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
There’s a few factors.
The big one is war. Spain wasn’t Spain. Spain was The Crown of Castille. At the time of North American colonization the Spanish had just won a major war uniting Castille, Andorra, Aragon (Barcelona), and the Kingdom of Sicily under one banner. This made the crown of Castille one of the strongest in Europe and one of the few countries that didn’t have a war during this period.
Next up they established the first American colony, Santo Domingo (Hispanoles or modern day Haiti/Dominican Republic). A lot of money was invested into fortifying it against the locals which allowed for a jump point for all Europeans to exploit the Americas and became a centre for all trade.
Finally, the groups that the Spanish went to war with and ended up conquering were all at war with each other. By the first time meeting the Aztecs they just finished a war. So that meant that a lot of their procreation aged women were le single. Now take the number two (the number of parents a person has) and bring it to the power of how many generations have passed, let’s say 20. That’s how many ancestors you have, 1,048,576. That’s a big number. And each of these people had brothers and sisters and might have intertwined with other families.. and before long you find out that most of Europe can trace their heritage from Charlemagne. It means that it doesn’t take a lot of effort to trace your heritage to Spain.
Now the other part, why are there so many people in Latin America and so few in Spain? Well the short answer is… Spain sucks. Latin America was colonized and given structure without a real power struggle until the early 19th century. Slaves were actively being imported and the life of the colony favored larger families. When revolutions spread across Latin America a lot of them ended up being a lot more bloodless
And that wasn’t the case of Spain. Much of the history of Europe is based around the names Bourbon and Habsburgs. The Habsburgs took over Spain and Austria in the 17th century they instituted mercantilism and began getting involved in trade wars with France and Sweden. This resulted in severely reduced prosperity and a lot of famine.
The French Bourbon Family take over Spain in the 18th century after engaging in a bloody succession war. Since France and Spain border they opt to not have any defenses on their borders. And then in the 19th century Napoleon comes to power after a revolution. Spain gets its army decimated by France (TWICE) and just has problems with loyalties. Napoleon installs his brother as king and the population engage in a bloody revolution against Napoleon.
And basically since then ,Spain has been in revolt. Spain stabilized slightly after WW2 and since then it’s population has doubled.
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