(^318) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
seem designed to keep settiers out. Most of the soil went in gigantic
pieces to placemen and strongmen, often by outright gift (emphyteu
sis), otherwise at bargain prices. Sometimes the grants or sales set con
ditions of setdement and cultivation, but these could not be enforced.
Lacking capital and labor, the owners found it easier to leave the land
idle or turn it over to catde and sheep. Meanwhile the Argentine state
expanded by driving out the Amerindians, and it paid for these cam
paigns by selling the new land in advance. These operations brought
in money, but they meant selling the land in gobs to speculators who
found their quickest return in open-range ranching.
Which came first, the chicken or the egg? Cause and effect went
both ways. From time to time, the government sought to recruit
abroad. It looked for volunteers in Italy especially, a seedbed of mi
grants in search, not of land, but of money—the better to buy a place
back home. One 1880s contract with an Italian firm specified the kind
of person the Argentines wanted: "field workers and artisans if possi
ble, single and chosen among the youngest, most robust, and hard
working people of the countryside."^14 These efforts ran up against so
cial and political reality: the distribution of land and the predominance
of labor-saving activities such as herding; endemic instability; religious
restrictions; local prejudice. Those few areas that needed intensive
labor—the sugar-growing districts, for example—had recourse to in
denture and compulsion, which killed their attractiveness for free im
migrants.
Compare land policy in the North American colonies and the United
States. In the southern colonies, large holdings needed slave labor.
The native Indians were few and unwilling, and free whites would not
work for wages when land there was aplenty and one could be one's
own master. So blacks were brought in from Africa until such imports
were banned as of 1807. After that, the use of slaves could be main
tained only by natural reproduction, which entailed a higher standard
of nourishment and treatment than prevailed in the Caribbean or
South America. Meanwhile Americans increasingly found slavery re
pugnant, and the expansion of the republic westward touched off fights
over the extension of servitude and the nature of the compact that
had made the Union. In the end, as everyone knows, civil war settled
the matter. The slaves went free, and the large estates dissolved into
family-sized units.
In former free states and new territories, the expansion of cultivation
rested on the westward movement of farmers abandoning tired lands
in the East for virgin soil, and of European immigrants seeking better
nora
(Nora)
#1