Land Tenure and Land Settlement: Policy and Patterns in the Canadian Prairies and the Argentine Pampas,1880–1930

Abstract

Argentina and Canada were two of a small group of historically favoured new countries that emerged in the nineteenth century. Although European settlement had existed in Argentina since the sixteenth century and in Canada since the seventeenth, both countries contained vast and rich grassland regions that remained virtually unpopulated until the nineteenth century. The prairies and the pampas made Argentina and Canada land-surplus rather than labour-surplus countries, and when the international trading economy expanded dynamically in the late nineteenth century, both regions and both countries underwent a dramatic transformation. Foreign capital, technology and labour poured in to develop the thriving agrarian economy that took root in both regions, and by the late 1890s, vast quantities of farm products flowed out to the hungry markets of Europe. As a result of the development of the prairies and the pampas, Canada and Argentina were among the leading world agricultural exporters by 1914, and both countries retained their primacy through the 1920s.