Cabet's Utopia, from Minorca to Argentina: Bartolomé Victory y Suárez

Abstract

After the Battle of Caseros in 1852, Argentina experienced a historic moment of such intense and far-reaching transformations — driven by the dominant class —, that it was recently referred to as a “veritable process of social engineering”.1 During the course of this transformational period, three major objectives were achieved. In the first place, Argentina completed its integration into the new world capitalist order, so establishing the foundations of bourgeois order in that corner of the world. This was mirrored not only in the extremely rapid urbanization of Buenos Aires and other provincial capitals, the modernization of transport and means of communication, the commercial exploitation of all the factors of production in anticipation of a national market, but also in the transformation of regional bourgeois groups born under colonial or post-independent rule into a modern agricultural bourgeoisie that strove to control the levers of political power and set itself up as a dominant class of national scope...