Political Order and Political Decay (39 page)

THREE REGIONS

In the following chapters, I will trace the development of political institutions in three regions of the developing world: Latin America, sub-Saharan Africa, and East Asia.

East Asia is of course today the great star, with Japan, Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Singapore having successfully joined the club of developed countries, and China on its way to overtaking the United States as the world's largest economy. Sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, is the poorest region, despite the relatively good performance of a number of countries there in the early 2000s. Latin America lies somewhere in the middle: it is full of what the World Bank labels “middle-income countries,” such as Mexico, Brazil, and Argentina, but with the possible exception of Chile, none seems poised to reach the high income levels of Europe, North America, or northeast Asia anytime soon.

These economic growth outcomes are indeed related to the institutional legacies of colonialism, as the economists argue. Geography and climate had a large impact on the kinds of institutions that the colonial powers were initially able to establish. But geography is not destiny: in each region, there are many significant cases of countries that escaped the fates of their neighbors and performed either better or worse because other factors, like ideology, policies, and the choices made by individual leaders, shifted the societies onto new development paths.

Moreover, the literature on colonialism gives too much weight to colonial legacies in general. Contemporary institutional outcomes, and thus contemporary growth outcomes, were influenced not just by the policies of the colonial powers but also by the nature of preexisting indigenous institutions. In particular, the superior performance of East Asia in modern times is directly related to the fact that many East Asian countries developed strong, modern states prior to their contact with the West. In China and Japan, this prevented their total conquest and subordination by foreign powers. In sub-Saharan Africa, by contrast, half the continent was still tribally organized at the time of its conquest by the Europeans. The “states” that existed were very primitive and weak. The colonial powers therefore had no strong indigenous state traditions to build on. Latin America was again an intermediate case: while the Spanish encountered large empires and concentrated populations in Mexico and Peru, these polities were much less formidable than they seemed, and not at all modern in the Chinese sense. They collapsed almost immediately, even before disease took its toll, and left almost nothing by way of institutional residue. This left the new colonial powers free to construct their own feudal institutions on New World soil.

 

16

SILVER, GOLD, AND SUGAR

How resources and population affected institutions in the New World; the nature of Spanish institutions, and how Madrid sought to transfer them; how inherited class structure and ethnicity weakened rule of law and accountability

Latin America was the first part of the non-Western world to be colonized by Europeans. It is also the part of the world for which contemporary economic theories of the origin of political institutions were originally developed. The establishment of authoritarian, highly unequal political institutions in much of the region was attributed to the “extractive” nature of economic production there, based in turn on geography, climate, resources, and other material conditions that the colonialists encountered. By this view, institutional characteristics persisted over the centuries, even after the original economic and technological conditions that created them began to change. The different kinds of political institutions that emerged in North America—more democratic, egalitarian, and economically liberal—reflected the rather different conditions of agricultural production found there.

This basic story is correct. Latin America has been characterized by a “birth defect” of inequality from which it has not yet recovered. But the economic interpretation of the origin of institutions is far from a complete one. Latin American institutions are overdetermined: that is, their authoritarian and illiberal character has multiple sources and does not simply lie in the material conditions found by the colonialists. It is not as if the Spanish and Portuguese had created liberal, egalitarian institutions back in Europe and would have implanted them in the New World if only conditions were right. In fact, they sought to re-create a version of their own political system in their colonies. Conditions at home began to change with a modest series of liberal reforms that took place under the Bourbon monarchy in the eighteenth century, and as Spain itself liberalized, the types of institutions exported to the Americas liberalized as well.

The real differences between North and Latin America lie less in these initial institutional conditions than in what happened later. Virtually all of Europe, including England, was authoritarian, hierarchical, and unequal at the beginning of the sixteenth century. But the countries there went through a series of violent wars and revolutions over the next two centuries that, first, produced a series of strong, consolidated modern states, and second, produced changes in political institutions that ultimately created modern democracy. Sometimes things that don't happen are as important in explaining subsequent events as those that do, as Sherlock Holmes said of the dog that failed to bark. In Latin America, there also was a dog that didn't bark: the large-scale and continuous political violence that was so critical in shaping Western European states and national identity simply didn't convulse the New World. On the one hand, this was a good thing: Latin America has been a much more peaceful continent than either Europe or Asia. On the other hand, its political institutions developed more slowly as a result, and the older forms of authoritarian government as well as the social inequalities on which they were based persisted for much longer.

EXPLOITATION

The Spaniards did not conquer the New World for strategic reasons, as the European powers were to do in Africa during the late nineteenth century, nor did they necessarily want to impose their way of life there. They established colonies because they wanted to get rich, and for this purpose they were attracted to the regions that were already wealthy and populous, such as the seats of the Aztec and Inca Empires in Mexico and Peru. The Valley of Mexico where the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlán (now Mexico City) was located had perhaps a million inhabitants at the time of Hernando Cortés's expedition, with several million more in the surrounding countryside. The Inca Empire stretched from Ecuador to northern Chile and encompassed as many as ten million inhabitants. The Spanish located their two viceroyalties in Mexico and Peru precisely because they found precious gold and silver there and because they could draw on dense populations as sources of servile labor.

The Spaniards enriched themselves at first by simply plundering the wealth of their conquered kingdoms. (The Inca ruler Atahualpa was told to fill a large room with gold and silver to ransom his life, which he did, whereupon the Spanish killed him anyway.) When these sources were exhausted, they discovered new ones, the silver mines in Zacatecas, Mexico, the mercury mines in Huancavelica, and the silver mountain of Potosí high in the Andes (then part of Upper Peru, now in Bolivia).

Legally, indigenous people were considered to be full subjects of the Crown, with their property protected by the same legal rights as that of Europeans. The
encomienda
, an institution by which the Spanish Crown granted the conquistadores rights over people but not land, was considered to be an alternative to slavery. Under it, the indigenous could be made to work in return for paternalistic protection. In some cases, the church joined hands with the local representatives of the Spanish Crown in trying to protect native populations from abuse by settlers. In practice, these legal protections were not observed, and de facto slavery became a common practice, led by the Spanish settler community. Under the viceroy Francisco de Toledo late in the sixteenth century, the Inca institution of the
mita
(corvée labor) was reconfigured into a much harsher form of coercive labor that required long absences from the workers' local communities and the endurance of extremely dangerous conditions in the mines. The colonial authorities resorted to forced relocations of their steadily declining populations, called
reducciones
, in order to be better able to control and draft laborers.
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The elites in Latin America were both the Spanish colonial authorities—the
peninsulares
—and the white settler population, known as Creoles. Early Spanish policy tried to prevent the establishment of a landed aristocracy through institutions like the
encomienda
, which did not give the settlers rights to land. But the Creoles' presence on the ground allowed them to become major landowners nonetheless, a process that was accelerated by the
mayorazgo
, a form of primogeniture imported from Spain that permitted landowning families to concentrate and enlarge their holdings. Carried over from Spain as well was the tendency for landowners to live in cities rather than on their estates; peasant labor was controlled by managers for the benefit of wealthy absentee landowners.

Also part of the elite were merchants who benefited from the trade monopolies granted by the Crown under mercantilist rules. These two groups lived symbiotically, the merchants exporting the primary products produced by the landowners to protected markets that guaranteed them a steady income. This urban-merchant elite, over time, bought titles and offices from a weakening Habsburg colonial regime and cemented their power in a manner very similar to elites in old regime France and Spain.
2

The ethnic and racial divides that existed in the Americas strongly entrenched class differences. In the words of historian David Fieldhouse, “Because the peoples of Mexico and Peru filled the role of a European working class, there was no place in Spanish America for a white proletariat; and this distinguished Spanish colonies from others in North America which became ‘pure' European settlements.”
3
Class differences overlapped with racial and ethnic ones, marking off the poor visibly from the rich—or rather, given the degree of intermarriage, creating a continuum from white to black whose different shades marked rungs on a social ladder. It is this social stratification that has shaped the region's politics over the centuries, and in many ways it persists to the present moment.

THE SLAVERY-PLANTATION COMPLEX

If there was a single area where climate and geography could be said to have direct political implications, it was the emergence of a plantation complex involving the export of tropical agricultural products to Europe, in particular sugar. Sugar differs from staple crops like wheat or corn because it is not suitable for family farming. Families cannot live on sugar; it is purely an export crop. It needs to be processed near where it is grown, requiring substantial capital investment and benefiting from economies of scale. And it grows best in wet, hot climates like those found in tropical or subtropical regions. Sugar was cultivated in Portugal and other parts of southern Europe beginning in the fifteenth century but soon moved to Portugal's West African colonies such as São Tomé. And there it began its fateful association with African slavery, since the kingdoms of Kongo and Benin provided nearby sources of labor to work the sugar plantations.
4

Slavery had existed in West Africa for several centuries prior to the arrival of the Europeans late in the fifteenth century, largely as a result of the trans-Saharan trade from North Africa and the Middle East. The Portuguese found ready sources of slaves there, whom they put to work in the sugar plantations of São Tomé. When the Treaty of Tordesillas in 1494 gave Portugal possession of what would become Brazil, this system of labor would prove to be exportable. Unlike Peru and Mexico, the Portuguese found little gold or silver in their New World lands, nor large concentrations of people. But northeastern Brazil had a perfect climate for growing sugar, which the Portuguese quickly brought over from Africa. And from West Africa, it was relatively easy to transport slaves to the new colony being established in Brazil, where prevailing winds made for a much easier east-to-west journey than farther north in the Atlantic where prevailing winds blew in the opposite direction. Under the harsh work conditions of sugar production in the tropics, slave populations did not reproduce themselves sufficiently, so a triangular trade developed: slaves were exported to Brazil, sugar and sugar products like rum were exported back to Europe, and European manufactured goods were sent to Africa in return for more slaves.

Thus Brazil, now a charter member of the emerging market BRICS club and Latin America's industrial powerhouse, got its start as a plantation colony based on slave labor. Portugal did not have the power or resources to rule Brazil the way the Spanish ruled Mexico and Peru. Instead, it gave authority and grants of land to a group of “captains donatory” who acted as virtual sovereigns in the territory they controlled. These land grants were huge, extending 130 miles along the coast and going inland as far as 500 miles. De facto authority came to lie in the hands of a powerful yet provincial slave-owning planter class, which by the end of the sixteenth century had accumulated substantial political power in a relatively decentralized political system.
5

The second phase of the sugar revolution occurred farther north, in the Caribbean, where conditions and trade winds were favorable to exports to Britain and other parts of Northern Europe. The Carib and Arawak indigenous populations encountered by Christopher Columbus had long since been wiped out by disease and their few descendants assimilated into the settler populations, both white and slave. Beginning in the mid-sixteenth century, Barbados and the Windward and Leeward Islands became the center of a huge export industry, a center that later shifted westward to the French colony of Saint-Domingue (today Haiti), Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and eventually Cuba. England, France, Spain, Holland, and even Denmark participated in both the process of colonization and the creation of a plantation industry there. In the early days, the commercial companies investing in plantations were as willing to use white indentured laborers as readily as African slaves, but they found that the latter had greater immunity to local diseases than the Europeans and could be made to work under harsher conditions. This is not to say that Africans flourished in the New World; as in Brazil, the slave population could not replenish itself and so was dependent on a continuing flow of new bodies from Africa. As a result, the number of Africans transported to the Americas outnumbered white Europeans by a factor of five in the years between 1600 and 1820.
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Slavery was thus integral to a burgeoning transatlantic commercial economy. Exports from Britain's slave colonies exceeded the value of exports from free ones by almost a factor of ten.
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