Tariffs, Empire, and Conflict: Trade Policy in Argentina (1895–1950)

This thesis reconstructs the long-run evolution of Argentina's tariffs using detailed product-level data, estimates the impact of discriminatory trade policies on bilateral trade flows, analyzes parliamentary debates on tariff reforms using text analysis methods, and examines the relationship between trade exposure, immigration, and labour conflicts in Buenos Aires. By combining these different approaches—quantitative reconstruction, impact estimation, political discourse analysis, and micro-level labour market analysis—the thesis provides a comprehensive understanding of how trade policy evolved and how it shaped, and was shaped by, political and social conflicts during Argentina's transition from export-led growth to import substitution.

The thesis demonstrates that Argentina's economic trajectory cannot be understood through simple narratives of policy shifts. Contrary to conventional wisdom, tariff protection was remarkably high in the late 19th century—substantially higher than previous studies suggested—but this early protection primarily served fiscal and political purposes rather than industrial development. High tariffs protected primary industries like sugar, wine, tobacco, and leather to maintain political stability between interior provinces and littoral agricultural elites while generating substantial state revenues. The powerful Pampean agricultural export elites tolerated this protection because it preserved the agro-export economy's smooth functioning: agricultural inputs remained lightly taxed, fiscal revenues supported state operations, and regional political support was maintained.

The interwar period marked a qualitative rather than quantitative shift in protection. Protection spread to potential infant industries, sectoral inequality decreased, and commercial policy became more active in shaping tariff levels. This transformation reflected changing political power distributions driven by electoral expansion, mass migration, and the rise of an urban working class. Argentina's 1930s discriminatory trade policies, particularly the Roca-Runciman Treaty with Britain, remarkably reoriented trade flows while paradoxically combining British dominance with industrial expansion, intensifying nationalist sentiments.

The three central forces of Argentina's First Globalization—trade, migration, and British capital—remained fundamental to the country's political economy long after World War I. Structural legacies from Independence, including fiscal dependence on customs revenues and regional inequalities, continued dominating trade policy into the 1930s. Migration's legacy proved particularly consequential: European immigrants who brought anarchist, socialist, and syndicalist ideas fundamentally altered Buenos Aires' labour markets. By the interwar period, disenfranchised immigrant workers—particularly Southern Europeans who lacked electoral rights—transformed strikes into their primary political tool, with trade disruptions amplifying labour conflicts that remained peripheral to formal political debates where fiscal concerns and regional interests dominated.

Argentina's interwar trajectory reveals how First Globalization's forces continued shaping political and social struggles even as the international order fragmented, creating contradictions between British-influenced protectionism, persistent export dependence, and immigrant-led mobilizations that would define the country's contested path toward import substitution after World War II.