Can't Afford It but We'll Buy It: The Foreign Business of Advertising Agricultural Machinery in Argentine Revistas, 1850–1940

My proposed poster session, “Can’t Afford It But We’ll Buy It: The Foreign Business of Advertising Agricultural Machinery in Argentine Revistas, 1850-1940” will be a chapter in my new book project “Imagining Independence.” A poster session at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association is an opportunity to share this work in progress in a less formal setting. I wish to discuss marketing techniques of European and North American machine vendors through illustrated advertisements of agricultural machinery. Such drawings appear in Argentine provincial newspapers and in machine catalogs, and are interesting for their analytical content.  Questions to be answered include: Why did North Americans and Europeans advertise their machinery in Argentina's local and provincial journals? What was so appealing about these advertisements that enticed Argentine farmers to buy the machinery despite having little to no credit to finance purchases? Why were U.S. businesses the most successful in selling machinery to Argentina?

Thus far, I possess illustrated advertisements from provincial newspapers (Entre Ríos, Santa Fe, and Buenos Aires) and catalogs of foreign machinery (Spanish text) from the late nineteenth century. Between March and August 2009, I will return to Argentina to finish research and collect additional illustrations from twentieth-century provincial journals. I argue that the details in the art and text mattered to Argentine farmers, and helped them decide who to buy machinery from. American machine vendors were particularly successful in part because they created aesthetically pleasing illustrations and offered detailed descriptions of the machinery. Most U.S. vendors also created a culture of trust with local farmers that perhaps enticed thrifty Argentine growers to use their savings to buy new agricultural machinery.

Overall my new book project “Imagining Independence” explores Argentina’s adoption of machinery and technological ideas coming from Europe and North America for the purpose of advancing agriculture and manufacturing, and the clashes between these imported modern technologies, economic elites, and the government’s growing nationalist ideologies. It is about a developing nation’s search for technological independence. It builds on several aspects not fully explored for Argentina: the cultural, economic, and political significance of the transfer of technology between Argentina and the Atlantic economies. It complements works on the history of technology that examine society and technology as a seamless web between the technical, political, cultural, and economic. Such views began with Thomas Hughes, Networks of Power (1983) and were further developed in Wiebe Bijker, Thomas Hughes, and Trevor Pinch (editors), The Social Construction of Technological Systems (1987).