Spain's Repu

[Faeelin]

This has been bothering me since I saw a professional historian write that
if the americas were empty, they'd all be more prosperous because those
good, industrious, northern europeans would've settled them. (Unlike the
evil spanish papists who bring ruin and desolation in their wake, of
course).

I've always wondered how much of the blame goes to Spain, when it should go
to Geography. land with a ready workforce and gold to be mined by the bucket
doesn't seem conducive to establishing diversified trading states.

Then there are the colonies. I think you have to compare colonies were lots
of Spanish settled to colonies where the spanish set themselves up ontop of
a native populace to their english counterparts. Umm.... well, this is
hard, because the British did this in India, and Africa, but they didn't
intermingle like in Mexico.

Let's try the others.
Slaveholding islands: Jamaica vs. Cuba.

Large settler populations: Argentina Vs. America. Okay, here america's
definitely better off, but I could easily see an independent CSA ending up
as just as much of a basket case as argentina today, as well as a prosperous
Argentina.

In fact, I'm damned if I see anything done by the Spanish that no one else
would have done.

Everyone thought colonies could trade with the home countries, for isntance;
Britain just couldn't stop the american ones from doing as they pleased.

So who would've made Latin America a shiny happy place?

 

[MerryPrankster]

Though all of the colonial powers were mercantilists, the Spanish were the most stringent and controlling. Plus they actively tried to control the colonies' domestic political situation (unlike the Brits, who pretty much ignored the US until the French/Indian War and then their attempts to meddle backfired), and let us not forget the religious totalitarianism of the Inquisition.

 

[David Howery]

The Spanish were rather uneven in their treatment of the Indians. To be sure, they did brutalize and enslave them, and conquered broad swathes of the Americas in the process. OTOH, they did do their damndest to mass convert them all to Christianity (which was important to them) and intermarried with them to a much higher degree than the Americans did....