Financing the agrarian expansion. The stores as a source of credit, Argentina (1900-1930)

LLUCH, ANDREA

Buenos Aires

Congreso; XIII Economic History Congress, Session 71; 2002

International Economic History Association, UDESA, ANH (versión electrónica)

The agrarian expansion was the motor of the economic growth of Argentina at the end of the nineteenth century, and it was part of a wider economic process that included other Latin Americans rural areas which developed forms of commercial agriculture. In this process, like in other contexts, the rural stores houses, called in Argentina “almacenes de ramos generales", played an important role, channelling part of the production toward the port and providing inputs, machinery, capital but also clothes and dry canned food to rural producers. For it, the storekeeper ´s greatest contribution to the financing problem was providing farmers with sufficient dry goods, groceries and tools for maintenance until the major yearly crops were harvested. In these sense, the study about the role of the rural merchant in the financing not only the capital inputs but also the everyday necessities of rural communities and small cities of Argentina in the first decades of the XX century is the main topic of this paper.