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Uruguay Historical Patterns of Settlement
First administered from Buenos Aires, Uruguay came into
being
as an independent nation in 1828 when the British
intervened to
create a buffer (and client) state between Argentina and
Brazil.
The fact that Uruguay was scarcely settled beyond a thin
coastal
strip during the colonial period meant that unlike many
other
areas of Latin America, little of its colonial heritage
survived.
The British dominated the country's economic and
commercial
development until World War I. In marked distinction to
Chile's
or Peru's minerals, however, Uruguay's prime productive
asset
(land) remained in the hands of Uruguayans, or at least
settlers
who wanted to become Uruguayans.
Shortly after independence, civil war broke out between
the
two political factions that came to form Uruguay's
traditional
parties, the Colorado Party (Partido Colorado) and the
National
Party (Partido Nacional, usually referred to as the
Blancos).
Military conflicts between caudillos on both sides were to
recur
frequently until 1904. The main cause of conflict was the
rivalry
between center and periphery: in Montevideo the Colorados
predominated, but in the interior the Blancos wished to
preserve
their control. A dictatorship by a Colorado caudillo,
Lorenzo
Latorre (1876-80), imposed strict order in the
countryside.
Concurrently, Uruguay's exports of beef products and wool
to
Europe began to boom.
After 1911 massive growth of frozen meat exports
revived the
profitability of the large cattle ranches that had been
somewhat
eclipsed after the 1860s by medium-sized sheep farms. By
World
War I, two-fifths of the nation's farmland was in the
hands of
large landowners (the 3 to 4 percent of proprietors who
had over
2,000 hectares). However, historians have argued that
Uruguay's
rural society was "pluralist" in character. Thus, along
with the
big landowners (latifundistas) and smallholders
(minifundistas), a middle sector had arisen,
constituting
40 percent of the proprietors and accounting for 55
percent of
the land.
Data as of December 1990
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