Political Order and Political Decay (40 page)

Climate and geography thus had a clear effect on the rise of what Philip Curtin calls the “plantation complex” and the institution of slavery that it spawned. The identity of the colonial power made no initial difference to where slavery arose; the more liberal British and Dutch were just as eager participants in this trade as the authoritarian Spaniards.

If there is a single historical case that proves the importance of physical conditions to institutions, it is the rise of slavery and cotton in the southern United States. Slavery of course existed throughout the United States at the time of the War of Independence, including the northern colonies. But many people at the time believed that it was a dying institution. While George Washington and Thomas Jefferson owned slaves, the economics of growing crops like tobacco and wheat with servile labor was not especially favorable.

All of this changed dramatically with the spread of cotton in the American South, facilitated by the invention of the cotton gin and the enormous increases in demand for raw cotton coming from Britain's emerging textile industry at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Cotton, like sugar, benefited from economies of scale on large plantations, and strongly revived demand for servile labor. Unlike in the Caribbean and Brazil, slave populations reproduced well in the continental United States, so even after the end of the slave trade in 1807 there was a growing population of servile labor that increasingly constituted a major source of the region's capital.

There has been a prolonged and often bitter debate among historians over the economics of North American slavery. Some have argued, along with a number of slavery critics prior to the Civil War, that the practice was an economically inefficient one that could not compete on equal terms with free labor, and would have died out on its own under free-market conditions. A number of Marxist historians have argued that the Civil War itself was driven not by moral considerations concerning slavery but rather by a competition between free and servile forms of labor. On balance, however, it would seem that right up to the time of the Civil War, slavery-based plantation production was a fully competitive form of economic enterprise and that per capita incomes in the South began to decline relative to those in the North only after the war and the abolition of slavery.
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The emergence of a powerful economic interest in slavery in North America soon overwhelmed whatever democratic and egalitarian political proclivities the English settlers brought with them. Prior to the Civil War, southern defenders of the “peculiar institution” began raising a host of novel arguments to defend slavery, drawing from the Bible, from arguments regarding the natural order of races, and from simple manufactured traditions of hierarchy and racial domination. Abraham Lincoln was to underline the contradictions between these theories and the country's founding assertion that “all men are created equal,” something that nonetheless did not prevent economic self-interest from trumping principle.

INDIGENOUS STATES

One of the great puzzles of institutional development in Latin America is why the indigenous political institutions of pre-Columbian America did not play a greater role in shaping later developments. Latin America's institutions were largely created by European settlers, either ones they imported from Europe or ones they created in response to the conditions they found on the ground. In tropical Africa and large parts of Southeast Asia, European settlement was limited by disease, as it was in the Caribbean. In other parts of the world—South Asia, the Middle East, and East Asia—large-scale European settlement was blocked or slowed by the existence of big and often well-organized indigenous populations that could be displaced only with great difficulty. In the core areas of the Spanish New World empire—Mexico and Peru—diseases affecting settlers were not a limiting factor, but well-organized local populations should have been. In contrast to the nomadic tribal societies that existed in North America, or groups like the Mapuches who resisted white settlers in Argentina and Chile, the Aztecs and Incas were organized into complex, state-level societies and projected centralized authority over tremendous distances. And yet the speed and completeness with which their power collapsed—as told by authors from William Prescott to Jared Diamond—is astonishing.
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Francisco Pizarro defeated the Inca king Atahualpa, who commanded an army of perhaps 80,000 soldiers, with 168 Spanish troops of his own, and did not suffer a single casualty.

Diamond attributes this success to a number of technological factors, such as the Spanish use of horses, muskets, and steel swords, none of which were possessed by the Incas, as well as a healthy dose of tactical surprise. The Spanish brought with them Old World diseases, as is well known, which devastated native populations and eventually killed as many as 90 percent of the local inhabitants.
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This account of the Aztec-Inca collapse is not, however, entirely convincing. As political scientist James Mahoney points out, the Europeans held similar technological advantages over more primitive groups in other parts of the Americas, and yet it took decades to defeat them. Disease was certainly a factor in the ultimate demise of the indigenous civilizations over the long run, but the disastrous declines in population did not start until the second half of the sixteenth century, well after the political collapse of the Aztecs and Incas. The real explanation, it seems, would have to be more political and institutional in nature. Although this risks amounting to an ex post “just so” story, the fact of their collapse suggests that neither civilization was nearly as institutionalized as it appeared.

This is most evident if we compare the Aztec or Inca state to the one that developed in China. Chinese states gradually evolved out of tribal groups during the Eastern Zhou Dynasty, particularly in the violent five hundred years comprising the Spring and Autumn and Warring States periods (770–221
B.C.
). At the end of this period the total number of political units in northern China had been reduced from perhaps a thousand to seven, each of which had developed centralized bureaucratic institutions. The country was unified under the Qin and Earlier Han Dynasties, the first taking power in 221
B.C.
, the latter in 202
B.C.
At the time of the Qin-Han unification, China consisted not just of the remnants of the seven early warring states but also of pockets of tribal and aristocratic influence spread throughout the country. It took the Han bureaucracy, modeled on that of the western state of Qin, nearly two hundred years to fully suppress these pockets of resistance and create a uniform, modern administrative system that ruled over a population as large as the contemporaneous Roman Empire.

The level of political development of the New World indigenous empires seems to have resembled that of China at a point sometime in the middle of the Eastern Zhou period, rather than of the mature Han state. Both the Aztec and Inca Empires remained organized around segmentary lineages at a local level (such as the
ayllu
in Inca lands, a social unit that survives to the present day in Bolivia and the highlands of Peru) and confederations of tribes. These empires were highly mixed ethnically, speaking related but often mutually unintelligible languages. The Aztec Empire had been created through conquest a couple of centuries before the confrontation with Cortés; the Inca Empire only in the decades preceding the Spanish arrival. Both empires were maintained through repression—notably, with the Aztecs, involving the widespread use of human sacrifice of subject peoples. This made it easy for the conquering Spaniards to find local allies who would fight for liberation from their indigenous rulers. Cortés established alliances with the Tlaxcala and the Totonacs and was able to attack Tenochtitlán with tens of thousands of indigenous soldiers. The same was true of Pizarro in Peru, who arrived on the heels of a bloody conflict between two princes, Atahualpa and Huáscar, over succession to the throne of the Sapa Inca, or supreme chief. As in Mexico, the Spaniards were able to play on Inca divisions. Local allies proved critical in the final defeat of Túpac Amaru, the Inca prince who tried to rally the last organized resistance in the eighteenth century, and who is still a symbol of indigenous pride in contemporary Peru.

While both the Aztec and Inca Empires are sometimes described as “bureaucratic,” the level of administrative development was nothing close to what China achieved by the middle of the Earlier Han Dynasty. Perhaps the clearest indication of this was in the use of language. Chinese administrators were already communicating with one another with written memoranda during the second millennium
B.C.
Shang Dynasty that preceded the Zhou. By contrast, the Aztecs had a hieroglyphic form of writing that is sometimes described as a form of protowriting, useful for ritual purposes but not something that could be used for routine communications throughout a bureaucratic hierarchy. The Incas had no written language at all, although they had a system of colored strings known as the quipu by which they could record statistical information. Otherwise, they had to rely on runners using spoken Quechua to communicate with distant parts of their empire. This meant that neither indigenous civilization could create a literary corpus similar to the Chinese classics that became not just the common curriculum of bureaucratic education but also the basis for a shared cultural identity. Needless to say, neither New World civilization could penetrate its respective societies in the manner of China, promulgating written legal codes enforced by a complex bureaucratic hierarchy.
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The kind of civilization that existed in Mexico and Peru would thus seem to be closer to that of India under the Mauryas in the third century
B.C.
than to the Qin-Han civilization of the same period. The Mauryas succeeded in violently unifying the northern two-thirds of the subcontinent under Ashoka, but their empire went into decline within three generations because they were never able to create a powerful administrative system. Like the Incas, they had no written administrative language.
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While both New World empires covered vast territories, they nevertheless were very weak. When the Spanish defeated and killed Montezuma and Atahualpa, symbols of military centralization, the empires shattered into their constituent ethnic and tribal groups, never to be reconstituted. Many of these subordinate groups simply transferred loyalty from their indigenous leaders to the Spaniards. All of this happened
before
the indigenous populations suffered their disastrous demographic decline due to imported Eurasian diseases. That decline sealed the fate of any surviving institutions. Mexico's population fell from ten million at the time of Cortés's arrival to two million in 1585, and then to one million by the beginning of the sixteenth century. Peru's preconquest population shrank from nine million to somewhat over one million by 1580, and then down to six hundred thousand by 1620.
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The indigenous cultures of the New World have shaped contemporary Latin America in myriad ways, from the Day of the Dead ceremonies in Mexico to
ayllu
clan organizations that characterize social life in the Andes. But the higher-level political legacy of the pre-Columbian civilizations played a much smaller role than state-level indigenous organizations in other parts of the world, particularly those in East Asia.

WEAK ABSOLUTISM

Geography and climate were not the only factors determining the nature of political institutions in Latin America. The Spanish and Portuguese also sought to export their own institutions to their colonies.

The Habsburg Spain that first colonized the New World was characterized by what I labeled weak absolutism in the earlier volume. The Spanish monarch, beginning with the defeat of the Comunero revolt in 1520, emasculated the Spanish estates (the Cortes) and centralized power in the court. But he was still strongly limited by the existing system of law, whose Roman roots ran deeper in Spain than in other parts of Western Europe. Charles V, who acquired a huge empire both in the Old World and the New, had legal taxing authority only in Castile, which bore the burden of his expensive wars in Italy and the Low Countries. In the course of the sixteenth century, this led to heavy borrowing from foreign bankers, the repeated bankruptcy of the Crown, and attempts to meet revenue needs by debasing the currency. Eventually, the Spanish state, like its French counterpart, turned to the selling of public offices to wealthy elites, legalizing corruption and weakening the capacity of the state to administer its realm uniformly and impersonally. Unlike a strong absolutist state that has the power and autonomy to master its own elites, the Spanish government was over time captured by them.
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Under these circumstances, revenue from the New World in the form of exports of gold and silver was critical. The Spanish government, however, imposed strict rules limiting economic exchange—a system known as mercantilism—under the mistaken belief that this would maximize its income from the colonies. Exports from the New World could go only to Spain, indeed, to a single port in Spain; they were required to travel in Spanish ships; and the colonies were not permitted to compete with Spanish producers of manufactured goods. Mercantilism, as Adam Smith was to demonstrate in
The Wealth of Nations
, created huge inefficiencies and was highly detrimental to economic growth. It also had very significant political consequences: access to markets and the right to make productive economic investments were limited to individuals or corporations favored by the state. This meant that the route to personal wealth lay through the state and through gaining political influence. This then led to a rentier rather than an entrepreneurial mentality, in which energy was spent seeking political favor rather than initiating new enterprises that would create wealth. The landowning and merchant classes that emerged under this system grew rich because of the political protection they received from the state.