R2.5 The formation of modern nations in the Americas (1860–1929)

Between the 1860s and the 1920s the states of the Americas changed from loosely connected, mostly rural societies into modern nations with national markets, large cities, railways and growing bureaucracies. The same decades saw the conquest of the last independent Indigenous lands, the end of slavery in Brazil and Cuba, and the arrival of tens of millions of immigrants.

The Americas in 1860: unfinished nations

In 1860 most American states had been independent for between 40 and 85 years, but none was a fully consolidated nation. Central governments were weak, regions often acted as if they were independent, and large areas of each country were still controlled by Indigenous peoples. Economies were mostly agricultural, transport was slow and expensive, and national markets hardly existed.

The 1860s were a decade of wars that decided what kind of states would survive. The USA fought the Civil War (1861–1865) over slavery and secession. Mexico was invaded by France, which installed the Austrian archduke Maximilian as emperor (1864–1867). Argentina was reunified after the Battle of Pavón (1861), and Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay fought Paraguay in the War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870). In British North America the colonies negotiated a union that became the Dominion of Canada in 1867.

Population figures come from national censuses (USA 1860 and 1930; Brazil 1872).

Historians often describe the period as one of modernisation: the growth of industry, cities, transport, education and state power. The word is useful but needs care. Modernisation was uneven, it served some groups far more than others, and many people experienced it as conquest, eviction or exploitation.

Railways and the economic transformation

Railways were the single most important technology of the period. Before them, goods moved by river, canal, coastal ship or ox-cart, and the interior of every American country was cut off from markets. A railway cut the cost of moving a tonne of wheat or ore by land many times over, so farms and mines hundreds of kilometres from the coast could sell on world markets for the first time.

The United States

The USA already had about 30,000 miles of track in 1860, roughly as much as the whole of Europe, but the lines were short and regional. In 1862, during the Civil War, Congress passed the Pacific Railway Act, which gave land and loans to two companies to build a line to California. The Union Pacific built westward from Nebraska and the Central Pacific eastward from Sacramento. The two met at Promontory Summit in Utah on 10 May 1869.

The Central Pacific relied on Chinese workers, who made up most of its labour force (perhaps 12,000 or more at the peak of construction) and did much of the most dangerous work in the Sierra Nevada. The Union Pacific used many Irish immigrants and Civil War veterans. Four more transcontinental lines were completed by 1893, and the network grew fastest in the 1880s.

The federal government and the states encouraged construction with land grants. Federal grants alone gave the railway companies about 130 million acres, often alternate square-mile sections along the line, which they sold to settlers to raise money. Railway companies sent agents to Europe to recruit immigrants to buy their land, which tied railway building directly to migration and settlement.

Consequences in the USA

• A national market. Meat packed in Chicago, flour milled in Minneapolis and steel made in Pittsburgh could be sold across the continent. Firms that sold nationally grew far larger than local businesses.

• The first big businesses. Railways were the first companies to need professional managers, accountants and huge sums of capital, raised through stocks and bonds on Wall Street. Their methods were later copied by industrial firms.

• Demand for coal, iron and steel. Rails, locomotives and bridges created the market on which the steel industry grew.

• Standard time. On 18 November 1883 the railways divided the country into four time zones to make timetables workable, replacing hundreds of local times.

• Settlement and conquest of the West. Railways carried settlers, soldiers and buffalo hunters onto the Great Plains and broke the independence of the Plains nations.

• Corruption and financial crises. Overbuilding and speculation caused the Panics of 1873 and 1893; the Crédit Mobilier scandal (exposed in 1872) showed members of Congress taking shares in a company that overcharged the Union Pacific.

Canada

In Canada the railway was a condition of nationhood. Nova Scotia and New Brunswick joined Confederation partly on the promise of the Intercolonial Railway to Quebec, completed in 1876. British Columbia joined in 1871 only after Ottawa promised a railway to the Pacific within ten years. The first contract collapsed in the Pacific Scandal of 1873, when it emerged that Prime Minister John A. Macdonald's Conservatives had taken large election contributions from the financier Hugh Allan, who had been promised the contract.

The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), chartered in 1881, received 25 million dollars and 25 million acres from the government. It was completed on 7 November 1885, when the last spike was driven at Craigellachie in British Columbia. About 15,000 Chinese labourers were brought in to build the British Columbia section, where hundreds died in accidents and from disease and malnutrition.

The CPR gave Canada an east–west link independent of the USA, carried troops to suppress the North-West Resistance in 1885, and opened the Prairies to settlement. Two more transcontinental lines, the Grand Trunk Pacific and the Canadian Northern, were built in the wheat boom after 1900. Both went bankrupt and were taken over by the government between 1918 and 1923 to form the Canadian National Railways.

Latin America

In Latin America railways were built largely with British capital and were designed to carry exports to the ports, so networks often looked like the spokes of a fan centred on one port. In Argentina they ran from the Pampas to Buenos Aires and Rosario; in Brazil from the coffee districts of São Paulo to the port of Santos; in Mexico from the mining north to the US border and to Veracruz.

Figures are rounded and vary between sources, because some count only track open to traffic. Data: national railway statistics of each country, as reported in standard economic histories.

In Mexico the railways were the core of Porfirio Díaz's programme of "order and progress". They allowed the army to reach any rebellion within days, raised the value of land and helped the hacienda owners who seized village lands, as the study of the Mexican Revolution shows in detail. In Argentina the railway made the Pampas, a grassland the size of France, into one of the world's great grain and meat exporting regions.

How significant were the railways?

Contemporaries treated railways as the symbol of progress, and most historians agree that they were essential to the economic transformation of every country in the study. Their significance can still be weighed. Robert Fogel, in Railroads and American Economic Growth (1964), estimated that without railways US national income in 1890 would have been only a few per cent lower, because canals and rivers could have carried most freight. His conclusion was much debated, and other historians stress effects his calculation left out, such as national markets, big business and the speed of western settlement.

In Latin America the debate is about who benefited. Railways brought rapid growth in exports, but because they linked export zones to ports rather than regions to one another, they did less to create national markets or local industry than US lines. John Coatsworth, in Growth Against Development (1981), argued that Mexican railways produced large savings for the economy but also encouraged the seizure of village land.

Industrialisation and urbanisation in the United States

Between the end of the Civil War and the 1890s the USA overtook Britain to become the world's largest manufacturing economy. The period from the 1870s to about 1900 is often called the Gilded Age, a name taken from a novel by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner (1873): a thin layer of gold covering a society of corruption, poverty and inequality.

Government helped more than it restrained. Republican administrations kept tariffs high to protect American manufacturers from European competition, as in the McKinley Tariff of 1890 and the Dingley Tariff of 1897, and federal and state governments gave land and loans to railways while doing almost nothing to regulate business before 1887.

Steel, oil and finance

Three industries show how American business changed. Andrew Carnegie, a Scottish immigrant who had worked for the Pennsylvania Railroad, built steel mills near Pittsburgh using the Bessemer process, which made steel cheaply in large quantities. He controlled every stage of production, from iron mines and coke ovens to ships and railways, a method called vertical integration. In 1901 he sold Carnegie Steel to the banker J. P. Morgan for about 480 million dollars, and Morgan combined it with other firms to form US Steel, the first company valued at more than a billion dollars.

John D. Rockefeller founded Standard Oil in Ohio in 1870. He bought up or drove out rival refiners, using secret rebates from railways to undercut them, until by about 1880 Standard Oil refined some 90 per cent of American oil. This method of combining competitors in one industry is called horizontal integration. In 1882 Rockefeller's lawyers created the Standard Oil Trust, in which shareholders of many companies handed their shares to a board of trustees that ran them as one.

Banks became as powerful as industrialists. J. P. Morgan reorganised bankrupt railways in the 1890s and financed giant mergers. Between 1895 and 1904 a wave of mergers created firms that dominated their industries, and critics began to speak of a "money trust" in which a few New York banks controlled American industry.

The cartoon of the trusts looming over the Senate expressed a widespread fear that wealth was buying political power. Senators were then chosen by state legislatures, not by voters, and several were known as representatives of railway, oil or lumber interests.

Electricity, cars and the consumer economy

A second wave of industrialisation from the 1880s was based on electricity, chemicals and the internal combustion engine. Thomas Edison opened the first central power station in New York, at Pearl Street, in 1882; by the 1920s most urban homes had electric light. Henry Ford introduced the Model T in 1908 and the moving assembly line at his Highland Park factory in Michigan in 1913, which cut the time needed to assemble a car from about twelve hours to about an hour and a half. The price of a Model T fell from more than 800 dollars in 1908 to under 300 dollars by the mid-1920s, and about 15 million were built by 1927.

By the 1920s the USA had become the first mass-consumption society. Cars, radios, refrigerators and washing machines were bought on credit; advertising and chain stores spread; Hollywood dominated world cinema. The weaknesses of this boom (unequal incomes, farm depression and speculation) belong to the study of the Great Depression; the consumer economy of the 1920s was the outcome of half a century of industrialisation.

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Cities and workers

Industry drew people to cities. Chicago grew from about 110,000 people in 1860 to 1.7 million in 1900, New York (after its 1898 merger) to 3.4 million. The 1920 census was the first to count a majority of Americans in urban places.

Most urban growth came from immigrants and migrants from the countryside, who lived in overcrowded tenements, worked long hours for low wages and had no protection against injury, sickness or unemployment. The journalist and photographer Jacob Riis exposed conditions in New York's Lower East Side in How the Other Half Lives (1890). City politics was often run by party machines such as Tammany Hall in New York, which traded jobs, favours and help for immigrant votes.

Export-led growth in Canada and Latin America

Outside the USA, economic transformation came mainly through export-led growth. Each country specialised in one or a few primary products, food or raw materials, that the industrial countries of Europe and the USA wanted. Exports earned the money to pay for imported manufactures and for the interest on foreign loans, and taxes on trade paid for the state.

Argentina: beef, wheat and wool

Argentina was the most successful export economy in Latin America. After unification in the 1860s and the conquest of Indigenous lands in the south (1878–1885), the Pampas were divided into large estates, or estancias, and opened to cattle, sheep and wheat. British-financed railways carried the produce to Buenos Aires. Refrigerated shipping from the late 1870s and meat-freezing plants, or frigoríficos, from 1882 allowed frozen and later chilled beef to be sold in Britain.

By 1914 Argentina was one of the world's leading exporters of wheat, maize and beef, and on Angus Maddison's estimates its income per head was among the ten highest in the world, comparable with Germany's. Buenos Aires grew into a city of about 1.5 million people with grand avenues, an opera house (the Teatro Colón, 1908) and Latin America's first underground railway (1913).

The boom had weaknesses. Land was concentrated in a few thousand families, so most immigrants became tenants or urban workers rather than owners. British firms owned most of the railways, meat-packing plants were mostly British- and later US-owned, and the economy depended on the British market. The weaknesses appeared when world prices fell after 1929.

Brazil: coffee and rubber

Brazil became the world's main producer of coffee. Planters in São Paulo cleared new land in the west of the state, used railways to reach the port of Santos and, after abolition in 1888, recruited subsidised immigrants from Italy to work the plantations. In the early 1900s Brazil produced between two-thirds and three-quarters of the world's coffee.

Dependence on one crop made Brazil vulnerable to falling prices. In 1906, when a huge harvest threatened to collapse prices, the states of São Paulo, Minas Gerais and Rio de Janeiro signed the Taubaté Agreement. The state governments borrowed abroad to buy and store surplus coffee, keeping it off the market until prices recovered. This policy of valorisation protected planters' incomes but encouraged more planting and tied public finances to the coffee elite.

In the Amazon a rubber boom from about 1879 to 1912 made the city of Manaus briefly rich, with electric trams and an opera house. Rubber was tapped by migrants from the drought-stricken Northeast and by Indigenous workers, often held by debt in conditions close to slavery. The boom collapsed after 1912, when plantations in British Malaya and the Dutch East Indies, grown from seeds taken from Brazil in 1876, produced rubber more cheaply.

Chile and Peru: nitrates, guano and copper

Chile's growth rested on nitrates, used as fertiliser and to make explosives. In the War of the Pacific (1879–1884) Chile defeated Peru and Bolivia and took the nitrate provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta; Bolivia lost its coast. British investors, led by John Thomas North, the "Nitrate King", soon controlled much of the industry, while export taxes on nitrates supplied around half of the Chilean government's revenue for several decades. From the 1910s US companies such as the Guggenheims developed copper mines, including Chuquicamata.

Peru had depended on guano (bird droppings used as fertiliser) until the deposits ran out in the 1870s; the war with Chile left it bankrupt. In 1890 its foreign creditors, organised as the Peruvian Corporation, took control of its railways for 66 years in return for cancelling its debt, a clear case of foreign control resulting from export dependence.

Mexico, Cuba and Central America

Under Porfirio Díaz (1876–1911) Mexico opened its mines, railways and, from 1901, oil fields to US and British investors, and exported silver, copper, henequen (a fibre from Yucatán) and coffee. The costs of the Porfirian model, above all for peasants who lost their land, were a main cause of the revolution of 1910 and are examined in that study.

In Cuba, US capital flowed into sugar after 1898. In Central America the United Fruit Company, founded in 1899, came to own huge banana plantations, railways and ports. The American writer O. Henry coined the term "banana republic" in 1904 for a small state dominated by a foreign fruit company and a corrupt elite.

Canada: the National Policy and the wheat boom

Canada combined export-led growth with deliberate industrial policy. Macdonald's National Policy of 1879 had three parts: high tariffs to protect manufacturing in Ontario and Quebec, the transcontinental railway, and settlement of the Prairies. Growth was slow until the late 1890s, when rising world wheat prices, cheaper shipping and the end of free land in the US West brought a wheat boom. Wheat exports rose more than tenfold between 1896 and 1913, and new varieties such as Marquis wheat (released in 1909) ripened fast enough for the short Prairie summer. The Klondike gold rush in the Yukon (1896–1899) and new mines, pulp mills and hydroelectric plants in Ontario and Quebec added a resource boom.

Trade, foreign investment and dependency

Until 1914 Britain was the largest foreign investor in Latin America and Canada, mostly through loans to governments and through railway, port and utility companies. Its investments in Latin America were concentrated in Argentina, Brazil and Mexico. The First World War cut British lending, and by the 1920s the USA had replaced Britain as the main source of new investment in most of the hemisphere, and as Canada's leading investor.

Inter-American trade was promoted by the USA. At the first International Conference of American States in Washington (October 1889 to April 1890), the US secretary of state James G. Blaine proposed a customs union and arbitration of disputes. Latin American delegates, led by Argentina, rejected the customs union, fearing US domination, but agreed to a Commercial Bureau of the American Republics, which became the Pan American Union in 1910. The opening of the Panama Canal on 15 August 1914 cut the sea route between the east and west coasts of the Americas and drew Pacific trade towards the USA.

Neocolonialism and dependency

Critics, both at the time and later, argued that formal independence hid economic subordination. Latin American states were politically independent, but foreign companies owned their railways, mines and utilities, foreign banks held their debts, and their prosperity rose and fell with prices set in London and New York. When states defaulted, foreign powers sometimes used force, as when Britain, Germany and Italy blockaded Venezuela in 1902–1903.

From the 1950s Latin American economists and historians developed these ideas into dependency theory. The Argentine economist Raúl Prebisch argued that the terms of trade tended to move against exporters of primary goods, so the "periphery" fell further behind the industrial "centre". Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, in Dependency and Development in Latin America (1969), argued that export economies developed in ways shaped by their ties to foreign capital and by the local elites who profited from them. These were later interpretations, not terms used by people at the time.

Other historians reject the dependency model. D. C. M. Platt, in Business Imperialism, 1840–1930 (1977), found that British firms rarely had the power to dictate to Latin American governments, which often regulated, taxed or nationalised foreign companies. Stephen Haber and the contributors to How Latin America Fell Behind (1997) blame weak domestic institutions, such as insecure property rights, concentrated landholding and narrow political systems, more than foreign capital.

Political transformation in Canada: Confederation and its challenges

In 1860 British North America consisted of separate colonies: the Province of Canada (today's Ontario and Quebec, united since 1841), Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, Prince Edward Island, Newfoundland and, on the Pacific, British Columbia and Vancouver Island. The vast lands between them, Rupert's Land, belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company.

Why Confederation came about

The Province of Canada was deadlocked. Its two halves, English-speaking and Protestant Canada West and French-speaking and Catholic Canada East, had equal seats in the assembly, and governments fell repeatedly in the early 1860s. In June 1864 the Conservative John A. Macdonald, his French Canadian ally George-Étienne Cartier and their Reform rival George Brown formed a "Great Coalition" to seek a wider federal union.

Outside pressures made union urgent. The US Civil War had created the largest army in the world, and some northern politicians talked of annexing British North America in revenge for British sympathy with the Confederacy. The USA ended the Reciprocity Treaty, which had allowed free trade in natural products, in March 1866. In the same year the Fenians, Irish American veterans who hoped to pressure Britain over Ireland, raided Canada from US soil. Britain, eager to reduce the cost of defending its colonies, supported union.

Delegates met at Charlottetown (September 1864) and Quebec (October 1864), where they agreed the 72 Resolutions, and in London (1866). The British Parliament passed the British North America Act on 29 March 1867, and the Dominion of Canada, uniting Ontario, Quebec, Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, came into being on 1 July 1867, with Macdonald as its first prime minister.

The compromises of 1867

The British North America Act created a federation with a strong central government. Macdonald had wanted a single legislature, and he blamed the weakness of the states for the US Civil War. French Canadians, led by Cartier, insisted on a provincial government for Quebec that would protect their language, Catholic Church and civil law. The result was a compromise.

It shall be lawful for the Queen, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate and House of Commons, to make Laws for the Peace, Order, and good Government of Canada, in relation to all Matters not coming within the Classes of Subjects by this Act assigned exclusively to the Legislatures of the Provinces.

British North America Act (now the Constitution Act, 1867), section 91, passed by the British Parliament on 29 March 1867. The section gives Ottawa every power not listed for the provinces, the reverse of the US Constitution, which leaves unlisted powers to the states. Written by colonial politicians in the shadow of the US Civil War, it shows their intention to build a strong centre; the courts later read provincial powers more widely than its authors expected.

Other compromises included equal representation of regions in the Senate (24 seats each for Ontario, Quebec and the Maritimes), representation by population in the House of Commons (which Brown and Canada West had demanded), protection for Catholic and Protestant denominational schools (section 93), and the use of both English and French in Parliament and the Quebec courts (section 133).

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Opposition and unresolved issues

Confederation was made by politicians, not by popular vote, and it faced opposition. In Nova Scotia the former premier Joseph Howe led an anti-Confederation campaign that won 18 of the province's 19 seats in the first federal election of 1867; Nova Scotians feared higher taxes and domination by central Canada. They sought repeal until Ottawa offered better financial terms in 1869. Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland refused to join (PEI joined in 1873 when it needed help with railway debts; Newfoundland only in 1949). In Quebec the Rouges, led by Antoine-Aimé Dorion, argued that French Canadians would be a permanent minority.

Expansion to the West and the Métis resistances

In 1869–1870 Canada bought Rupert's Land from the Hudson's Bay Company without consulting its inhabitants. At Red River (today's Winnipeg) the Métis, a people of mixed First Nations and European, mostly French, descent, formed a provisional government under Louis Riel. The Red River Resistance forced Ottawa to negotiate the Manitoba Act of 1870, which created the province of Manitoba with French language rights and land for the Métis. But Riel's government had executed an Ontario Protestant, Thomas Scott, and Riel had to flee.

Many Métis moved further west, to the Saskatchewan valley, where they again faced surveyors, settlers and an indifferent government. In 1885 Riel returned to lead the North-West Resistance, joined by some Cree warriors. The government sent troops on the new CPR and crushed it in weeks. Riel was convicted of treason and hanged at Regina on 16 November 1885, despite pleas for mercy from Quebec. French Canadians saw his execution as an attack on a French-speaking Catholic; English Ontario saw Riel as a traitor. The division between the two communities hardened.

The Manitoba Schools Question deepened it. In 1890 Manitoba ended public funding for Catholic schools and made English the only official language of the province, against the guarantees of 1870. The crisis was settled only in 1896 by the compromise of the new Liberal prime minister, Wilfrid Laurier.

British Columbia joined in 1871 on the promise of the railway, and Alberta and Saskatchewan were created as provinces in 1905. Regional grievances persisted. Prairie farmers resented tariffs that raised the price of the machinery they bought while they sold their wheat on an unprotected world market; their Progressive Party won 58 seats in the federal election of 1921. In the 1920s the Maritime Rights movement protested that Confederation had left the Atlantic provinces poorer and politically marginal. Canada gradually took control of its own affairs: it sent its own delegation to the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, and the Balfour Declaration of 1926 recognised the dominions as equal in status with Britain.

Political transformation in the United States: from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era

The Civil War settled that the USA was one nation and that slavery was ended. Reconstruction, the attempt to rebuild the South and protect the rights of freed people, ended with the withdrawal of federal troops in 1877 (the subject of the study of the Civil War). After 1877 national politics turned to the problems created by industrial growth.

Gilded Age politics, 1877–1900

Gilded Age politics was closely fought, highly partisan and often corrupt. Turnout was high (often around 80 per cent of eligible men in presidential elections), but the two main parties differed mainly over tariffs and money, and both were close to business. Federal jobs were handed out to party supporters under the spoils system. After a disappointed office-seeker assassinated President James Garfield in 1881, the Pendleton Act (1883) began a civil service recruited by examination.

Pressure from farmers produced the first federal regulation of business. The Interstate Commerce Act (1887) created a commission to ensure that railway rates were "reasonable and just", and the Sherman Antitrust Act (1890) made combinations "in restraint of trade" illegal. Both were weak at first: courts interpreted them narrowly, and in United States v. E. C. Knight (1895) the Supreme Court ruled that a sugar trust controlling about 98 per cent of refining was manufacturing, not commerce, and so outside the Act.

Farmers in the South and West, hit by falling crop prices, debt and high railway rates, organised Farmers' Alliances and in 1892 founded the People's Party, or Populists. Its Omaha Platform demanded government ownership of railways and telegraphs, a graduated income tax, the direct election of senators and the free coinage of silver to raise prices. The party won over a million votes in 1892 but declined after the Democrats adopted free silver in 1896 and lost. Many of its demands were later enacted by Progressives.

The Progressive Era, c. 1900–1920

From about 1900 a broad reform movement, called progressivism, used government to correct the abuses of industrial society. Progressives were mostly urban and middle class: journalists, lawyers, social workers, women's clubs and some business leaders. The movement changed the constitution itself.

At state and city level, Progressives introduced the secret ballot, primary elections, the initiative and referendum (which let voters propose and approve laws), the recall of officials, city commissions and laws on factory safety, child labour and working hours; Wisconsin under Governor Robert La Follette (1901–1906) became the model of a Progressive state. President Woodrow Wilson (1913–1921) cut tariffs (Underwood Tariff, 1913), created the Federal Reserve (1913) and the Federal Trade Commission (1914), and strengthened antitrust law (Clayton Act, 1914).

Political transformation in Latin America

In Latin America political consolidation usually meant the victory of liberal elites over their conservative and regional rivals, the strengthening of the central state, and stability under oligarchic or personal rule. By about 1880 most of the larger states had stable governments for the first time since independence, but they were controlled by narrow groups of landowners, merchants and officers.

Mexico: from French intervention to the Porfiriato

Mexico entered the period divided between liberals, who wanted a secular federal republic, and conservatives, who defended the Church and the army. After the liberals under Benito Juárez won the Reform War (1858–1861), Juárez suspended payments on foreign debts. France, under Napoleon III, invaded in 1862. Although a Mexican army defeated the French at Puebla on 5 May 1862, the French took Mexico City in 1863 and made Maximilian of Habsburg emperor with conservative support.

Juárez kept up the resistance. When the US Civil War ended and France withdrew its troops in 1866–1867, Maximilian's regime collapsed; he was captured and shot at Querétaro on 19 June 1867. The victory over a European power discredited the conservatives and made liberalism the national ideology. During the Restored Republic (1867–1876) Juárez and then Sebastián Lerdo de Tejada began building schools and railways. In 1876 General Porfirio Díaz seized power, ruling directly or through a puppet until 1911. His rule, the Porfiriato, is the starting point of the study of the Mexican Revolution and is also one of the examples of leadership in this period.

Argentina: unification and the oligarchic republic

Until 1861 the province of Buenos Aires, which controlled the customs revenue of the main port, stood apart from the Argentine Confederation. After the Battle of Pavón (1861) Bartolomé Mitre of Buenos Aires became president of a united Argentina (1862–1868). His successors Domingo Sarmiento (1868–1874) and Nicolás Avellaneda (1874–1880) expanded schools, railways and immigration. In 1880 the city of Buenos Aires was made a federal capital, separate from its province, ending the long rivalry.

The War of the Triple Alliance (1864–1870), in which Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay fought Paraguay under Francisco Solano López, strengthened the central army in Argentina and Brazil. For Paraguay it was a catastrophe. Estimates of its population losses range from under a fifth to more than half; historians disagree because Paraguay's pre-war population is uncertain, but all agree that a large share of its adult men died.

From 1880 the Partido Autonomista Nacional (PAN), led by Julio Argentino Roca, controlled elections through fraud and patronage. Pressure from the middle class, expressed through the Unión Cívica and from 1891 the Unión Cívica Radical (UCR), which led armed revolts in 1890, 1893 and 1905, eventually forced reform. The Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 introduced secret and compulsory voting for all native-born and naturalised men over 18. In 1916 the Radical leader Hipólito Yrigoyen won the presidency, the first transfer of power to an opposition party through a free vote in Argentine history.

Brazil: abolition and the Old Republic

Brazil was the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. Pressure built gradually: the slave trade from Africa had ended in 1850; the Rio Branco Law of 1871 (the "Law of Free Birth") freed children born to enslaved mothers; and the Sexagenarian Law of 1885 freed those over 60. In the 1880s an abolitionist movement led by figures such as Joaquim Nabuco and the journalist José do Patrocínio, and the flight of enslaved people from plantations in São Paulo, made slavery impossible to maintain. Princess Isabel, acting for her father, signed the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) on 13 May 1888, freeing an estimated 700,000 people, the number still enslaved after the registers of 1887, without compensation to their owners or support for the freed.

Eighteen months later, on 15 November 1889, the army deposed Emperor Pedro II, who went into exile. The new republic's flag carried the positivist motto Ordem e Progresso ("Order and Progress"). The constitution of 1891 created a federal system with strong states, separated Church and state, and limited the vote to literate men, which excluded most of the population; in presidential elections before 1930 rarely more than about 5 per cent of the population voted.

Politics in the Old Republic (1889–1930) was run by the governors of the largest states. Under the "politics of the governors", São Paulo (the coffee state) and Minas Gerais (with its dairy farms) usually alternated the presidency between them, an arrangement nicknamed café com leite ("coffee with milk"). In the countryside, local bosses called coronéis delivered votes in return for patronage, a system called coronelismo.

The republic faced violent challenges. At Canudos in the backlands of Bahia, a religious community of some tens of thousands led by Antônio Conselheiro was destroyed by the army in 1897 after four expeditions. In the Revolt of the Lash (1910), Black sailors led by João Cândido mutinied against flogging in the navy. From 1922 young army officers, the tenentes, rebelled against the oligarchy. In 1930 the republic was overthrown by Getúlio Vargas.

Chile and Uruguay: two other paths

Chile had the most stable constitutional government in Latin America from the 1830s. In 1891 a civil war between President José Manuel Balmaceda, who wanted stronger presidential power and more state control of nitrate wealth, and the Congress, backed by the navy and many nitrate interests, ended with Balmaceda's defeat and suicide. The "Parliamentary Republic" that followed (1891–1925) was dominated by a landed and mining oligarchy.

Uruguay took a different path under José Batlle y Ordóñez, whose reforms made it the first welfare state in the Americas. Women voted for the first time in Latin America in a local plebiscite at Cerro Chato in Uruguay in 1927, and Uruguayan women gained the national vote in 1932.

Social and cultural change: women and the arts

Changes in the role of women

Industrialisation and urbanisation changed women's lives across the Americas, but unevenly by class, race and country. Before 1860 most women worked within the household economy on farms. By the early 1900s growing numbers of young, unmarried women worked for wages: in textile mills and garment workshops, as domestic servants (the largest single occupation for women in every country), and increasingly as teachers, nurses, typists, telephone operators and shop assistants. Women made up about a fifth of the US paid workforce by 1920.

Education opened new roles. Women's colleges such as Vassar (1861) and Bryn Mawr (1885) were founded in the USA, and in Argentina Sarmiento recruited American women teachers to train the teachers of his new public schools. Middle-class women entered public life through reform: the Woman's Christian Temperance Union (1874), the largest women's organisation in the USA, campaigned against alcohol and for suffrage; Jane Addams founded Hull House in Chicago (1889), the best-known of the settlement houses in which educated women lived among and served immigrant families.

The campaign for the vote moved at different speeds. Wyoming Territory gave women the vote in 1869, and by 1914 most western states had done so. The National American Woman Suffrage Association (formed in 1890) campaigned state by state, while Alice Paul's National Woman's Party picketed the White House from 1917. Women's war work helped persuade Congress, and the 19th Amendment was ratified on 18 August 1920. In practice most African American women in the South, like Black men, were still prevented from voting.

In Canada women won the federal vote in 1918, and in the Persons Case of 18 October 1929 the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London ruled that women were "persons" who could be appointed to the Senate, overturning a Canadian Supreme Court decision. The case was brought by five Alberta women, the "Famous Five", led by Emily Murphy. Several of them also supported eugenic sterilisation, a reminder that reformers of the period often combined progressive and exclusionary ideas.

In Latin America women's organisations grew from the 1900s, led mostly by educated middle-class women: the first International Feminine Congress met in Buenos Aires in 1910, and the Brazilian Federation for the Advancement of Women was founded by Bertha Lutz in 1922. Working-class women were active in anarchist and socialist movements, such as the 1907 rent strike in the tenements of Buenos Aires. Legal change was slow: civil codes kept married women under their husbands' authority, although Uruguay allowed divorce in 1907 and, in 1913, divorce at the wife's request alone.

Some reformers campaigned for women's control over childbirth: the nurse Margaret Sanger opened the first birth-control clinic in the USA in Brooklyn in 1916 and was arrested for it. The 1920s produced the image of the "new woman" or "flapper" in the USA and Canada: young, urban, wage-earning, with short hair and skirts, who smoked, drove and danced to jazz. The image exaggerated change. Most married women did not work for wages, and pay and job opportunities remained far below men's.

Developments in the arts

Artists and writers across the Americas looked for national forms of expression, often in reaction to European models.

• USA. Realist writers such as Mark Twain and Theodore Dreiser, and the "Ashcan School" painters, depicted ordinary and urban life. The Armory Show in New York (1913) introduced European modern art to a shocked American public. Jazz, developed by African American musicians in New Orleans and spread north by the Great Migration, became the sound of the 1920s.

• The Harlem Renaissance. In the 1920s Harlem in New York became the centre of a flowering of African American literature, music and art: the poets Langston Hughes and Claude McKay, the novelist and anthropologist Zora Neale Hurston, and Alain Locke's anthology The New Negro (1925). It grew out of the Great Migration, which made Harlem the largest Black urban community in the USA.

• Canada. The Group of Seven, painters who first exhibited together in Toronto in 1920, presented the northern wilderness as the essence of Canadian identity.

• Mexico. After 1921 the education minister José Vasconcelos commissioned Diego Rivera, José Clemente Orozco and David Alfaro Siqueiros to paint public murals celebrating the Indigenous past, the revolution and the working people.

• Brazil. The Modern Art Week in São Paulo (February 1922), held in the year of the centenary of independence, launched Brazilian modernism, which sought a national culture mixing European, African and Indigenous influences.

• Spanish America. The Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío's Azul (1888) began modernismo, the first Latin American literary movement to influence Spain. The tango, born in the immigrant tenements of Buenos Aires and Montevideo, became fashionable in Paris before 1914.

African Americans, 1877–1929: Jim Crow, protest and migration

When Reconstruction ended in 1877, about 90 per cent of the country's 6.5 million African Americans lived in the South, most of them as sharecroppers or tenant farmers. Over the next twenty years southern states, now controlled by white Democrats who called themselves "Redeemers", built a system of segregation and disfranchisement known as Jim Crow.

Social, economic and legal conditions

Economic conditions. Most rural African Americans were trapped in sharecropping and the crop-lien system, under which a merchant or landowner advanced seeds and supplies against the coming harvest at high interest. Many families ended each year in debt and could not leave. In towns Black workers were mostly confined to unskilled and domestic jobs, and most trade unions excluded them.

Disfranchisement. Mississippi's constitution of 1890 introduced a poll tax and a literacy test, applied by white registrars who could pass whites and fail Black applicants. Other southern states followed, adding grandfather clauses that exempted men whose ancestors had voted before 1867 (that is, whites) and all-white Democratic primaries. In Louisiana the number of registered Black voters fell from about 130,000 in 1896 to about 1,300 in 1904.

Segregation in law. From the late 1880s states required separate railway carriages, schools, waiting rooms, hospitals and later almost every public place. In 1892 Homer Plessy, a Louisiana man of mixed descent, deliberately sat in a whites-only railway carriage to test the state's Separate Car Act. In Plessy v. Ferguson (18 May 1896) the Supreme Court ruled by seven votes to one that segregation was constitutional so long as facilities were equal. Only Justice John Marshall Harlan, a former slave-owner from Kentucky, dissented.

But in view of the constitution, in the eye of the law, there is in this country no superior, dominant, ruling class of citizens. There is no caste here. Our constitution is color-blind, and neither knows nor tolerates classes among citizens. In respect of civil rights, all citizens are equal before the law.

Justice John Marshall Harlan, dissenting opinion in Plessy v. Ferguson, US Supreme Court, 18 May 1896. A dissent has no legal force, and Harlan wrote it knowing he had lost; in the same opinion he still described the white race as the dominant one in prestige and wealth. Its value lies in showing that the "separate but equal" doctrine was challenged from inside the highest court at the time, and civil rights lawyers later used his words against segregation.

Violence. Segregation was enforced by terror. The Tuskegee Institute recorded 3,446 Black victims of lynching between 1882 and 1968, most of them before 1930, usually without any trial. The journalist Ida B. Wells, whose friends were lynched in Memphis in 1892, showed in Southern Horrors (1892) that the common justification, the rape of white women, was rarely even alleged, and that lynching was used to punish economic success and to terrorise.

Strategies for progress: Washington, Du Bois and Garvey

African American leaders disagreed about how to respond. Booker T. Washington, born into slavery in Virginia, founded the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama in 1881 to train Black students in trades, farming and teaching. At the Cotton States Exposition in Atlanta on 18 September 1895 he set out what critics called the "Atlanta Compromise".

In all things that are purely social, we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress. There is no defense or security for any of us except in the highest intelligence and development of all.

Booker T. Washington, address to the Cotton States and International Exposition, Atlanta, 18 September 1895. Washington spoke to a largely white southern audience, at a time of rising lynching and disfranchisement, and needed the support of white philanthropists and politicians for Tuskegee. His public acceptance of social separation in return for economic opportunity was shaped by that audience; his biographer Louis Harlan later showed that Washington secretly funded legal challenges to disfranchisement and segregation.

W. E. B. Du Bois, a historian and sociologist born in Massachusetts and the first African American to earn a doctorate at Harvard (1895), rejected this strategy. In The Souls of Black Folk (1903) he argued that accommodation had been answered with disfranchisement and segregation.

Mr. Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things,— First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro youth,—and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, and accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South.

W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, chapter 3, "Of Mr. Booker T. Washington and Others", 1903. Du Bois wrote for an educated northern readership, Black and white, as the leader of a younger generation challenging Washington's dominance. His summary is a critic's framing, but it identifies the issues that divided the two men: voting rights, civil rights and higher education.

Du Bois and others founded the Niagara Movement in 1905 to demand full civil and political rights. In 1909 its members joined white progressives to form the NAACP, with Du Bois as editor of its magazine, The Crisis. The NAACP worked mainly through the courts and publicity. It won Guinn v. United States (1915), which struck down Oklahoma's grandfather clause, and Buchanan v. Warley (1917), which struck down laws segregating housing, and campaigned for a federal anti-lynching law. The Dyer Bill passed the House of Representatives in 1922 but was blocked in the Senate by southern senators.

Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, founded the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in Jamaica in 1914, moved to New York in 1916 and set up a branch in Harlem in 1917, which became the movement's headquarters. Garvey preached Black pride, economic independence and a return to Africa ("Africa for the Africans"). The UNIA attracted hundreds of thousands of members, with branches across the Americas and Africa, and set up businesses including the Black Star Line shipping company (1919). It was the largest mass movement among people of African descent of the period. Garvey was convicted of mail fraud over the sale of Black Star Line shares in 1923 and deported in 1927.

The Great Migration

Between about 1910 and 1930 well over a million African Americans left the rural South for cities in the North and Midwest, such as Chicago, Detroit, New York and Philadelphia, in the first phase of the Great Migration; by 1930 about 1.3 million southern-born African Americans lived in other regions, and the first phase as a whole (1910–1940) moved about 1.6 million people. Chicago's Black population grew from about 44,000 in 1910 to about 234,000 in 1930.

Migrants found higher wages and the right to vote, but also overcrowded housing, segregation by custom and by restrictive covenants, and white hostility. In the "Red Summer" of 1919, white mobs attacked Black neighbourhoods in Chicago, Washington and many other places; in Chicago 38 people died. In Tulsa, Oklahoma, on 31 May and 1 June 1921, a white mob destroyed the prosperous Black district of Greenwood, killing perhaps 100–300 people (the official count was 36). Black veterans of the First World War, who had fought for democracy abroad, were among those who fought back, and a new assertiveness, described as the "New Negro", spread through Black communities.

The Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s expressed this new spirit. Writers such as Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Zora Neale Hurston and Jean Toomer, the musicians Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, and the philosopher Alain Locke, whose anthology The New Negro (1925) named the movement, asserted Black identity and creativity. Its significance is debated: it gave African Americans a new cultural confidence and visibility, but most of its audience and patrons were white, and it did little to change the economic and legal position of most Black Americans by 1929.

Challenges: labour conflict and social unrest

Rapid industrialisation and export growth created a large wage-earning class with few legal protections. Workers responded with unions and strikes; employers and governments often responded with force. Across the Americas, labour conflict was among the most serious challenges to the new national order.

The United States

The first national strike came in July 1877, when railway workers struck against wage cuts during the depression that followed the Panic of 1873. The Great Railroad Strike spread from West Virginia to Pittsburgh, Chicago and St Louis; President Rutherford Hayes sent federal troops, and around 100 people were killed. The Knights of Labor, which admitted skilled and unskilled workers, women and African Americans, grew to about 700,000 members by 1886 but collapsed after the Haymarket affair in Chicago (4 May 1886), when a bomb killed police officers at a meeting for the eight-hour day and anarchists were convicted and hanged on weak evidence.

The American Federation of Labor (AFL, 1886), led by Samuel Gompers, organised skilled craftsmen and concentrated on wages and hours rather than political change. Large strikes were defeated with private guards, state militias and federal troops: at Carnegie's Homestead steelworks (1892) a battle with Pinkerton guards left about ten dead; the Pullman Strike (1894) was broken by a federal court injunction and troops. The Industrial Workers of the World (IWW, 1905) tried to unite all workers in "one big union" and was crushed during the First World War and the Red Scare of 1919–1920.

Canada

The Winnipeg General Strike (15 May to 25 June 1919) was the largest in Canadian history. About 30,000 workers walked out in support of metalworkers demanding union recognition and higher wages after wartime inflation. The federal government, fearing a Bolshevik-style revolution, arrested the strike leaders and amended the law to allow the deportation of British-born immigrants. On "Bloody Saturday", 21 June, the Royal North-West Mounted Police charged a crowd, and two strikers died.

Latin America

In Latin America workers were often immigrants influenced by anarchism and syndicalism, and states treated strikes as threats to public order. Argentina's Residence Law (1902) allowed the government to deport foreign "agitators". In January 1919, during the Semana Trágica ("Tragic Week"), a metalworkers' strike in Buenos Aires became a general strike; the army, police and armed civilian groups crushed it and attacked Jewish immigrants, and hundreds died. In Patagonia in 1920–1922 the army killed many hundreds of striking farm workers.

In Chile, at the Santa María School in Iquique on 21 December 1907, the army fired on striking nitrate workers and their families; estimates of the dead range from about 200 to more than 2,000. In Mexico the strikes at the US-owned Cananea copper mine (1906) and the Río Blanco textile mills (1907) were crushed by force and are often seen as early signs of the revolution.

Repression was not the only response. By 1929 governments had begun to accept some labour reforms: Uruguay legislated an eight-hour day in 1915; Mexico's constitution of 1917 promised an eight-hour day and the right to strike; US states passed laws on hours, accidents and child labour, although the Supreme Court struck down many of them, including the federal child labour laws of 1916 and 1919. Argentina's Radical government under Yrigoyen first mediated in strikes, then turned to repression in 1919.

Challenges: Indigenous peoples and the frontier of settlement

For Indigenous peoples, the formation of modern nations meant the loss of land and independence. Between the 1860s and the 1890s the governments of the USA, Canada, Argentina and Chile completed the conquest of the last large territories controlled by independent Indigenous nations: the Great Plains, the Canadian Prairies, the Argentine Pampas and Patagonia, and Araucanía in southern Chile. In each case railways, settlers and new weapons combined with state policies of confinement and assimilation.

The United States: wars, reservations and allotment

After the Civil War the US Army fought a series of wars against the Plains nations, the Lakota, Cheyenne, Comanche and others, who resisted the advance of railways and settlers. The near-extermination of the buffalo, from tens of millions to a few hundred animals by the late 1880s, mostly by commercial hunters, destroyed the economic basis of Plains life. The Lakota and Cheyenne defeated George Custer's cavalry at the Little Bighorn on 25 June 1876, but by 1881 most Plains peoples had been forced onto reservations. At Wounded Knee in South Dakota on 29 December 1890 the army killed some 250–300 Lakota, many of them women and children.

Reformers who considered themselves friends of Indigenous people then sought to end tribal life altogether. The Dawes Act (General Allotment Act) of 8 February 1887 divided reservation land into individual plots of 160 acres for each family head, with US citizenship for those who accepted allotment; "surplus" land was sold to settlers. Indigenous landholding fell from about 138 million acres in 1887 to about 48 million in 1934. Children were sent to boarding schools such as Carlisle in Pennsylvania (1879), whose founder, Richard Henry Pratt, summed up his aim as "Kill the Indian in him, and save the man". The Indian Citizenship Act of 2 June 1924 made all Indigenous people born in the USA citizens, although several states still prevented them from voting.

Canada: treaties, the Indian Act and residential schools

Canada acquired the Prairies peacefully by comparison with the USA, but with similar results. Between 1871 and 1877 the Crown signed seven numbered treaties with the First Nations of the Prairies, who gave up title to vast areas in return for reserves, annual payments, tools and promises of help in famine. The First Nations understood the treaties as agreements to share the land; the government treated them as surrenders. When the buffalo disappeared around 1879, Ottawa withheld rations to force bands onto reserves, and thousands faced starvation.

The Indian Act of 1876 made status First Nations people legal wards of the federal government, controlled by Indian agents. Amendments banned the potlatch and other ceremonies (1884), introduced a pass system after 1885 that restricted movement off reserves, and made attendance at residential schools compulsory for many children (1920). About 150,000 First Nations, Métis and Inuit children attended these church-run schools between the 1880s and 1996; Canada's Truth and Reconciliation Commission concluded in 2015 that the system amounted to cultural genocide.

Argentina and Chile: the southern conquests

In Argentina, General Julio Roca, as minister of war, led the Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885), using rifles, the telegraph and railways to defeat the Mapuche, Tehuelche and Ranquel peoples of the Pampas and Patagonia. Army reports counted about 1,300 Indigenous people killed and some 14,000–15,000 captured by the end of the campaign of 1879, and later campaigns added more; many were sent to work on sugar plantations in Tucumán or as servants in Buenos Aires, and families were separated. The conquered lands were sold or granted in huge blocks, creating the great estates of the export economy. The name "desert" expressed the view that Indigenous land was empty and unused.

Chile carried out the "Pacification of Araucanía" (1861–1883), occupying the Mapuche lands south of the Biobío river that had resisted Spain for three centuries. Mapuche communities were confined to small reserves, and their lands were given to Chilean and European settlers.

In Mexico and Peru, where Indigenous people were a large share of the population, liberal land laws attacked communal landholding in the name of individual property. In Mexico, Yaqui people of Sonora who resisted the loss of their lands were deported in thousands to henequen plantations in Yucatán in the 1900s. In Peru and Bolivia the expansion of haciendas at the expense of Indigenous communities provoked repeated rebellions.

Ideological trends and the transformation of nations

The leaders who built modern nations in the Americas justified their policies with a set of ideas, most of them borrowed from Europe and adapted to American conditions. Some, such as liberalism and positivism, drove modernisation from above; others, such as progressivism, indigenismo and nationalism, criticised its results; and some, such as social Darwinism and nativism, were used to exclude groups from the nation.

Liberalism

Nineteenth-century liberalism stood for individual rights, private property, free trade, limited government and the separation of Church and state. In Latin America liberals saw the Catholic Church's wealth and the communal lands of Indigenous villages as obstacles to progress. Mexico's Reform laws of the 1850s, enforced after 1867, forced the sale of Church and communal land, which in practice passed to hacendados and speculators. Argentina's Law 1420 (1884) made primary education free, compulsory and secular, and civil marriage followed in 1888. In the USA and Canada liberal ideas of free markets and limited government supported laissez-faire towards business.

Positivism

Positivism, the philosophy of the Frenchman Auguste Comte, held that society should be studied and managed scientifically, like nature, and that progress required order. In Latin America it appealed to elites who wanted economic growth without the disorder of mass politics. In Brazil, positivist officers such as Benjamin Constant Botelho de Magalhães, a teacher at the military academy, helped overthrow the monarchy and put Comte's motto Ordem e Progresso on the republic's flag. In Mexico, Díaz's advisers, known as the científicos ("scientists") and led by the finance minister José Yves Limantour, used positivist arguments to justify authoritarian rule as the precondition of progress.

Social Darwinism and scientific racism

Social Darwinism applied the idea of a struggle for survival to societies. The English writer Herbert Spencer coined the phrase "survival of the fittest" (1864), and the Yale professor William Graham Sumner argued in What Social Classes Owe to Each Other (1883) that government should not help the poor. In the USA these ideas justified laissez-faire and opposition to reform; combined with scientific racism, they justified segregation, the conquest of Indigenous peoples and immigration restriction.

In Latin America the same ideas encouraged "whitening". The Argentine thinker Juan Bautista Alberdi had argued in 1852 that "to govern is to populate" (gobernar es poblar), meaning populating with Europeans, and Sarmiento's Facundo (1845) framed Argentine history as a struggle between European "civilisation" and gaucho and Indigenous "barbarism". Argentina and Brazil subsidised European, not Asian or African, immigration, partly in the belief that it would "improve" the population.

Manifest Destiny and the frontier

Manifest Destiny, a phrase used by the journalist John O'Sullivan in 1845, expressed the belief that the USA was destined by God to spread across the continent. After 1865 it justified the conquest of the West, and in the 1890s it was extended overseas, as the study of the Americas in global affairs shows. Historians see it as an ideology that presented conquest as natural and inevitable.

In 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner gave the idea an academic form, arguing that the frontier had shaped American character and democracy.

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

Frederick Jackson Turner, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History", paper read to the American Historical Association, Chicago, 1893. Turner wrote just after the 1890 census declared that a continuous frontier line no longer existed, and he spoke at a moment of anxiety about what would replace the frontier. His description of Indigenous lands as "free land" shows the settler perspective of his time, which later historians criticised.

Progressivism

Progressivism was a broad movement, not a single party, that sought to use government and expert knowledge to correct the abuses of industrial society. Investigative journalists, whom Theodore Roosevelt called muckrakers, exposed abuses: Ida Tarbell's History of the Standard Oil Company (1904), Lincoln Steffens's The Shame of the Cities (1904) and Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle (1906) about the Chicago meat-packing plants. Progressives wanted to regulate big business, clean up city and state government, protect workers, women and children, conserve natural resources and, for many, ban alcohol. In Canada a similar reform movement, inspired by the social gospel, campaigned for prohibition, women's suffrage and public health.

Nationalism

Nationalism took different forms. In Canada it meant a growing sense of a Canadian identity within the British Empire. English Canadian imperialists wanted to help Britain in its wars, while French Canadian nationalists led by Henri Bourassa opposed sending troops to the South African War (1899) and the Naval Service Act (1910). In Latin America, cultural nationalism grew in reaction to European dominance and US power. The Cuban poet and independence leader José Martí, who lived in exile in New York, warned in 1891 that Spanish America must govern itself according to its own realities.

The European university must bow to the American university. The history of America, from the Incas to the present, must be taught in clear detail and to the letter, even if the archons of Greece are overlooked. Our Greece must take priority over the Greece which is not ours.

José Martí, "Our America" (Nuestra América), essay published in La Revista Ilustrada (New York) and El Partido Liberal (Mexico City), January 1891; English translation as reproduced in the University of Pennsylvania's online collection of Martí's writings (translator not named). Martí was writing as a revolutionary preparing the Cuban war of independence, after reporting on the Washington conference of 1889–1890 as a newspaper correspondent, with deep suspicion of US intentions. The essay shows a Latin American perspective that rejected imitation of Europe and the USA and, unusually for its time, called for including Indigenous and Black Americans in the nation.

The Uruguayan writer José Enrique Rodó, in Ariel (1900), contrasted the spiritual idealism of Latin American culture with the materialism of the USA, and was read across the region by a generation of students.

Indigenismo

Indigenismo was a movement, mostly of non-Indigenous intellectuals and artists, that valued Indigenous peoples and cultures as the basis of national identity. In Mexico the anthropologist Manuel Gamio argued in Forjando patria (1916) that the nation must integrate its Indigenous majority, and José Vasconcelos's La raza cósmica (1925) celebrated mestizaje, racial and cultural mixing, as the source of a new "cosmic race". In Peru, José Carlos Mariátegui's Seven Interpretive Essays on Peruvian Reality (1928) argued that the "problem of the Indian" was a problem of land, and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre founded APRA (1924) with an Indo-American programme. President Augusto Leguía's constitution of 1920 recognised Indigenous communities legally.

Nativism

Nativism is hostility to immigrants in the name of protecting the "native" population, which in the USA meant white Protestants of north-west European descent. It produced the first US law to exclude a group by nationality.

Whereas in the opinion of the Government of the United States the coming of Chinese laborers to this country endangers the good order of certain localities within the territory thereof: Therefore, Be it enacted [...] That [...] the coming of Chinese laborers to the United States be, and the same is hereby, suspended.

An Act to execute certain treaty stipulations relating to Chinese (the Chinese Exclusion Act), US Congress, 6 May 1882. The law suspended Chinese labour immigration for ten years; it was renewed in 1892 and made permanent in 1902, and was repealed only in 1943. Its vague claim about "good order" reflects the campaigns of white workers and politicians in California, who blamed Chinese labourers for low wages during the depression of the 1870s.

Nativism grew with the "new immigration" from southern and eastern Europe after 1890: the Immigration Restriction League (1894) campaigned for a literacy test, which Congress passed over President Wilson's veto in 1917. After the First World War, the Red Scare of 1919–1920 targeted immigrant radicals; the Italian anarchists Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti were executed in 1927 after a trial widely seen as prejudiced. The second Ku Klux Klan, founded in 1915, attacked Catholics, Jews and immigrants as well as African Americans, and claimed several million members in the mid-1920s. Nativism culminated in the quota laws of 1921 and 1924, which cut immigration from southern and eastern Europe. Canada had its own versions: the Chinese head tax and the turning back of the Komagata Maru in 1914. Hostility to Asian migrants also appeared in Latin America: in May 1911 revolutionary troops and local residents killed more than 300 Chinese residents of Torreón in Mexico.

Leaders and the transformation of nations

Leaders can be judged by their aims (what they wanted to change), their methods, and their successes and failures, measured against the constraints they faced. Five leaders show the range of leadership in the period: Roosevelt, Laurier, Díaz, Roca and Batlle y Ordóñez. John A. Macdonald, Bartolomé Mitre and Domingo Sarmiento, Hipólito Yrigoyen and Woodrow Wilson appear in the accounts of their countries.

Theodore Roosevelt (USA, president 1901–1909)

Roosevelt, a Republican from a wealthy New York family, became president when William McKinley was assassinated in September 1901. He believed that the president should act as "steward" of the public interest and that the federal government should stand above business and labour as an impartial referee. His domestic programme became known as the Square Deal: control of corporations, consumer protection and conservation. His foreign policy belongs to the study of the Americas in global affairs.

• Control of corporations. Roosevelt distinguished "good" trusts from "bad" ones. His administration sued the Northern Securities Company, a railway combination organised by Morgan, and won in the Supreme Court in 1904; it brought more than 40 antitrust suits, including the case that broke up Standard Oil in 1911. The Hepburn Act (1906) gave the Interstate Commerce Commission power to set maximum railway rates.

• Labour. In the anthracite coal strike of 1902 he threatened to take over the mines unless the owners accepted arbitration, the first time a president had intervened in a strike on terms that did not simply favour employers. The miners won a 10 per cent wage rise and a shorter day, but not union recognition.

• Consumer protection. After The Jungle caused a public outcry, Congress passed the Meat Inspection Act and the Pure Food and Drug Act (both 30 June 1906).

• Conservation. Roosevelt and his forester Gifford Pinchot placed about 230 million acres under federal protection as national forests, parks, monuments and wildlife refuges, and created the US Forest Service (1905).

Roosevelt's achievements were real but limited. He accepted large corporations as efficient and wanted to regulate rather than break them up; the courts and a conservative Congress blocked more radical change. He did little for African Americans: after he invited Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House in 1901, the southern outcry made him retreat, and in 1906 he dismissed 167 Black soldiers without trial after the Brownsville affair. In 1912 he ran as the Progressive ("Bull Moose") candidate on a programme of "New Nationalism", including social insurance and votes for women; he split the Republican vote and Wilson won.

Wilfrid Laurier (Canada, prime minister 1896–1911)

Laurier, a lawyer from Quebec, was Canada's first francophone prime minister. His aim was to hold together a country divided between English and French, Protestant and Catholic, and imperialists and nationalists, while making it prosperous. His method was compromise, which earned him the nickname "the great conciliator" and the criticism of both sides.

• The Manitoba Schools Question. The Laurier–Greenway compromise of 1896 kept a single public school system in Manitoba but allowed religious instruction at the end of the school day and teaching in French (or other languages) where enough pupils spoke it. Catholic bishops condemned it; it ended the crisis but not French Canadian grievances.

• Immigration and the West. His interior minister Clifford Sifton advertised the "Last Best West" across Europe and the USA and recruited farmers from central and eastern Europe, the "stalwart peasant in a sheep-skin coat", as he later put it. About 2.5–3 million immigrants arrived between 1896 and 1914, and Alberta and Saskatchewan became provinces in 1905.

• Economic growth. The wheat boom, two new transcontinental railways and rapid industrial growth made these years the most prosperous in Canada's history to that point. Laurier is said to have predicted in 1904 that the twentieth century would belong to Canada.

• Canada and the Empire. In the South African War (1899) he compromised by sending volunteers, about 7,000 in all, paid by Britain once in South Africa. The Naval Service Act (1910) created a small Canadian navy that could be placed under British command in war, satisfying neither imperialists, who mocked it as a "tin-pot navy", nor Bourassa's nationalists.

Laurier lost the election of 1911 when he proposed a reciprocity (free trade) agreement with the USA. Manufacturers and imperialists in Ontario attacked it as a step towards annexation, while Quebec nationalists turned against him over the navy. His compromises had kept Canada united and prosperous for fifteen years, but they left the deeper divisions over language, schools and the Empire unresolved, as the conscription crisis of 1917 showed.

Porfirio Díaz (Mexico, 1876–1880 and 1884–1911)

Díaz, a hero of the war against the French, came to power in a revolt in 1876 under the slogan "effective suffrage, no re-election", and then had himself re-elected seven times. His aims were order and progress: to end decades of civil war and attract foreign capital. He used a mix of patronage, co-optation of regional bosses, a rural police force (the rurales) and repression. Railways grew from about 640 km to about 19,000 km, exports multiplied, and Mexico paid its debts and won foreign credit. The costs were the concentration of land, the exclusion of the middle class from power and the poverty of peasants and workers, which led to the revolution of 1910. His rule is the subject of a separate study; for this one, Díaz is the clearest case of a leader who achieved economic modernisation without political modernisation.

Julio Argentino Roca (Argentina, president 1880–1886 and 1898–1904)

Roca, an army officer from Tucumán, made his name in the Conquest of the Desert (1878–1885) and became president in 1880. He completed national consolidation by federalising Buenos Aires, and his Partido Autonomista Nacional dominated politics for a generation. His governments promoted railways, immigration and secular education (Law 1420 of 1884). He is a contested figure: celebrated as the founder of the modern Argentine state, and condemned for the conquest of Indigenous peoples and for an oligarchic system based on electoral fraud.

José Batlle y Ordóñez (Uruguay, president 1903–1907 and 1911–1915)

Batlle, leader of the Colorado Party, ended a civil war with the rural Blanco Party in 1904 and then made Uruguay the first welfare state in the Americas. His governments introduced an eight-hour working day (1915), pensions and accident compensation, free secondary education, divorce laws (1907 and 1913), and the abolition of the death penalty (1907). The state took over the Bank of the Republic (1911), electricity (1912) and other utilities, and the new constitution in force from 1919 separated Church and state and created a collective executive council, partly on Batlle's Swiss-inspired model, to prevent personal dictatorship. Batllismo shows that modernisation in Latin America could include social reform and democracy, although it rested on the income from beef and wool exports.

Migration and its impacts

Between the 1860s and 1914 the Americas received the largest movement of people in history to that time. Cheap steamship fares, railways to the ports, rural poverty and population growth in Europe pushed people to leave; land, jobs and higher wages in the Americas pulled them. Governments of the receiving countries actively recruited settlers, because they needed labour and people to occupy territory. Most migrants went to four countries: the USA, Argentina, Canada and Brazil.

The United States

About 26 million immigrants arrived in the USA between 1870 and 1920. Until the 1880s most came from Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia. After about 1890 the majority came from southern and eastern Europe: Italians, Poles, Jews from the Russian Empire, Hungarians, Slovaks and Greeks. Contemporaries called them the "new immigration" and often considered them less able to become American. From 1892 most European immigrants passed through the federal station on Ellis Island in New York harbour, where they were inspected for disease and the likelihood of becoming a "public charge". In 1910 about 14.7 per cent of the US population had been born abroad.

Immigrants provided the labour of industrialisation: Slavs and Hungarians in the steel mills and coal mines, Italians in construction, Jews in the garment trades of New York, Scandinavians and Germans on Midwestern farms. They built Catholic and Jewish communities, ethnic newspapers and mutual aid societies, and were the base of urban political machines. Their arrival also produced a nativist reaction, which culminated in two laws.

• Emergency Quota Act (1921): limited annual immigration from each European country to 3 per cent of people born in that country living in the USA in 1910.

• Immigration Act (Johnson–Reed Act), 1924: cut the quota to 2 per cent of the foreign-born of each nationality in 1890, before most "new immigrants" had arrived; set an annual ceiling of about 165,000 from outside the western hemisphere; and barred immigrants who were ineligible for citizenship, which in effect excluded all Asians.

Migrants from Asia met exclusion earlier. After the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882), Japanese immigration grew on the West Coast until the "Gentlemen's Agreement" of 1907–1908, in which Japan agreed to stop issuing passports to labourers. Immigration from Mexico was not restricted by quota, and several hundred thousand Mexicans moved north during and after the revolution of 1910–1920 to work on railways, mines and the farms of the Southwest.

Canada

Canada received few immigrants until the late 1890s, and many arrivals moved on to the USA. Under Laurier and Sifton, aggressive recruitment and the end of free land in the US West brought about 2.5–3 million immigrants between 1896 and 1914, from Britain, the USA and central and eastern Europe (Ukrainians, Poles, Germans, Doukhobors and Mennonites). They turned the Prairies into wheat country. The welcome depended on race: Chinese immigrants paid a head tax of 50 dollars from 1885, raised to 500 dollars in 1903, and were almost completely excluded by the Chinese Immigration Act of 1923. In 1914 the Komagata Maru, carrying 376 passengers from British India, was held in Vancouver harbour for two months and forced to return.

Argentina

About 6 million immigrants reached Argentina between 1857 and 1930, mostly from Italy and Spain; perhaps half of them settled permanently, while others, called golondrinas ("swallows"), crossed the Atlantic each year for the harvest. In 1914 about 30 per cent of Argentina's population, and about half of the population of Buenos Aires, had been born abroad, a far higher share than in the USA.

Because land on the Pampas was already held in great estates, most immigrants became tenants, labourers or city workers rather than independent farmers, and many lived in crowded tenements called conventillos. Because few became citizens, they could not vote, so the Sáenz Peña Law of 1912 widened the electorate less than it seemed. Immigrants brought anarchism and socialism, and the state responded with the Residence Law (1902). Their children were turned into Argentines through the secular public schools and compulsory military service (1901).

Brazil

Brazil received about 4 million immigrants between 1872 and 1930, mostly Italians, Portuguese and Spaniards. After abolition, the state of São Paulo paid the passages of European families to work on coffee plantations as colonos, replacing enslaved labour. The policy reflected the planters' need for labour and the elite's wish to "whiten" the population, and it left Afro-Brazilians, freed in 1888, competing for the worst-paid jobs. Japanese immigration began with the arrival of the Kasato Maru at Santos in 1908, creating what became the largest Japanese community outside Japan.

Data: national censuses and immigration statistics; figures are approximate because many migrants returned or moved on.

Emigration, Asian migration and labour migration within the Americas

Migration was not only from Europe. Between the late 1840s and 1874 about 100,000 Chinese indentured labourers ("coolies") were shipped to Peru, and over 120,000 to Cuba, to work on plantations, guano islands and railways in conditions close to slavery. Indian indentured labourers went to British Guiana and Trinidad until 1917. Tens of thousands of West Indians, about 20,000 from Barbados alone, worked on the Panama Canal (1904–1914), and others went to Cuban sugar plantations and Central American banana plantations.

Internal migration

Movement within countries changed nations as much as immigration. In the USA, the Homestead Act of 1862 offered 160 acres of public land to settlers who farmed it for five years, and land runs such as the one into Oklahoma on 22 April 1889 drew settlers onto former Indigenous land. Rural Americans moved to cities in their millions, and the Great Migration of African Americans changed the politics and culture of northern cities. In Canada, settlers moved from Ontario to the Prairies; in Brazil, drought refugees from the Northeast went to the Amazon rubber forests; in Mexico, workers moved north to mines, railways and the border.

The impact of migration on Indigenous peoples

For Indigenous peoples, the arrival of millions of settlers was the decisive force behind dispossession. Railways and settlement destroyed the buffalo herds of the Plains and Prairies; homesteaders, ranchers and immigrants in Argentina, Chile and Canada occupied land taken in the conquests of the 1870s and 1880s; and the demand for land after allotment in the USA turned reservations into settler farms. Some Indigenous people themselves became migrant labourers on haciendas, plantations and in mines, or, in the case of the Yaqui, were forcibly deported. The experience of migration was therefore one of opportunity for the settlers and loss for the peoples whose land they settled.

Comparing the formation of modern nations

The countries of the Americas shared many of the same forces between 1860 and 1929: railways, foreign capital, mass immigration, the conquest of Indigenous lands and new ideologies. They produced different kinds of nation because of differences in their economies, their political institutions and the groups that held power.

Several judgements follow from the comparison. Economic growth was rapid everywhere, but only the USA built a broad industrial base, and the export economies remained exposed to world prices, as the Depression after 1929 showed. Political consolidation was achieved everywhere, but the degree of popular participation varied widely, from mass democracy (for white men) in the USA and Canada to narrow oligarchies in Brazil and Mexico. In every country the nation that was formed excluded or subordinated some of its inhabitants: Indigenous peoples everywhere, African Americans in the USA, Afro-Brazilians, Asian migrants and, in politics, most women until after 1918.

Perspectives and debates

Robber barons or industrial statesmen?

Historians have long disagreed about the great industrialists. In The Robber Barons (1934), written during the Depression, the journalist Matthew Josephson presented Carnegie, Rockefeller and Morgan as ruthless monopolists who grew rich through fraud, bribery and the exploitation of workers. In the 1940s and 1950s Allan Nevins, in his biography of Rockefeller (1940, revised 1953), presented them as "industrial statesmen" whose organisation of industry made the USA rich. The business historian Alfred Chandler, in The Visible Hand (1977), shifted the debate from morality to structure, arguing that large corporations with professional managers developed because they coordinated production and distribution more efficiently than markets could.

Who were the Progressives, and what did they want?

More recent historians stress the variety of progressivism, including the role of women's organisations, labour and immigrant communities in pressing for social legislation, and the movement's limits on race. The interpretations can be combined: different groups supported reform for different reasons, which explains why progressivism could include both trust-busting and business-friendly regulation.

The frontier: democracy or conquest?

Turner's frontier thesis (1893) dominated American historical writing for half a century: the frontier, he argued, made Americans individualistic, practical and democratic. From the 1980s the "New Western" historians rejected this view. Patricia Nelson Limerick, in The Legacy of Conquest (1987), presented the West as a place of conquest of Indigenous and Mexican peoples, of federal subsidy rather than individual self-reliance, and of continuing conflict over land and water. Comparisons with Canada, Argentina and Chile, where frontiers did not produce the same democracy, also weaken Turner's claim that the frontier by itself explains national character.

Dependency or development in Latin America?

Dependency theorists of the 1960s and 1970s, such as Andre Gunder Frank and Cardoso and Faletto, argued that the export boom of 1870–1929 tied Latin America to the industrial centre in a way that blocked balanced development: profits went abroad, elites invested in land rather than industry, and economies remained at the mercy of world prices. E. Bradford Burns, in The Poverty of Progress (1980), argued that modernisation enriched elites while impoverishing the rural majority and destroying popular cultures.

Critics point to evidence that export growth brought real gains: Argentina's income per head, rising wages that attracted millions of immigrants, and the first industries in São Paulo and Monterrey built with export profits. Platt (1977) showed that foreign firms seldom controlled governments, and Haber (1997) and other economic historians argue that Latin America fell behind because of domestic institutions, such as concentrated landholding, weak property rights and narrow political systems, more than because of foreign capital. Many historians now accept that export-led growth produced both development and dependence, and that its results depended on local institutions, as the contrast between Argentina's prosperity and Mexico's revolution suggests.

Washington and Du Bois

Contemporaries and historians have judged Booker T. Washington very differently. Du Bois's critique (1903) shaped the view of Washington as an accommodationist who accepted segregation. Louis Harlan's two-volume biography (1972, 1983) showed a more complex figure: a skilled political operator who controlled much of the Black press and patronage through his "Tuskegee Machine", and who secretly funded court cases against disfranchisement and segregated railway cars. Some historians argue that, given the violence of the 1890s South, Washington's strategy was the only realistic one for southern African Americans; others, following Du Bois, argue that public acceptance of segregation encouraged it. The debate turns on the perspective chosen: rural southern Black communities facing lynching, or the long-term struggle for equal rights.

Canadian Confederation: a centralised nation or a compact?

Donald Creighton, in his biography John A. Macdonald (1952–1955) and The Road to Confederation (1964), presented Confederation as the creation of a strong, centralised nation built around the St Lawrence and the railway, with Macdonald as its architect. Supporters of the compact theory, examined by Ramsay Cook in Provincial Autonomy, Minority Rights and the Compact Theory (1969), argued instead that Confederation was a pact between provinces, or between the two founding peoples, English and French, which the federal government could not change without their consent. The two readings still shape debates about Quebec and provincial rights.

Applying the ideas in exam questions

The six areas of this study (economic transformation, political and social transformation, challenges, ideologies, leaders and migration) overlap. A question on leaders can be answered with economic and ideological evidence, and a question on migration with evidence about Indigenous peoples and nativism. Strong answers use these links to weigh the claim from several perspectives.

Paper 3: economic transformation

Paper 3: the impact of migration

Paper 3: ideologies

Paper 3: leaders

The guidance for the question on Theodore Roosevelt includes a full essay plan, showing how to structure an answer on leadership.

Paper 3: African Americans

Self-check

• To do:

  I can describe the state of the main countries of the Americas around 1860 and explain what "modernisation" means.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes and consequences of railway building in the USA, Canada, Argentina and Mexico, and weigh their significance.

• To do:

  I can explain why the USA industrialised so rapidly, with examples of Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan and Ford, and describe urbanisation.

• To do:

  I can explain export-led growth in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Mexico and Canada, including valorisation and the National Policy.

• To do:

  I can define neocolonialism and dependency and weigh the debate on dependency and development.

• To do:

  I can explain the causes of Canadian Confederation, the compromises of the British North America Act and the opposition to it.

• To do:

  I can explain the Red River and North-West Resistances and their effect on French–English relations.

• To do:

  I can outline political change in the USA from the Gilded Age to the Progressive amendments.

• To do:

  I can explain political consolidation in Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, including the Sáenz Peña Law, abolition in 1888 and the Old Republic.

• To do:

  I can describe changes in the role of women and developments in the arts, and link them to national identity.

• To do:

  I can explain the social, economic and legal conditions of African Americans from 1877 to 1929, including Plessy v. Ferguson