_20^
The South American Way
Comparing the population of Spanish with that of British America, we shall
at every step be struck with the wonderful difference in origin, in progress,
and in the present situation. The conquerors from Spain, instead of the fru
gal, laborious and moral description of our English setders, partook of the
ferocity and superstition of an earlier and less enlightened period. The war
riors who had exterminated the Mahomedanism of Granada were readily in
duced to propagate their own religion by the sword....
—Quarterly Review (London), 17, 34 (July 1817): 537.We [Santo Domingo] became an economy of the West, not of the most de
veloped models of Europe, but of the Spanish model. Spain transmitted to
us everything it had: its language, its architecture, its religion, its dress and
its food, its military tradition and its judicial and civil institutions; wheat, live
stock, sugar cane, even our dogs and chickens. But we couldn't receive from
Spain Western methods of production and distribution, technique, capital,
and the ideas of European society, because Spain didn't have them. We knew
the evangel but not the works of Erasmus.
—JUAN BOSCH, Composition Social Dominicana... the provinces on the Rio de la Plata... contain an immense extent of
fertile soil, blessed with a salubrious climate, and fitted for the growth of
every species of produce. Under a liberal government they must soon teem
with inhabitants and wealth. They must every day abound more and more in
all sorts of raw commodities, in exchange for which they must want manu
factures...
—RODNEY and GRAHAM, Reports of the Present State (1818)
L
atin America followed a very different pattern. It was not poorer
to start with, in say the seventeenth century; on the contrary.
The Spanish and Portuguese invaders thought of their English rivals as
orphans of destiny: How could one compare the woods and fields of
North America or the used-up or useless isles of the Lesser Antilles with
the silver and gold of New Spain and Peru, or the dyewoods and dia
monds and gold of Brazil? The best the English could do was lurk like
jackals on the flanks of the Spanish bullion fleets while their colonists
struggled to survive in a hostile environment. Even in agricultural po
tential, Latin America compared well, especially in its temperate parts.
But nothing stands still, and yesterday's comparisons are today's his-