why did none of the latin countries in America succeed like the english ones?
In: Economics
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.”
Latest Answers