How did Spain populate an entire continent?

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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?

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Anonymous 0 Comments

Keep in mind the Spanish didn’t walk in, guns blazing, and killing everything that moved. Yes, masses of natives died. But the Spanish SOP was to integrate themselves at the top of the existing hierarchies and incorporate them into the Spanish empire, religion and customs that way. In doing so, they’ve mixed with the surviving natives. It’s the Bourbon reforms (EDIT: forgot this) that pushed the local aristocracies away, and only to a point. Tupac Amaru, for instance, was a noble of Inca heritage.

And even then, as others said, the population of Spanish America isn’t really big anyway.

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