chapter five
Occupations and the Nature of Rural Development, 1890-1908
The previous chapter examined how the livestock economy of modernising Uruguay made productive use of land, demonstrating the impact of specific kinds of soils and landownership structures on economic strategies. This chapter focuses on people, as population and as labour resources, mapping their distribution across the territory and between economic sectors to quantitatively reassess one dimension of the contribution of workers to Uruguay’s rural development at the height of the country’s ‘modernization’. In so doing, it attempts to answer three interrelated questions: what was the impact of agricultural modernization on rural workers and their livelihoods; how large and how productive was the agricultural workforce; and to what extent did export-oriented agriculture contribute to wider economic development.
Between and the volumes of meat and wool produced per hectare in Uruguay more than doubled.1 The conventional wisdom has long been that the livestock economy achieved this largely without creating more jobs, because of its reliance on increasingly wire-fenced, capitalised, and specialised large estates, which had outsourced some of the more labour-demanding ranching tasks (slaughtering, skinning, droving) to meat factories, tanneries, and railroad companies. As a result, in this account, pastoral agriculture was unable to create opportunities for employment or technological change, and, therefore, could never become the cornerstone for long-term development.2 Meanwhile, crop farmers working smaller holdings are thought to have been generally too poor themselves to employ more workers. And so, across the ‘latifundia/minifundia’ divide, the rural economy expelled workers rather than retain them. Because most people in Uruguay still lived in the countryside, it is widely accepted that this process led to widespread rural poverty which fuelled both political violence, in the uprisings of and , and rural-to-urban migration.3 Scholars have found exceptions to this general pattern, pointing to some labour-intensive niches
1 Moraes, Pradera, .
2 For two classic statements of this argument, from economics and history respectively, see Instituto de Economía, El proceso and Barrán and Nahum, Agricultura, -.
3 The classic account of rural impoverishment (pobrerío rural) in this context is Barrán and Nahum, Barrán and Nahum, Revoluciones, -. See also Aldo E. Solari, Sociología rural nacional (Montevideo, ); José Pedro Barrán
such as sheep shearing.4 But the premise that the rise in agricultural output and productivity during
‘modernization’ destroyed more rural jobs than it created remains nearly universal, despite the fact that no detailed occupational data has been mobilised to prove this point, and no pre- estimates of the employment structure of the economy even exist.
This chapter fills that gap by examining the history of occupational structures in the period. It provides original, detailed, and internationally comparable data on the occupations of informal as well as formal workers in rural and urban Uruguay in and . To do this, a diverse but cohesive set of sources was explored, including population and agricultural censuses as well as individual-level sources (Table .). The emphasis throughout is on relative shares more than absolute numbers, not only because margins of error are smaller for the former, but also because very fast demographic growth in this period means that in absolute terms employment across most sectors must have grown significantly. In the two decades before
, Uruguay received, relative to population, more immigrants than the United States, and was only behind Argentina and Canada in global immigration rates.5 Natural population growth contributed as much as immigration to population increases, as fertility rates remained at pre-demographic transition levels while mortality decreased.6 Changes or continuities in agricultural employment should be then understood as reflecting primarily the livelihoods and choices of new entrants to the labour market, whether immigrants or young Uruguayans.
and Benjamín Nahum, Batlle, los estancieros y el Imperio Británico (Montevideo, ); Millot and Bertino, Historia económica, ; Moraes, Pradera, -. On the idea that wire-fencing caused widespread ‘technological unemployment’, see Barrán and Nahum, Historia Rural I, -.
4 Diego Piñeiro, Mariela Bianco, and María Inés Moraes, Trabajadores de la esquila: pasado y presente de un oficio rural (Montevideo, ); María Inés Moraes, El trabajo de la esquila y los esquiladores: algunos aspectos de su historia social (-) (); Millot and Bertino, Historia económica, -. For a description of sheep shearing crews and their work, see Roberto J. Bouton, La vida rural en el Uruguay (Montevideo, ): -.
5 Sánchez Alonso, ‘The other Europeans’, . On Uruguay’s migration policy, see Carlos Zubillaga, La utopía cosmopolita. Tres perspectivas históricas de la inmigración masiva en Uruguay (Montevideo, ): - and María del Pilar Cagiao Vila, ‘La inmigración gallega en Uruguay (-),’ Anuario Americanista Europeo, ().
6 Adela Pellegrino and Raquel Pollero, ‘Fecundidad y situación conyugal en el Uruguay. Un análisis retrospectivo,’
in Cambios demográficos en América Latina: la experiencia de cinco siglos, ed. Dora Estela Celton, Carmen A. Miró, and Nicolás Sánchez-Albornoz (Córdoba, ).
TABLE 5.1. Sources for reconstructing the occupational structure of Uruguay, 1890-1908
Notes: ‘Adults’ refers to people years old and older. ‘Adults with occupation’ refers to those people who were recorded with gainful employment.
Sources: Dirección General de Estadística: Anuario Estadístico de la República Oriental del Uruguay, Censo General de la República en , Tomo II, Parte II, ; Anuario Estadístico , p. ; Anuario Estadístico , p. ; Junta Económico-Administrativa de Montevideo: Censo Municipal del Departamento y la Ciudad de Montevideo, Montevideo: Establecimiento Tipográfico Oriental, ; Registro General de Estado Civil (Uruguay), Libros de Partidas de Nacimiento.
The chapter is divided into three parts. The first section reconstructs the employment of women and men in , as well as district-level population densities across the country, to paint a picture of the sectoral demands for labour resources towards the end of ‘rural modernization’. The second section studies the pre-census period making extensive use of the birth records from the Registro de Estado Civil, an extremely rich archival trove resulting from the state taking over registration from the Catholic Church and which, to my knowledge, has never been systematically used by historians before. The third section offers new estimates of sectoral productivity and uses them as a vantage point to revisit the debates on the potential of export agriculture to sustain long-term development in Uruguay and beyond. The conclusion takes stock of the results and summarises their challenges to the conventional wisdom.
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