State and development: economic liberalism in theory and practice, c.1900

Using the Argentine as a case-study, this paper will consider a key element of macroeconomic policy - credit, money and banking - through the optic of new contributions to the literatures on monetary regimes and crony capitalism. Much recent work on the architecture of the international financial system and global monetary order c.1900 offers new perspectives on lender-creditor relations and the operation of world capital markets. Similarly, drawing on the public choice approach associated with the new political economy, some revisionist writing on cronyism provides a distinctly nuanced view of state-business engagement. Elements of these advances in the literature will be applied to the Argentine around the turn of the nineteenth century, viewed mainly from the perspective of British interests, though involving references to domestic agents.