Argentina: Informal Empire

The empire that left, and the one that never had to arrive

Every empire needs a single country that proves the rule without ever being formally ruled, and Argentina is Britain’s. No governor was ever posted to Buenos Aires. No regiment permanently garrisoned the pampas. And yet for the better part of a century, the decisions that mattered most to Argentina’s economy — what got built, what got exported, who got paid for both — were made in London, by people who never had to answer to a single Argentine voter. This piece is about that arrangement: how it was built, who benefited from it, what broke it, and what came after.

It’s also, unavoidably, about two empires wearing the same country as their case study. Spain administered Argentina formally for two and a half centuries before Britain ever set foot there informally. The bureaucratic machinery Spain built — distant, slow, indifferent to the people running it as much as the people run by it — didn’t disappear when formal rule ended in the 1810s. It left behind exactly the kind of local elite, and exactly the kind of governing vacuum, that a second empire could occupy without ever needing a flag. Argentina is the clean version of that handoff — clean enough that both empires can be read from a single country’s history, and clean enough that the novelist Antonio Di Benedetto noticed the first one from the inside a century and a half before the filmmaker Lucrecia Martel noticed the second.

What neither empire left behind, when it finally withdrew, was a settled answer to who Argentina actually belonged to. Formal Spanish rule ended in the 1810s. British economic dominance frayed through the 1930s and was formally bought out by the 1940s. Both exits produced the same aftershock rather than genuine closure: a fight over whose consent the country was now supposed to run on, fought out through coups, fraud, populism, and default for the better part of two centuries since. The land cleared to make the wealth possible, and the people written out of the story of who made it, don’t stay buried just because the empire that benefited from the clearing has moved on. They resurface as exactly the instability historians still argue about today.

Money arrived as capital rather than conquest; the land and the people underneath it arrived by force. British investment built the railways and financed the ports. The territory that capital needed cleared, and the labour it needed to work the land once cleared, are where the story stops being tidy — displacement dressed as national destiny on one side, millions of European immigrants recruited to do the work on the other, an Argentine landowning elite making its own choices throughout rather than simply having choices made for it.

Selling the world raw material, it turns out, is rarely as good a deal for the seller as it looks from the boom years. Argentina’s wealth, at its 1920s peak, rested on beef and wheat sold into a British-run system built to reward the buyer’s stability far more reliably than the seller’s. That’s a pattern we will explore again in other countries and with other commodities. What follows is how it actually played out here.

And because both empires left a paper trail and a work of art, we don’t have to take any of this on faith. Antonio Di Benedetto wrote the paper trail of the first empire into a novel in 1956, from inside the head of a man it had already forgotten. Lucrecia Martel filmed it, and then went looking for the second empire’s residue in her own country’s present tense. What follows uses both of them, alongside the ledgers, the treaties, and the coups, because the numbers alone were never going to be the whole story.

I. Spain, and the man who waited

Antonio Di Benedetto, an Argentine writer who lived from 1922 to 1986, published his novel Zama in 1956. It tells the story of Diego de Zama, a fictional Creole official of the Spanish crown, waiting in a remote colonial outpost for a promotion that will never come. Di Benedetto himself lived through Argentina’s own later authoritarian turn — arrested without explanation under the Videla dictatorship in 1976, held for eighteen months, and brought before a firing squad more than once in staged mock executions before his eventual release and exile to Spain — but the novel that made his reputation was written two decades before that, and set two centuries before that again.

Zama is posted to Asunción, an outpost on the Paraguay river, in 1790. He is close enough to Spanish power to administer it and too far from its source to hold real rank within it — a distinction the empire enforces with total consistency. Chief administrator posts go to men born on the other side of the Atlantic. Zama, born in the Americas of unmixed Spanish blood, can only ever be the man who does the work.

The empire that employs him has already stopped watching. Letters take months. Requests for transfer vanish into a bureaucracy with no clear terminus. Zama spends nine years of the novel waiting — for pay, for reassignment, for reunion with a wife and children posted elsewhere — and the waiting is not an obstacle to the plot, it is the plot. This is what administered empire looks like from underneath: not conquest, not extraction visibly in motion, but a machinery so distended by distance that its own agents can no longer locate its centre.

The territory itself is named for a metal nobody ever found there. Early Spanish explorers, working from indigenous reports of silver somewhere upriver, named the estuary the Río de la Plata — the River of Silver — and the territory beyond it Argentina, from argentum, Latin for silver. There was no silver in it. The silver Spain actually found, in quantities that reshaped the world economy, was next door at Potosí in Bolivia — the same mountain of bullion that flooded Spain with money, sparked a continent-wide price revolution, and left the greatest extractor of the age industrialising slower than almost anyone it was extracting from. Argentina got the name and the disappointment. Spain got the silver, and the decay that follows an empire that extracts faster than it builds.

That machinery took two centuries to calcify into the thing Zama serves. What began as crown-licensed conquest — individual men contracted to seize territory for a royal cut — hardened over generations into viceroyalties, audiencias, a professional colonial bureaucracy answering to structure rather than to any person. By 1776, when Spain carved the Viceroyalty of the Río de la Plata out of an older, unworkable arrangement, the empire was reorganising itself for the same reason firms restructure: because the original design could no longer govern what it had accumulated. Zama’s Asunción is a remote piece of that late fix.

Decay, in this telling, has no drama to it. Zama’s undoing comes through gambling, ill-judged affairs, small cruelties toward men below him and small humiliations from men above — the ordinary rot of a man with just enough authority to damage others and none at all to change his own position. There is no rebellion in Zama, no reckoning. There is a man perfectly loyal to a system that has already forgotten to reward loyalty.

This is the empire that leaves when formal rule ends — and the vacuum it leaves behind. By the time Spanish American independence arrives in the 1810s, the machinery Zama served has produced generations of administrators exactly like him: locally rooted, functionally powerless, loyal to an authority whose attention has permanently moved elsewhere. When formal Spanish rule collapses, it is not sovereignty that rushes into the space it leaves. It is whoever arrives next with capital, and Argentina’s next extractor is already crossing the Atlantic.

Lucrecia Martel found this story on a boat and never let go of its atmosphere. She read Di Benedetto’s novel drifting down the Paraná after an earlier project collapsed, and built her 2017 film from the inside of Zama’s own disorientated head rather than from outside his period costume: exact colonial detail, zero exposition, hierarchy left for the viewer to feel rather than have explained. Her trademark is sound, not spectacle — insects, water, voices bleeding in from off-screen, engineered at the script stage before a camera rolled. The novel, once barely read outside Argentina, got called a neglected masterpiece on its English translation. The film played Cannes and was read by critics as an anti-imperialist reckoning staged from inside the coloniser’s skull. Book and film, forty years apart, land the same blow twice.

II. Britain, and the empire with no flag

Britain never planted a flag in Argentina, and never needed to. By the early twentieth century, British capital had built the country’s railways, controlled its meat trade, financed its ports, and held a substantial share of its government debt — all without a governor, a garrison, or a single acre formally annexed. This is what historians call informal empire: dominance secured through infrastructure and finance rather than conquest, sovereignty left technically intact while the economic decisions that matter are made somewhere else.

The mechanism was concrete, not metaphorical. British firms built and owned most of Argentina’s rail network, radiating out from Buenos Aires to move cattle and grain toward the docks rather than to knit the country together — infrastructure designed for extraction, not integration. British-owned refrigerated shipping and meatpacking plants controlled the beef trade from pasture to London table. British bondholders held Argentine sovereign debt, giving London leverage over a government it never had to govern. The country was, in the phrase that stuck, “Britain’s unofficial dominion” — closer economically to Australia or Canada than to any fully independent state, without ever appearing on a map in imperial pink.

The land this ran on had to be cleared first, and the clearing had a name and a general. Between 1878 and 1885, the Argentine state waged the Conquest of the Desert — a military campaign into the pampas and Patagonia that killed over a thousand Mapuche, displaced more than fifteen thousand, and enslaved a portion of those who survived. The campaign’s commander, Julio Roca, rode the victory straight into the presidency in 1880. The land his army emptied is the same land the export boom ran on.

A second erasure ran alongside the first, quieter but just as deliberate. Nineteenth-century Argentina had a substantial Afro-Argentine population — by some estimates close to half the population in some provinces in the late eighteenth century. Policy and public discourse across the following century actively privileged European immigration and wrote Afro-descendants out of the national story, producing the enduring self-image of Argentina as a white European nation “descended from the boats.” Even tango, the country’s best-known cultural export, had its African roots quietly filed off in the retelling. Two populations disappear from the record in the same decades the boom is being built, and both disappearances are policy, not accident.

Argentina, for its part, chose this arrangement as much as it suffered it. The landowning elite that ran the country from the 1880s to the 1920s got rich supplying British markets and had every reason to keep the relationship exactly as it was — cheap British capital, guaranteed British demand, and a domestic political order that let a small class of exporters set national policy. Landowners themselves pushed for open immigration because a larger labour pool suited them, and pulled back only once inequality and unrest made continued growth politically dangerous. Informal empire, in Argentina’s case, ran on willing local partners as much as on foreign pressure — no occupying army to blame, just a ruling class that found dependency profitable, and a labour force of some seven million European immigrants who arrived between 1870 and 1930 to do the actual work the boom required.

Argentina’s own founding statesmen had a very specific kind of immigrant in mind, and mostly didn’t get them. Sarmiento and Alberdi, the intellectual architects of the country’s open-door immigration policy, wanted Northern Europeans specifically — the presumed carriers of the industry and civic order the country’s elite wanted to import along with them. What actually arrived was a far broader mix. There were genuine pockets of exactly the settlers they’d hoped for: 153 Welsh colonists sailed from Liverpool in 1865 to found a Welsh-speaking settlement in Chubut, Patagonia, explicitly to preserve their language and culture away from English domination back home, and German migration ran in five separate waves from before 1870 through to after the Second World War, leaving Buenos Aires with a lasting German-descended community. But the numbers were dominated by exactly the people the founding vision hadn’t planned for — Ottoman-Syrian and Lebanese migrants who became one of the country’s largest immigrant groups by the 1920s, Jewish migrants fleeing the Russian Empire and later Central Europe in numbers that make Argentina’s Jewish population the largest in Latin America, and Polish arrivals who by the 1920s outnumbered every nationality except Spaniards and Italians. Even the country’s demographic self-image was, from the start, an aspiration the reality never quite matched.

By the mid-1920s this made Argentina one of the richest countries on earth per head. Wheat and beef exports, riding British capital and British demand, produced a boom that put Buenos Aires among the great cities of the world — its opera house, its boulevards, its self-image as a European capital transplanted to the Southern Cone, built on land that had been someone else’s within living memory. The wealth was real. So was its total dependence on a single trading partner staying solvent, staying hungry for Argentine beef, and staying willing to keep the capital flowing. None of those three could be guaranteed, and none of them were about to be.

III. The crack

The boom’s foundations were never as solid as the opera house made them look. By the mid-1920s Argentina was riding record wheat and beef exports, but the entire arrangement depended on a single trading partner staying both solvent and hungry. Neither was guaranteed. The Wall Street Crash in 1929 answered the solvency question first — commodity prices collapsed worldwide, and Argentina’s export economy, built on exactly the goods now losing value fastest, had no cushion built in.

Britain answered the hunger question next, and answered it badly for Argentina. At the 1932 Ottawa Conference, Britain restructured its trade around imperial preference — favouring meat and grain from its own dominions, Australia and Canada chief among them, over outside suppliers. Argentina was never a dominion. It had all the economic dependency of one and none of the formal standing, and Ottawa was the moment that distinction stopped being academic.

Argentina’s political order collapsed in step with its economic one. In September 1930, General José Félix Uriburu overthrew President Hipólito Yrigoyen, ending the country’s run of open democratic government. What follows, roughly 1930 to 1943, is what Argentine historiography calls the Década Infame — the Infamous Decade — a run of conservative governments that stayed in power not through mandate but through systematic electoral fraud, an oligarchy governing by force of habit long after it had lost the argument for governing at all.

Into that vacuum, in 1933, Julio Roca Jr travelled to London. The vice-president who signed the Roca-Runciman trade treaty with the British Board of Trade was the son of the general who had cleared the pampas fifty years before. The deal kept Argentine beef flowing to British tables — but at a quota lower than Britain gave its own dominions, and with continuing British control over Buenos Aires’s transport network and unregulated railway tariffs. Argentine nationalists, and most historians since, read it as the moment informal empire stopped being implicit and became a signed, humiliating document: dependency put on paper, with a Roca’s signature on it.

The 1930s Depression forced one structural change nobody had chosen on principle. With the export-and-import British-oriented model exposed as fragile, Argentina began building domestic manufacturing in earnest — import substitution industrialisation, a pivot toward making at home what had always been bought from abroad. It’s a modest-sounding shift with a large consequence: it’s the beginning of the urban industrial working class that Peronism will later organise around and speak for.

By 1943 the Infamous Decade had exhausted whatever legitimacy it still had. Poor economic results and a decade of visible fraud produced a second coup — a nationalist military faction known as the GOU. Colonel Juan Perón was part of it, and did something unusual for an officer in that government: he took the labour ministry and spent the next two years building a base directly among the urban working class Depression-era industrialisation had just created. He rose to national prominence between 1943 and 1945, and won the presidency outright in 1946 — stepping into a vacuum that Uriburu’s coup, the Infamous Decade’s fraud, and Roca Jr’s treaty had spent thirteen years hollowing out for him.

IV. Martel, and the legacy

Lucrecia Martel didn’t need to leave Salta to find the whole argument. Born there in 1966 into the province’s conservative bourgeoisie, she set almost every film she has made in and around it — a body of work built from the inside of the class it critiques. Her debut, La Ciénaga (2001), follows an extended bourgeois family drinking through a decaying summer at a crumbling country house: bodies aging by the pool, wine spilling as freely as it’s poured, a matriarch too drunk to notice her own injuries. Critics reached for one word more than any other — decay — but the sharper reading is what the camera treats as background. Indigenous domestic staff move constantly through the frame, present in nearly every scene and central to almost none of the dialogue, heard on the soundtrack before they’re ever properly seen. The film doesn’t argue this arrangement is wrong. It simply photographs a family that has stopped noticing it at all — which is the more damning position.

Zama did the same work in period costume, and Martel has said the connection was deliberate. Extending the concerns of her Salta films into the eighteenth century, she has described the fiction of Argentine identity — built on a self-image of European descent — as resting on precisely the same blindness her contemporary films skewer, just with the origin story attached. In the novel Di Benedetto leaves the racial identity of the woman Zama becomes entangled with genuinely unresolved. Martel resolves it deliberately — in her film she reads as clearly indigenous — a change the director has said she made on purpose, to make the story harder rather than easier to settle. The blindness that lets a bourgeois Salta family stop seeing its own household staff has a documented starting point, and Martel put it on screen twice, two centuries apart.

In 2025 she stopped fictionalising it entirely. Our Land, her first feature documentary, follows the 2009 murder of Javier Chocobar, an Indigenous Chuschagasta activist shot dead by three men laying claim to land his community had long disputed with colonial-era landowners. Martel tracked the case for over a decade, through a 2018 trial that many assumed would never happen at all, given how consistently Argentine law had deferred to landowners’ claims over Indigenous ones. The film opens with the Earth seen from space before dropping, slowly, onto the exact patch of ground where Chocobar died — a director who spent two decades implying the colonial inheritance through atmosphere finally naming it outright: one killing, inside five hundred years of the same argument about who the land belongs to.

Read together, the trilogy of Salta films, Zama, and Our Land are the same accusation made three times, in three registers. A contemporary family that has stopped seeing the people who work in its own house. A colonial administrator whose personal decline mirrors the empire’s, and whose racial blind spots are made visible for him only decades later, by someone else’s camera. And a 2009 murder that a courtroom, more than eighty years after Roca Jr signed away so much of Argentina’s economic independence in London and well over a century after his father cleared the pampas of the people already living there, finally had to answer for. Martel didn’t invent the through-line. She just kept pointing her camera at it until it became impossible to miss.

V. Perón, default, and a chainsaw

Perón’s first term closed the loop the Roca family had opened. In 1946 he took the presidency; by 1948 his government had purchased the British-owned railways outright — the same network built specifically to move Argentine cattle and grain toward the docks for Britain’s benefit, now nationalised as the flagship of his economic programme. It was framed as sovereignty reclaimed. The reality was messier and more revealing: postwar Britain, broke and diminished, was in no position to resist, and what Argentina bought was, by several historians’ account, a network already worn down by decades of underinvestment rather than the prize it was sold as. Even the moment of reclaiming the railways carried the terms of the old relationship inside it — Argentina paying full price for infrastructure Britain had already run down.

The nationalist model Perón built didn’t survive contact with the following decades. Economic nationalism, state-organised corporations dependent on government spending, and a central bank with no real independence became Argentina’s enduring inheritance from Peronism — and also, over time, the scaffolding for chronic inflation and repeated crisis. By the 1990s, President Carlos Menem was reversing the logic entirely: privatising state industries, including the railways Perón had nationalised, in a wave of neoliberal reform meant to restore the investor confidence Argentina had spent half a century burning through.

It bought roughly a decade, and then the country defaulted anyway. At the end of 2001, Argentina collapsed into the largest sovereign default in history to that point — savings frozen, the currency’s peg to the dollar broken, riots in the streets that helped burn through five presidents in a fortnight. The country that had once been Britain’s unofficial dominion, then Perón’s reclaimed sovereign economy, was now negotiating with bondholders again, exactly the position Roca Jr had occupied in London in 1933, run through a different currency and a different century.

The institutions doing the negotiating had changed, even if the leverage hadn’t. Roca Jr needed a boat to London and a face-to-face meeting with the Board of Trade. By 2001, that role belonged to the International Monetary Fund, whose lending conditions had shaped Argentine policy through the 1990s and whose refusal to keep disbursing helped trigger the collapse when it came. The IMF, the World Bank, and the wider Bretton Woods system built after 1944 didn’t replace informal empire so much as formalise it — the same leverage over a dependent economy’s choices, now exercised through standing institutions rather than bilateral treaties signed by name. The Fund is back in Argentina again now, having signed a new $20 billion, four-year programme with Milei’s government in April 2025. The room in London is gone. The conversation never really stopped.

Javier Milei is where the pendulum has swung to now. Elected president in December 2023 on a platform of taking a chainsaw, literally brandished at rallies, to the Argentine state, Milei has pursued one of the most aggressive austerity programmes in the country’s modern history — slashing subsidies, gutting ministries, and campaigning explicitly to dollarise the economy outright, formally handing Argentina’s monetary sovereignty to a currency it doesn’t control. He never actually managed it. In office, the pledge softened into “currency competition” — letting the dollar circulate legally alongside the peso, betting that Argentines would abandon their own currency voluntarily once given the choice. By 2026 Milei was admitting in public that the bet had failed: people kept using pesos anyway. The peso survives, now floating inside a managed currency band, and even the most radical government in Argentina’s recent history couldn’t get its own citizens to trade away the currency question by consent. The numbers on everything else, two and a half years in, cut in both directions. Annual inflation has fallen from 211% in 2023 to roughly 30% now — still high by any normal country’s standard, but the fastest disinflation any major economy has managed in decades. Argentina posted its first primary fiscal surplus in over a decade. Poverty fell from 41.7% of the population to 28.2%, a seven-year low. Unemployment rose over the same period, from 5.7% to 7.8%, and the economy contracted before it grew. Whatever else this is, it is not new in kind, only in method. It is the oldest question in Argentine political economy, asked again — and, this time, an Argentine electorate that stopped short of answering it the way their government wanted.

From a Spanish administrator with no power to a president who couldn’t persuade his own country to give up its currency, the throughline never really breaks. Zama waited for a transfer his empire had already forgotten to grant. Argentina waited for a British market that stopped needing it. Perón bought back a railway Britain had already exhausted. Milei offered to formalise the dependency all over again, voluntarily this time, and found that even Argentines exhausted by decades of inflation weren’t quite ready to sign. Two empires, one country, and the same argument still being had — with the answer, for once, still genuinely undecided.

Methodology note: this piece was written collaboratively between a human and an AI — the human providing the instincts, provocations, editorial judgement and voice; the AI providing research synthesis, intellectual scaffolding and drafting. Full method at [athomehefeelslikeatourist.blog].