Over the last century and a half, taking advantage of excellent natural conditions, the Pampa region has developed a high-productivity agriculture that responds rapidly to variations in demand in the global market, turning itself into one of the world's leading agricultural exporters. Far from the image of technical and social primitivism that predominates in the historiography of the mid-twentieth century, classically expressed in Revolución en las pampas by James Scobie, the last half-century has seen due attention paid to the rapid modernisation of agricultural production in the Pampas. In this context, Ezequiel Gallo's La pampa gringa and the phenomenon of agricultural colonisation in Santa Fe that he analysed have played a very significant role. This study showed the importance of smallholdings in the early expansion of agriculture in the Pampas and presented a process of considerable economic rationality and social dynamism. The work under review adheres to this view. It re-engages with the subject and the argument of Gallo's work and studies the precocious and extensive process of the establishment of agricultural colonies around Santa Fe, comparing this with the experience of Entre Ríos, Córdoba and Buenos Aires.

Expansión agrícola y colonización is the sixth volume in an ambitious series that aims to explain the phenomenon referred to in the first sentence of this review. The collection is made up of two types of study. There are important research-based studies of key aspects of agrarian development in the region – vol. 3, Desigualdad y crecimiento, by Gelman and Santilli, looks at Buenos Aires province in the early nineteenth century, and vol. 5, by Roberto Schmit, considers Entre Ríos in the same period. There are also works of synthesis conveying the latest research on some key aspects of this process. These have been developed by the team that works with Barsky, in which Julio Djenderedjian occupies a central role. In the first volume he and Barsky study the earliest stages of livestock farming, and in vol. 4 Djenderedjian assesses the state of agriculture prior to its commercial take-off. The work under consideration falls within this category, revealing the complex process by which the colonies established themselves and their expansion and highly contrasting characteristics as the period of rapid growth approached.

Following an introduction that sets out the book's methodology, three long chapters present the institutional framework, studying the norms that governed the working of the land, the approach of the leading sectors towards immigration and colonisation, and the link between migration and colonisation and rural political life. The final chapters of the first book recount in far greater detail the interaction of institutional and market factors that underpinned the consolidation of the colonies. The authors attempt to explain the colonists' decisions by means of a precise analysis of the economic and institutional contexts in which they were made and the limited information available to them, setting out anew the uncertainties and difficulties at each stage.

The study shows the way in which the evolution of the colonies began with a combination of military and institutional objectives, in a phase of relative isolation characterised by self-sufficiency and marked product diversification, to become integrated subsequently into local and regional markets specialising in wheat, and thereby consolidating the growth of agricultural capitalism. A comparison of Santa Fe, Entre Ríos and Buenos Aires in this early phase casts light on the complex nature of the variables involved and the interplay between the ideological elements that underpin institutional strategies and the practical conditions that led to the consolidation of the dominant features of the process. One constant and relevant variable is technology. In this field, without undervaluing the importance of knowledge transfer through such channels as the state itself, the colony promoters, the press and other information providers, emphasis is placed on the slow accumulation of experience by the settlers themselves, who slowly and painfully discovered the technical solutions best suited to the environmental and market conditions that they faced.

The following chapters, in book 2, explain first how markets were accessed, including the conquest of Buenos Aires, the early and limited development of the flour industry, and finally the updating of commercial processes and access to the world as a whole. Product growth has a variety of causes, ranging from the role of institutions (that provided physical and judicial security) to financial markets and even climate conditions. The comparison of the four provinces reveals how divergent development paths are the result of adapting to different circumstances and needs. For example, the agriculture of Buenos Aires province, apparently a source of frustration for settlers, reveals from another perspective how it fitted well with cattle-farming, reducing the risk represented by cereal monoculture. Thus, the development of Entre Ríos and, above all, Buenos Aires is presented as the result of a shared vision, which far from homogenising the phenomenon allows us to understand the diversity of the results in each province based on consistent interpretative parameters.

The final nineteenth-century phase shows the consolidation of a new agriculture with solid capitalist foundations, in the context of which colonisation acquired new meaning. The growth of ethnic colonisation can also be seen, including such groups as Eastern European Jews, Volga Germans and other communities that may have been of limited significance statistically, but were visible as a result of their specific characteristics.

The text closes by returning to one of its most important and original themes: technological change. The need to adapt and to develop productive technology well adapted to the environment, to factor costs and, consequently, to the scale of production prevalent in the Pampas – with its regional variants – imposed a laborious apprenticeship. This derives from agricultura criolla (as mentioned in the context of vol. 4 of the collection) existing alongside European peasant farmers, separate among themselves and from the needs of the new agriculture of the Pampas, which were similarly unforeseen by the state projects that drove them. The success of this technological development – which included institutional forms specifically adapted to conditions in the Pampas – gives rise to the epilogue to the study: the development of an agricultural expansion based on new land that acquired new methods on a far greater scale, transcending the link between agricultural expansion and colonisation.

As well as being a synthesis that displays much original research, Expansión agrícola y colonización is a work of reference. It is enough to say that more than 200 pages are devoted to a substantial summary of sources and the bibliography, a complete list of colonies (including the year in which they were founded, the founder, the proprietor, location and extent), basic data relating to the lives of some representative protagonists derived from two key sources, the correspondence of settlers and information relating to weights and measures. But above all this is a work that attempts to shed light on the motivations of the actors, explaining their achievements and failures in the context of the conditions in which they carried out their deeds and the information that was available to them, and by doing so recounting a crucial phenomenon in the great expansion of the Argentine economy in the second half of the nineteenth century.