This book explores the twists and turns in Argentina's modern economic history and the debates that raged there around a problem common to all former colonies: how to achieve a level of economic growth for its population in a world characterized by unequal economic relations between the industrialized nations of the north and the commodity producers of the south. This new perspective examines the history of ideas surrounding industrialization and economic development in Argentina, drawing on a rigorous investigation of multiple sources. It demonstrates Argentina's role as a laboratory for and disseminator of ideas that would eventually become the common property of all the developing world. Influential thinkers such as Raul Prebisch and Aldo Ferrer, leading figures in twentieth century Latin American economic thought, developed important ideas such as unequal international trade relations, the promise and limits of Import Substitution Industrialization, the role of the state in the development of a national capitalism. These were the forerunners of similar concerns in other countries in Latin America and elsewhere in the world. The book will be of interest to historians, economists, sociologists of economic development, and related disciplines concerned with questions of global economic inequality.

In mid-twentieth-century Latin America there was a strong consensus between Left and Right--Communists working under the directives of the Third International, nationalists within the military interested in fostering industrialization, and populists--about the need to break away from the colonial legacies of the past and to escape from the constraints of the international capitalist system. Even though they disagreed about the desired end state, Argentines of all political stripes could agree on the need for economic independence and national sovereignty, which would be brought about through the efforts of a national bourgeoisie.

James Brennan and Marcelo Rougier aim to provide a political history of this national bourgeoisie in this book. Deploying an eclectic methodology combining aspects of the "new institutionalism," the "new economic history," Marxist political economy, and deep research in numerous, rarely consulted archives into what they dub the "new business history," the authors offer the first thorough, empirically based history of the national bourgeoisie's peak association, the Confederacion General Economica (CGE), and of the Argentine bourgeoisie's relationship with the state.

They also investigate the relationship of the bourgeoisie to Peron and the Peronist movement by studying the history of one industrial sector, the metalworking industry, and two regional economies--one primarily industrial, Cordoba, and another mostly agrarian, Chaco--with some attention to a third, Tucuman, a cane-cultivating and sugar-refining region sharing some features of both. While spanning three decades, the book concentrates most on the years of Peronist government, 1946-55 and 1973-76.