I never understood this. From what I was taught in history class, masses of native north & south americans died because of European diseases. And for each latin american country, of course there are large african and native descents, but from what I read each country has a massive part of Spanish heritage.
Nowadays, how many humans live between El Paso and Ushuaia? More than half a billion? Yet Spain is only a country of 40m people. How is this possible?
In: 36
They died in large population centers, Still tons of people just going about their business out in the sticks.
1: Brazil is Portuguese, not Spanish. That’s 214.3 million people.
2: Immigration/Slavery. Almost the entirety of Argentina is of Spanish/Italian decent.
3: In Mexico for example, some 62% of the population is considered ‘Mestizo’ which is a mix of ‘Amerindian’ and spanish decent. Brazil has a Mulatto population of approx 43%.
People can procreate really quickly if thyr don’t have to compete for land. Also, the growing population from Europe was encouraged to go there. You could get land for cheap or free in many cases and get a much better live for yourself if you were willing to move to the new world.
Also, people populated South America from other countries. Brazil is mostly Portuguese.
Lost of native population died but not all, there’s an estimation of around 60 million people on the continent before 1492. Look at for ample the ancestry of the median population and you see a huge part of their ancestry [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexicans#Population_genetics_and_phenotype](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexicans#Population_genetics_and_phenotype)
It is not a billion people between that point. South Americas population is around 442 million in 2019, Central America’s is 186 million and the Caribbean’s 44 million is a total off 672 million. The is all of the Americas except for U.S.A. , Canada, Bermuda, Greenland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon
But all of it was not Spanish colonization, the main exception is Brazil with a population of 217 million which leaves 455 million. A billion is off by a factor of 2
ll of the population do not have their origin in Spain or America. there is the migration of another part of Europe primarily after their independence in the early 19th century.
https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/south-america-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/central-america-population/ https://www.worldometers.info/world-population/caribbean-population/
The enormous population is a result of primary growth after WWII Look at https://www.statista.com/statistics/1066995/population-mexico-historical/ when Mexico became independent in 1810 the population was around 6.4 million, at the start of WWII in 1939 is 20.3 million and today around 127 million
If you compare that to Spain the rise is from 12 million in 1810, 25 million 1939, and 47 million today.
If we include both the to low Soanocj population and to high in former Spanish colonies the error is 1000/40 /(455/47)= 2.58 and this number that primarily in the Caribbean and also in South and Central America
So Spain’s population has grown by a factor of 3.9 from 1810 to today compared to 19.8x for Mexico
If we assume the number is representative of the colonial population was 455/19.2 = 23.7 million or just double that of Spain itself
Look at Look at https://www.statista.com/statistics/997040/world-population-by-continent-1950-2020/ which estimates the population of all of the Americas in 1800 to 24 million compared to 194 million in Europe. That look to me like Mexico has grown less the other countries.
That will be closer to what really happened. In a period of around 300 years, Spain build a colonial empire in America that with emigration, native population, and importation of slaves end up with a colonial population of around 2x of their European population. In this portion moving to the colonization has been a good way for people from Sain to make more money or just find a place to build a farm.
Populations do grow in European countries in the 18th and 19th centuries the problem is the availability of usable land resulted in lots of migration early on. Lately when the standard for living has increased the number of child has dropped at a time is continued to grow in the rest of the world so the population has increased to the same degree.
The Spanish colonization state in 1492, there is around 300 years as colonies and then 200 years of independence. Human generational length is 20-30 years you have at least 10. If families have a lot of children and all of them have the ability to farm and create a family of their own you get very quick growth. If every family has 4 children that reach adulthood and create their own family you double the population each generation or make it 1024x larger in 10 generations.
Spain wasn’t a country of 40m people in colonial times just like the Americas didn’t have hundreds of millions of people in those times. The populations in both areas grew. The population may have grown faster in the Americas because before modern agriculture, you’d need a lot of space and farmland to support a big or rapidly-growing population. But also keep in mind, it was not just the Spanish that inhabited the Americas. There were surviving native people, African slaves, and other colonial countries that settled nearby areas and all these populations moved around and mixed together over the centuries.
What I don’t see in other comments is just the mathematics of it.
Turns out, if just a few Asian guys move to an isolated small population like Iceland and they and their descendants reproduce at the average rate with native Icelanders, it doesn’t take very many generations until almost everyone in Iceland has a little Asian heritage.
Wow, I guess Spain really took the saying ‘Go West, young man’ to heart! #ManifestDestinyWho?
Spain isn’t the only source of immigrants to Spanish-speaking countries. As with the US and Canada, people from all over the world have come to Central and South America.
Also, not every single native American died of disease. Tons of them, but not all.
Argentina is 62% Italian lol, these countries are filled with people from different parts of the world not even close to just Spain. You’ve profoundly confused language with ethnicity
Most of the people in South America aren’t Spaniards by blood. They just ended up speaking Spanish as a result of being rules as Spanish colonies. Most are native, or mixed with African, and perhaps some Spaniard. A much higher percentage of natives were killed off by war and disease in North America and in the Caribbean that South America.
Let’s imagine 500 Europeans arrived in South America in 1523 (500 years ago). We’ll call that 20 generations, and say each couple in each generation has four children who survive, causing the population to double each time. By now there’d be 500 million of them.
Obviously, that’s not what happened, but it shows that it’s not a particularly inexplicable population level.
Latest Answers