Samuel Lafone: the businessman who helped build Uruguay and extended his ventures to the Falklands

He arrived before independence, industrialized Montevideo, financed governments and expanded his commercial network into the South Atlantic.
Lafone embodies the strengths and contradictions of a founding entrepreneur.

SAMUEL LAFONE: THE BUSINESSMAN WHO HELPED BUILD URUGUAY AND EXTENDED HIS VENTURES TO THE FALKLANDS
He arrived before independence, industrialized Montevideo, financed governments and expanded his commercial network into the South Atlantic.
Lafone embodies the strengths and contradictions of a founding entrepreneur.
By Santiago H. Pereira Testa

When Samuel Fisher Lafone arrived in the Río de la Plata in 1825, Uruguay did not yet exist as an independent state.
He was barely twenty years old.
He had been born in Liverpool, into a family connected to trade and leather tanning, and he began in Buenos Aires by exporting livestock products and importing British manufactures.
Hides, jerky and tallow left the Río de la Plata.
Textiles, tools and European manufactured goods came in the opposite direction.
It was an early form of globalization.
And Lafone understood it quickly.
In 1833 he settled in Montevideo, in a small, unstable and sparsely populated country where almost everything still had to be built.
For a businessman, that could have looked like a problem.
For Lafone, it seemed to be an opportunity.
He did not specialize in a single activity.
He took part in foreign trade, land, meat-salting plants, financing, immigration, maritime activity and banking.
Like many nineteenth-century entrepreneurs, he did not enter mature markets.
Very often, he had to help create them.
One of his most important ventures was his meat-salting plant on the Pantanoso stream.
Toward the end of the 1830s, he incorporated steam-powered machinery to extract fat and tallow from bones, which made it possible to make better use of the animal and expand export production.
This was industry.
Rudimentary by today’s standards, naturally.
But industry nonetheless.
That activity also transformed the surrounding territory.
In 1842, on Lafone’s land between the Miguelete and Pantanoso streams, the settlement of Pueblo Victoria was authorized.
Over time, the people of Montevideo would come to call it La Teja.
The business did not only produce.
It also attracted workers, created demand for housing and pushed the city’s expansion outward.
But Lafone becomes especially interesting if we resist the temptation to turn him into a hero.
His relations with the state were intense.
He was a creditor of the Government of the Defense during the Great War, took part in supply contracts, received concessions and became involved in businesses linked to public revenues.
Some contemporaries even accused him of trying to turn certain concessions into monopolistic positions.
Here a central issue emerges.
Not every entrepreneur who accumulates a fortune does so by competing in a free market.
Business history is also made of privileges, protections and proximity to power.
Even so, it is worth understanding the world in which Lafone operated.
The Uruguayan state was weak.
It needed money, supplies, population and infrastructure.
Entrepreneurs could provide them.
And in return they obtained rights, land or advantages that today we would regard as problematic.
During the Great War, Lafone became one of the main private creditors of the Government of the Defense.
And whoever lends money to a desperate government also acquires power.
Later he was among the founders of Banco Comercial.
The same logic appears once again.
Where solid economic institutions were still lacking, merchants themselves helped create them.
But Lafone’s scale did not end in Montevideo.
His economic geography was broader.
He thought in terms of ports, routes, cattle, ships, capital and markets.
Montevideo, Maldonado, the Atlantic coast and the South Atlantic formed part of a single commercial space.
And here we encounter one of the most current and sensitive aspects of his trajectory.
Together with his brother Alexander, Lafone took part in land and maritime exploitation ventures in Maldonado, but also in British enterprises in the Falkland Islands.
The southern region of East Falkland even came to be known as Lafonia.
That fact is not merely a curious detail.
It helps explain that, for certain entrepreneurs established in Montevideo in the mid-nineteenth century, the Falklands were not a remote periphery but part of an Atlantic network of commercial, maritime and livestock interests.
In other words, Lafone’s story also connects early Uruguay to a zone that remains geopolitically sensitive to this day.
Lafone made a great deal of money.
He also lost a great deal.
In 1858 he suffered a severe financial collapse.
He called his creditors together and, according to the available historical research, ended up paying his debts with interest.
He managed to recover, although he never again held the dominant position he had once enjoyed.
Because entrepreneurship does not consist only in becoming rich.
It consists in taking risks.
Samuel Fisher Lafone died in Buenos Aires in 1871, during the yellow fever epidemic, after going there and caring for sick members of his community.
He left behind companies, properties and an extensive network of businesses on both sides of the Río de la Plata.
But he also left a neighborhood, a church, a mark on banking history and a set of links between business, the state and commercial expansion that help us better understand how the country was materially built.
He was not a saint.
We do not need him to be one.
He was an entrepreneur.
He innovated, took risks, speculated, negotiated with governments, benefited from privileges, lost money, started over and left transformations that long outlived his own life.
And among those traces, not only Montevideo appears.
So do the Falklands.
That is why studying Lafone allows us to look at Uruguay’s entrepreneurial origins, but also to remember that his economic world did not end at national borders.
It extended across the Río de la Plata and into the South Atlantic.
Samuel Fisher Lafone was one of the men who imagined businesses, institutions and territories when almost everything was still waiting to be built.

Business and nation-building
Capital, state and privilege
Uruguay and the South Atlantic

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