Re:School Is to Submit
by jacobolus on Saturday April 09, 2016 @02:29AM
(#11460199)
The comparison of the US to Mexico is just as ridiculous as the comparison of Nigeria to CAR.
In the US, the European settlers killed all of the natives and took the land over for themselves. In the northern states, the economy was a mix of small farms and industrial production. In the southern states, the economy was plantation-based, built on slave labor of imported Africans. In both North and South, most of the accumulated wealth stayed local, though the two regions ended up with radically different social structures and a substantially different level of per capita wealth.
In Latin America, by contrast, there were only a few settlers who set themselves up as elite rulers of the natives, who they subjugated and robbed, but left alive (excepting the large proportion who died of disease or were killed in armed rebellions). All of the wealth created by indigenous Latin Americans was systematically stolen and given over to the colonial Spanish authorities, and much of it was shipped back to Spain.
Later on, the US was able to build a strong federal government with a diverse power base. In Mexico, by contrast, since independence the government has been relatively weak with looser control over the country, and power has been much more concentrated, with less power equality.
You can’t just chalk this up to “English” vs. “Spanish” culture. What Spain did in Latin America is much more similar to what the British did in India or southern Africa (or Ireland for that matter), with analogous though not precisely identical historical outcomes. There are lots of other geographical, logistic, geopolitical, etc. differences between all of these places, so colonial strategy alone isn’t any kind of complete model.
In the US, the European settlers killed all of the natives and took the land over for themselves. In the northern states, the economy was a mix of small farms and industrial production. In the southern states, the economy was plantation-based, built on slave labor of imported Africans. In both North and South, most of the accumulated wealth stayed local, though the two regions ended up with radically different social structures and a substantially different level of per capita wealth.
In Latin America, by contrast, there were only a few settlers who set themselves up as elite rulers of the natives, who they subjugated and robbed, but left alive (excepting the large proportion who died of disease or were killed in armed rebellions). All of the wealth created by indigenous Latin Americans was systematically stolen and given over to the colonial Spanish authorities, and much of it was shipped back to Spain.
Later on, the US was able to build a strong federal government with a diverse power base. In Mexico, by contrast, since independence the government has been relatively weak with looser control over the country, and power has been much more concentrated, with less power equality.
You can’t just chalk this up to “English” vs. “Spanish” culture. What Spain did in Latin America is much more similar to what the British did in India or southern Africa (or Ireland for that matter), with analogous though not precisely identical historical outcomes. There are lots of other geographical, logistic, geopolitical, etc. differences between all of these places, so colonial strategy alone isn’t any kind of complete model.