why did none of the latin countries in America succeed like the english ones?
In: Economics
Chile is arguably more successful than Guyana or Belize so I’m not sure your premise is correct.
But generally speaking it’s because they didn’t industrialize to the extent that the US or Canada (or even Mexico) did. The US got a head start on the industrial revolution and became the ‘arsenal of democracy’ during the 2 world wars due to their ability to reliably produce wartime equipment in high quantities. This industrial capacity then kickstarted the baby boom era of consumer goods.
There are lots of theories for this, but one is that the USA, Canada, and NZ/Australia (all former UK colonies that are now widely considered to be part of the club of developed economies) were unusual among colonies in that they were primarily *settled* by the colonizer rather than simply ruled by them.
The most typical colony was a small bureaucracy backed by a slightly larger military force dominating the politics/economics of a region and re-orienting it around the extraction of resources for the benefit of the colonizer. This often meant an emphasis on agriculture and mining – things that were likely already happening before the colonizer arrived and could be scaled up without a lot of technology so long as they didn’t care about the working conditions of the natives. In an arrangement like this, educating natives would be not just inefficient but actively work against the continued dominance of the colonizer. The end result is a population, to the extent that they are trained/specialized at all, trained/specialized to extract resources and ship them away. Getting rid of the colonizer is a step in the right direction, but the left over economy is nowhere close to “developed” and won’t be for a long time.
Unusual colonies like the USA instead had small native populations (at least after the all the plagues) and less obvious extractive value. So instead of sending administrators and troops, colonizing nations sent homesteaders and outcasts (sometimes explicitly so in the case of Australian penal colonies) in the hopes that they would develop the colony into something more useful down the line. This meant more education and closer ties back to Europe among colonists. They could see the Industrial Revolution happening and bought in as it did.
In the end, that vague hope of “developing the colony into something useful” paid off in big ways, though more robust independence movements sometimes blocked the original colonizer from realizing the direct benefits themselves. It does make you wonder how much more developed the global economy would be today if Europeans had formed partnerships with the rest of the world instead of just viewing them as “the place that tea comes from.”
Spanish colonies were governed with the primary motivation of resource extraction and direct control, even moreso than other colonial powers. This had a few implications:
– Settlement and development remained limited to coasts and areas where mineral wealth could be extracted. Extraction infrastructure itself isn’t well-suited to long-term economic growth and even undermines development in more sustainable sectors (a phenomenon known as the Dutch Disease)
– Effective local governance for long-term development never grew because top-down rule was more effective at resource extraction. There was no direct equivalent to the local assemblies of English colonies.
– Resources which could have been directed towards governance had to be redirected towards military garrisons to sustain Spain’s less lenient approach native governance and pursuit of large-scale conversions
Probably not a single factor nor universal.
Spain and Britain had very different governments and started colonizing at different times. Spain was a monarchy for most of their colonial period and likely exported this form of control – focusing on landlords, aristocracy and serfs – essentially feudal structures through their colonies. The first British colony came more than 100 years after Spain’s and within a few decades of that, the British monarchs were removed from most executive power and Britain became a parliamentary democracy. (super ELI5)
There were different models for British colonies – some were political/religious exiles, some were penal colonies and a fair number were trade colonies. Very broadly speaking, the British tended to educate the locals, set up administrations staffed by the locals and generally implemented a system of laws broadly based on the British system. In a sense, the British co-opted the locals to maintain their colonies while the Spanish tended to treat the locals as serfs and themselves as local lords.
Generally speaking, the feudal system did not adjust well to the Industrial revolution.
The english ones were settled while the other ones were outposts destined to produce ressources and export them to the empire’s center.
The TLDR is that they got raped and pillaged into oblivion.
– Explored almost to death on its natural resources by the colonizers.
– Military coups
– Communism coups
– All out corruption that no one stops
– Dictators
Because Spain as an administrative power sucks, and they exported the evil that is breed within, is not so much a black legend but more of a black certainty.
Imagine two houses, in one of them, the original family was killed, but the new people move in, buy new furniture with their own money, and overall give the house good maintenance.
In the second house, the original family is kept as servants, the new owner sells everything inside the house, including ripping out the copper from the walks and the plumbing.
After a few years, the descendants of the first family are still living there, they have a big, nice house to live in, and were given an education and inherited money.
In the second house, the invaders were eventually driven off, but they threatened to come back and kill everyone if they weren’t paid rent, the children of the original family barely have walls, no education and are now in debt.
Just to add to what everyone else is saying: because the Spanish had no intention of staying, but just getting in – converting as many as possible, and taking as much gold as possible – and getting out, you end up getting a really cool mix of native and Spanish culture, especially relative to the English colonies which, for all intents and purposes, imported their culture when they came.
I remember going to a museum in Lima and they had this beautiful painting of Mary standing in front of a shining sun, and the tour guide explained that this was a mixture of the Spanish religion and the Inca one that was already present. How cool is that! It obviously tragically came by the sword and there’s no excusing that, but the cultural differences that arose from the different colonization strategies are mind boggling to me.
Spain and Portugal extracted and drained nations, Britain ran satellite states that then contributed materials without absolutely destroying their economic capacity (massively oversimplified and India is a bit of a good example of this going very wrong with famines in bengal etc)
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