THE SOUTH AMERICAN WAY^311tory. Gold and silver mines are wasting assets, and some two hundred
years later, when the American colonists had won their freedom, North
America far surpassed the lands to the south—richer in income per
head, richer in its more even distribution of wealth. The only excep
tions were small areas of lucrative specialty crops—specifically the sugar
isles of the Caribbean; and even there only if one excludes the slave
population from the data.
The change in relative wealth had deep roots. Where the English
found a land lightly peopled and pushed the natives out of the way to
make room for settler families—creating over time an absolute
apartheid—the Spanish found the most densely populated parts of the
New World and chose to intermarry with the inhabitants. Some see this
difference as evidence of English (or Protestant) racism vs. Spanish (or
Catholic) open-mindedness. Perhaps; although population distribu
tion had its own logic* Whereas the English migrated to the north
ern and central colonies in families, so that except for people over sixty,
the age distribution was similar to that of England, the Spanish did not
encourage the emigration of families or even women to the New
World.
As the native population succumbed to violence, exhaustion, de
spair, and above all disease, the Spanish imported black slaves from
Africa. These were worked growing sugar, panning for gold, and the
like, but they never played so large a role in mainland Hispanic Amer
ica as on the Caribbean islands and in the southern United States.
Meanwhile immigrants from other European countries were not avail
able. In Spain itself, locals complained bitterly of the competition and
pretensions of non-Spanish and non-Catholic businessmen, traders,
and craftsmen. Not so in Spanish America: the crown did its best to
keep these outsiders away from its possessions in the New World. This
exclusion deprived the empire of badly needed skills and knowledge, to
say nothing of the cultural advantages of diversity, of those quarrelsome
Protestant heresies that fostered intellectual challenge and sustained an
appetite for education.^1 Everywhere in the Spanish colonies, more
over, the Inquisition pursued heresy, hunting those crypto-Jews who
thought that an ocean would shield them from prying fanaticism. The
aim was to complete the cleansing; the effect, to recreate the closed en
vironment that prevailed at home. All of this proved great for purity
but bad for business, knowledge, and know-how. (None of this, note,
- The record of Spanish (or Portuguese) color-consciousness in the colonial and
postcolonial societies that emerged from the invasion also contradicts this reputation.