unofficial discrimination. But the economic stagnation or decline of the old colonial regions worsened the situation by fusing problems of distribution and scarcity. In the colonial period, one could have characterized the nonwhite population in the three countries as poor peopl
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