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Notas
| Project: While the role of coal has been the subject of long-running debate in the historiography of the Industrial Revolution, its part in the economic development of the global periphery has been comparatively neglected. The technological context of the ‘First Globalization’ (c.1870–1914) made pastoral production in the periphery increasingly dependent on modern energy, as new methods of production and transportation bridged the distance between grasslands in the south of the world and kitchens in the north. By comparing choices of meat preservation techniques in Uruguay and New Zealand – two small settler economies that prospered on the back of pastoral exports – this article highlights the usefulness of an energy perspective on agriculture-based transitions to modern economic growth. Different conditions of access to coal shaped how New Zealanders and Uruguayans exploited their livestock herds when terms of trade favoured them the most, with important consequences for the persisting income gap between them.
Methodology: Transcription of historical sources. The data for New Zealand refers to the price at the pithead, officially reported for the dominion in the Coal Tables presented to the House of Commons between 1894 and 1924. The Uruguayan series has been estimated by adding the different components of the CIF price of coal at Montevideo’s harbour and including the custom duties. It is a lower-bound estimate, as it takes the cheapest annual value for the Atlantic transportation of coal from the UK to the River Plate, as registered by the Angier Reports for each year. For two years (1910 and 1911) the managers’ half-yearly reports and the accounts of the Central Uruguay Railway Company of Monte Video (CUR) provide the price paid by the firm for wholesale coal in Montevideo, which broadly coincides with my estimate for the price at the port. Hence, even if, due to middlemen, the wholesale price paid by producers for New Zealand coal was likely somewhat higher to the price reported in the Coal Tables, the estimated price at Montevideo’s harbour was a likely minimum for the Uruguayan economy as well. The retail prices in both cases were therefore higher than the one presented here, but there is no reason to think the gap between pithead or port price and retail price was notably different in two countries of similar scale such New Zealand or Uruguay.
Funding from the Cambridge International Trust is gratefully acknowledged.
SEE MAP: Uruguay, New Zealand |
