Kinda true but enough people did live in these areas to fight a civil war, can't imagine how miserable it must have been in places like Louisiana and Southern Mississippi.
Why the USA and not Brazil?
- Thread starter Admiral A. Kolchak
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Kinda true but enough people did live in these areas to fight a civil war, can't imagine how miserable it must have been in places like Louisiana and Southern Mississippi.
Deleted member 92121
It was the most stable nation in Latin America during the 19th century. That's just fact. While the rest of the continent suffered with dictatorship after dictatorship, power struggles, and civil wars, Brazil had a representative democracy that offered a very democratic system(for the time). The 1830's were brutal but by the 1840's the vast majority of the country was in a peaceful state. That went all the way to the Republic in 1889. Compare it to the rest of the continent...compare it to the U.S., or Europe.
It all depends on where the coal is located and what is required to access it. If Brazil's coal is in the middle of the rainforest where nobody lives and nobody is prospecting then it doesn't help much. Same if it requires modern tech to reach and exploit.
BlondieBC
Banned
That sounds right. I use Brazil versus Argentina to highlight the impact of incentives. To greatly boost immigration, you need to supply two things. Free passage in steerage and an income source. Typically the income is either farm land or a good paying job. So the first part is pretty easy to do. Surely, Brazil could afford to pay ship passage (steerage) for 10K to 20K workers for a hundred years or so. It gives a nice boost to population of a few million and establishes the seed of immigration centers that will draw even more. We are talking about doing something like trying to divert the Italian immigration to Argentina to Brazil. Or boosting the German immigration to southern Brazil.
BUT, you have to have the second part. An income source. For reasons I don't recall off the top of my head, wages in things like the coffee or sugar plantations was very poor, even after slavery ended. This would have to be fixed.
SsgtC
Banned
This is like claiming to be the healthiest terminally ill person, tbh. Yeah, you're in better shape than your neighbor, but you're both going to die of disease. Not exactly a high bar to set there.
As for your claim that Brazil was more stable than the US, not exactly. Yes, the US fought a Civil War. For 5 years. Brazil had massive unrest for almost 20. Plus, outside of the South and the edges of the Border States, the rest of the country was pretty stable. Now, I'm not suggesting you should immigrate to a country in the middle of a civil war, but people did exactly that. Even if Brazil was more stable at that point, immigrants still opted to go to a country fighting a civil war over going to Brazil.
Deleted member 92121
Not saying it was more stable then the U.S., just saying that even the most "Stable" nation in the Americas had a period of massive instability at an time Brazil was doing good.
Not trying to claim Brazil was some kind of paradise or safe haven, it wasn't. It was just, for the most part of the Empire, doing pretty well.
BlondieBC
Banned
Most of the immigration to the USA was in the free lands, so what about this type of scenario.
Brazil has a no slave area. Say the state of Mato Grosso del Sur and Sao Paulo and the stuff to the south. White immigrants are given land and subsidies on passage. Maybe even Brazil gets to keep Uruguay and maybe a bit of Argentina in some war. You would get a lot more immigration, a lot more industry, a lot more small businesses. Then at some point after this, slavery ends.
Brazil has a no slave area. Say the state of Mato Grosso del Sur and Sao Paulo and the stuff to the south. White immigrants are given land and subsidies on passage. Maybe even Brazil gets to keep Uruguay and maybe a bit of Argentina in some war. You would get a lot more immigration, a lot more industry, a lot more small businesses. Then at some point after this, slavery ends.
Coal and iron were found quite early in USA. There were very navigable waters with fertile farmland on the East Coast and throughout the Mississippi watershed. There are gigantic rivers in Brazil but not much in the way of easy agriculture on their banks. USA had a fairly simple geography to traverse. Finally, USA has both Oacific and Atlantic coasts with many excellent harbors on both Atlantic and Oacific, as well as on the Gulf of Mexici
Coal reserves are mostly located in Santa Catarina and Rio Grande do Sul states, and exploration began(IIRC) in the 1890's.
SsgtC
Banned
There's your answer right there. US coal deposits were being extracted for industrial uses by English settlers in 1740. 150 years makes a huge difference in the state of development
Ignoring the political reasons, geographically Brazil was hampered by environment.
One thing I've wondered, is that if the rainforest and the diseases that it contained, were so hazardous to Europeans, why didn't they approach it with a 'European' solution? Like burning or cutting down the whole forest?
In theory a really good set of migrants for Brazil would be the Arcadians. If you could somehow convince people like that to come to Brazil it would do a lot. They took pretty inhospitable swamp land in Canada and converted it over a decade to the breadbasket if the whole colony.
One thing I've wondered, is that if the rainforest and the diseases that it contained, were so hazardous to Europeans, why didn't they approach it with a 'European' solution? Like burning or cutting down the whole forest?
In theory a really good set of migrants for Brazil would be the Arcadians. If you could somehow convince people like that to come to Brazil it would do a lot. They took pretty inhospitable swamp land in Canada and converted it over a decade to the breadbasket if the whole colony.
BlondieBC
Banned
The Amazon basin is a bowl. Originally, these rivers flowed into the Pacific. Then the rise of the Andes diverted them to the Atlantic. This leaves a bowl that is up to 60 feet deep that collects rain water in the wet season.
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They tried, there is only so much one can do when you have no real medicines, in many areas floods and if not floods monsoon season that lasts for months and is constantly wet and filled with hostile natives. Also slavery which became taboo in the early 1800's for much of Europe was only abolished in 1888 in Brazil. Morally many Europeans found that repugnant and wanted nothing to do with that. Plus it killed the need for immigrants to Brazil like it did in the American South. Then you have climate, there are regions in both Brazil and the South were you can have 100%humidity at 50 degrees C. Does that sound even remotely liveable? Especially without air conditioning or refrigeration? Everything that is not rubberized also rots or rusts. Clothes will literally rot off your body. Finally all the hostile wildlife. Until the 1940's when technology became available on a wide scale did it become possible for humanity to do what it has done in the tropics and many people have and still do die there to this day. To me the question should not be about Brazil but why not Chile or Argentina instead?
Brazil would be ideal for massive works of civil engineering, the Amazon floodplain forests could probably be turned into ideal farmland land with a large enough injection of cash. The issue is that 1) that's cash that the Brazilians have never had, and 2) it's not like Brazil doesn't have arable land, it actually has more than Ukraine and Argentina combined, so there was not much need for such projects, especially when the people working that land are slaves who can simply be replaced if the nearby swamp produces too many mosquitos.
Canada is another one that could easily have a much larger population.
Not that much larger, its suffers the Russia problem. Poor soils due the glaciers wiping away soil and leaving much of what is left acidic. Plus a good chunk that is frozen solid most of the year and there is how rocky a good chunk of it is. Now if Canada were part of the US I can easily see it having maybe double of what it has now and that's it. Most of that being in areas that are already existing like Toronto. I can see that city getting Chicago like apartments and sky scrapers.
The quality of Canada's soil is really irrelevant as Canada has been producing a food surplus since the times of New France and currently produces about three times as much food as its population consumes. There were plenty of opportunities for Canada to accept more immigrants durring the 1800s, and could have potentially had even more (and had less emigration to the US) had Rupert's Land been opened to settlement sooner than it was IOTL.
Also, Toronto is a bit larger than Chicago and has a similar population density, so I'm not sure what that last bit was meant to mean.
edit: and I'm not sure why Toronto being like the poster child for "doughnut cities" would be good.
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Chile is too fucking Far away, trust me I live here, the country don't have easy access to the atlantic Trade, that was vital to the colonies in the c. XVIII, XIX and early XX. I mean look at this map of from the 1900,when the steamship as travel vehicle was completely adopted. A Traveler from the UK takes more time to arrive to Chile than to arrive to Australia!!!, its more or less the same for most of Europe, so Chile don´t have a big immigration wave(s) that was common in most America. and the ones that he gets are government sponsored(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonization_of_Valdivia,_Osorno_and_Llanquihue) and we barely get 6.000 immigrants in a 25 years period (1850-1875) So for the most part the country remained relatively homogenous, with little population and backwater.
Plus the Chilean Elite was self serving, encroached in his privileges, and ridicoulus wealthy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_colonization_of_Valdivia,_Osorno_and_Llanquihue in spanish https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isidora_Goyenechea), in fact for the most XIX century the same handfull of surnames are a constant in the political, social and economical life of Chile, so there is little interets for the real progress of the Country, "obviusly we want to live in a modern country, but we are so far awty that there is little we could do."
i could go and go and go, but you get the picture
Hardial
Banned
Argentina (and Uruguay) are basically at Southern European standard of living already. Both were huge immigrant havens, attracting just as much if not more migrants than the US and Canada. With a bit more political stability, I see no reason why they couldn't be considered first world countries today. But obviously they can't become the United States due to carrying capacity limitations.
Chile, as the previous poster mentioned, has even more severe geographical limitations, being one of the most remote countries in the entire world (closest population center to Point Nemo!). But I think what held it back even more was its inherent social structure. While Argentina wiped out most of its natives and replaced them with Europeans America-style, Chile had a much higher native population and was built on subjugating and exploiting them rather than replacing them. This led to a less dynamic economy (like the U.S. South) and a much lower demand for European settlers. What prosperity Chile has is partly thanks to its wealth of natural resources and ability to reinvest them effectively.
While I agree with you, I must mention that Chile also have se same Standard of Living, and in some aspect better, Than Argentina and Uruguay, and Chile have in this moment a bigger and more vibrant first generation immigrant population that the neighbor countries, that i love, really we were too parochial, wit has much a as half million immigrant around 3% of the population, don't sound as much, but historically our immigration never was more than 0.8% of the population(partial source:https://www.bloomberg.com/news/arti...to-stay-open-to-immigrants-amid-record-inflow / https://www.theguardian.com/world/2017/jun/29/caribbean-migrants-chile-desert-minefield).
The problems that i describe for the C. XVIII XIX and early XX are changed as more of the trade are now done in the Pacific and the atlantic trade is losing importance as trade hub,and the countrie are in better position to exploit this opportunities