Having spent years in this region I needed a history lesson, an interesting read about Latam’s history of exploitation, and how its wealth was drained for centuries. While insightful, it feels like it quickly goes into ideology, making it feel more like a passionate argument than a purely historical account.
Memorable quotes
“This observation helps explain the ultimate goal of the Latin American colonial economy from its inception: although it showed some feudal characteristics, it functioned at the service of capitalism developing elsewhere.”
“The dominant classes took no interest whatever in diversifying the internal economies or in raising technical and cultural levels in the population: they had a different function within the international complex they were acting for, and the grinding poverty of the people—so profitable from the standpoint of the reigning interests—prevented the development of an internal consumer market.”
“An encomienda was an estate granted by the Crown to the Spanish conquistadors and colonists for their services to Spain. It included the services of the Indians living on it. The encomendero was thus the owner.”
“The Indians of the Americas totaled no less than 70 million when the foreign conquerors appeared on the horizon; a century and a half later they had been reduced to 3.5 million.”
“Soon after the mine began operating, in 1550, the Dominican monk Domingo de Santo Tomás told the Council of the Indies that Potosí was a “mouth of hell” which swallowed Indians by the thousands every year, and that rapacious mine owners treated them “like stray animals.”
“As Darcy Ribeiro puts it, the Indians were the fuel of the colonial productive system. “It is almost certain,” writes Sergio Bagú, “that hundreds of Indian sculptors, architects, engineers, and astronomers were sent into the mines along with the mass of slaves for the killing task of getting out the ore. The technical ability of these people was of no interest to the colonial economy.”
“The Indians have suffered, and continue to suffer, the curse of their own wealth; that is the drama of all Latin America.”
“Survivors were deported to plantations in Yucatán, and the Yucatán peninsula became not only the cemetery of the Mayas who had been its owners, but also of the Yaquis who came from afar: at the beginning of our century the fifty kings of henequen had more than 100,000 Indian slaves on their plantations.”
“Having found no highly developed and organized civilizations, only savage and scattered tribes who had no knowledge of metal, the Portuguese had to discover the gold on their own as they opened up the territory and exterminated its inhabitants.”
“In the eighteenth century Brazilian production of the coveted metal exceeded the total volume of gold that Spain had taken from its colonies in two previous centuries.”
“Brazil had 300,000 inhabitants in 1700; a century later, at the end of the gold years, the population had multiplied eleven times. No less than 300,000 Portuguese emigrated to Brazil in the eighteenth century, a larger contingent than Spain contributed to all its Latin American colonies.”
“From the conquest of Brazil until abolition, it is estimated that some 10 million blacks were brought from Africa; there are no precise figures for the eighteenth century, but the gold cycle absorbed slave labor in prodigious quantities.”
“Brazil had 300,000 inhabitants in 1700; a century later, at the end of the gold years, the population had multiplied eleven times. No less than 300,000 Portuguese emigrated to Brazil in the eighteenth century, a larger contingent than Spain contributed to all its Latin American colonies. From the conquest of Brazil until abolition, it is estimated that some 10 million blacks were brought from Africa; there are no precise figures for the eighteenth century, but the gold cycle absorbed slave labor in prodigious quantities.”
“The gold began to flow just when Portugal signed the Methuen Treaty with England in 1703.”
“The Portuguese Crown granted lands in usufruct to Brazil’s first big landlords. The feats of conquest proceeded in tandem with the organization of production. Twelve “captains” received by written grant the whole of the vast unexplored territory, to be exploited in the king’s service.”
“Barbados was, starting in 1641, the first Caribbean island where sugar was grown for bulk export, although the Spaniards had planted cane earlier in Santo Domingo and Cuba.”
“It was, as we have seen, the Dutch who introduced sugar into the little British island; by 1666 Barbados had 800 plantations and more than 80,000 slaves.”
“The New World revival of Greco-Roman slavery had miraculous qualities: it multiplied the ships, factories, railroads, and banks of countries that were not originally involved in Africa or—with the exception of the United States—in the fate of the slaves crossing the Atlantic.”
“Caio Prado estimates that up to the beginning of the nineteenth century between 5 and 6 million Africans arrived in Brazil alone, and that Cuba was then as big a slave market as the whole Western hemisphere had been before.”
“The ships sailed back to Liverpool carrying various tropical products: in the early eighteenth century three-quarters of the cotton used by the British textile industry came from the Antilles, although Georgia and Louisiana later became its chief sources; by mid-century there were 120 sugar refineries in Britain.”
“No slave rebellion in world history lasted as long as that in Palmares: Spartacus’s rebellion, which shook the most important slave system of ancient times, lasted eighteen months.”
“Although the Catholic religion officially embraces 94 percent of the population of Brazil, black Brazilians today maintain their African traditions and keep alive their religious faith, often camouflaged behind Christian saints; cults of African origin are widely practiced by the oppressed, whatever their skin color.”
“The Asian plantations, skillfully developed from shoots grown at Kew Gardens, easily supplanted Brazilian production.”
“In this republic of outcasts, workers’ wages had not risen by a centavo since the historic rising of the priest Miguel Hidalgo in 1810. In 1910, 800-odd latifundistas, many of them foreigners, owned almost all the national territory.”
“With the worker tied by inherited debts or by legal contract, slavery was the actual labor system on Yucatán henequen plantations, on the tobacco plantations of the Valle Nacional, on Chiapas and Tabasco timberland and fruit orchards, and on the rubber, coffee, sugarcane, tobacco, and fruit plantations of Veracruz, Oaxaca, and Morelos.”
“The private property system molds the production system: 1.5 percent of the agricultural landlords own half of all the cultivable land, and every year Latin America spends more than $500 million on importing food that its own broad and fertile lands could produce without difficulty.”
“Those colonists were lucky. Furthermore, the northern colonies, from Maryland to New England to Nova Scotia, had a climate and soil similar to British agriculture and produced exactly the same things. That is, as Sergio Bagú notes, they did not offer products complementary to the metropolis.”
“The situation in the Antilles and the mainland Spanish-Portuguese colonies was quite different. Tropical lands produced sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo, turpentine; a small Caribbean island had more economic importance for England than the thirteen colonies that would become the United States.”
“Around 1917 oil co-existed in Venezuela with traditional latifundios, those enormous extensions of thinly populated or idle land where hacendados kept up production by whipping their peons or burying them alive up to the waist.”
“The oilfields were fenced in and had their own police. No one could enter without a company pass, and even the roads on which the oil was transported to the ports were barred to other traffic.”
“The British economy paid with cotton textiles for the hides of Río de la Plata, the guano and nitrates of Peru, the copper of Chile, the sugar of Cuba, the coffee of Brazil.”
“The overwhelming majority of goods passing through Latin American customs houses was not Spanish. Spain’s monopoly had never in fact existed: “The colony was already lost to the metropolis well before 1810, and the revolution was no more than political recognition of this state of affairs.””
“The resulting deluge of foreign goods had crushed colonial production of textiles, pottery, and metal objects, and the artisans had little time to get back on their feet; then independence flung open the door to free competition from Europe’s already developed industries.”
“In Chile, one of Spain’s most far-flung possessions, isolation favored the development of industrial activity from the beginnings of colonial life.”
“In Brazil, too, textile and metal works, which took their modest first steps in the eighteenth century, were wiped out by foreign imports.”
“In Argentina, the coast was the most backward and least populated region until independence moved the economic and political center of gravity from inland to Buenos Aires. Only one-tenth of the population lived in Buenos Aires, Santa Fe, and Entre Ríos at the beginning of the nineteenth century.”
““Take his whole equipment—examine everything about him—and what is there not of raw hide that is not British? If his wife has a gown, ten to one it is made in Manchester; the camp-kettle in which he cooks his food, the earthenware he eats from, the knife, his poncho, spurs, bit, are all imported from England.” Argentina even received the stones for its sidewalks from Britain.”
“Latin America’s big ports, through which the wealth of its soil and subsoil passed en route to distant centers of power, were being built up as instruments of the conquest and domination of the countries to which they belonged, and as conduits through which to drain the nations’”,
“Britain was organizing a worldwide system and becoming the great factory supplying the planet: the entire world supplied it with raw materials and received its manufactured goods.”
“Friedrich List, father of the German customs union, once observed that free trade was Britain’s chief export.”
“Cotton farming was abandoned and Manchester ruined textile production; the national industry never came back to life.”,
“Until its destruction, Paraguay stood out as a Latin American exception—the only country that foreign capital had not deformed. The long, iron-fisted dictatorship of Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia (1814-1840) had incubated an autonomous, sustained development process in the womb of isolation.”
“In the hour of emancipation the Spanish colonies turned into some sort of British colonies.””