Plebeians, Politics and Labor Relations in Revolutionary Argentina (1810-1825)

DI MEGLIO, GABRIEL

Linz

Congreso; ITH-International Conference of Labour and Social History, ?Worlds of Labour Turned Upside Down ? Revolutions and Labour Relations in Global Historical Perspective?; 2017

ITH

After the Napoleonic invasion to Spain in 1808, several revolutions erupted in Hispanic America. They fought to achieve self-government and eventually led to the independence of many new republics in the former Spanish Empire. These revolutions were led by part of the local elites, but in many of them the popular classes ?urban plebeians, slaves, peasants and other rural laborers? also played a key role. One of the main features of the revolutionary process in what then came to be Argentina was precisely the active participation of this so called ?low people?. Many social and racial tensions were politicized after 1810. But how did this affected labor relations? This presentation deals with that question. Labor relations were not openly contested in the revolutionary years, but political disputes caused some transformation on that field. First of all, slaves? pressure for manumission led to prohibition of the traffic and to a freedom of wombs law. The entering of men to the armies, winning their liberty at the end of the service, weakened slavery remarkably. In the following decades many landowners would try to replace it by other forms of coercive labor, with little success. In many provinces the rural population, generally known as the ?gauchos?, fought for egalitarianism (the popular motif was ?no one is above no one?), but also for to maintain the uses of land and the access to resources regularized by custom and not by written contracts. Finally, free trade made many products cheaper for the population, especially in Buenos Aires, but it also triggered the opposition of the artisans to the entrance of foreign manufactures.