The number of colonists was never that large compared to British North America. In fact Portugal had laws limiting the number of colonists who could immigrate to Brazil (as they were worried about Brazil becoming more powerful than the mother country).
The economy reflected the economic makeup of the colonial power. Just like their colonies Portugal or Spain were also overwhelming rural population with a tiny landowning rich elite, large poor rural population and only a very small urban middle class. By the time of the American Revolution Britain (while still dominated by the rural poor) did have significant middle class, who did immigrate in large numbers.
Slavery was never as dominant in the US as in Brazil. Those areas of the south where it did dominate did actually look a lot like Brazil with a tiny elite planter class and a large enslaved population doing all the work and not having any of the property. But they were always dominated by the richer Norther states.
High levels of economic/class inequality are sort of the default in much of the world, to be fair. And just having your country be very rich in resources does not prevent that from happening. Nor does having some major industrial success stories (e.g. Brazilian aviation).
As Frodo may be able to elaborate upon, the line about “In the early 20th century Argentina was one of the richest countries” glosses over that (a) at the time, other than the outright multicontinental empires, that was not THAT high a hurdle to beat and (b) of that wealth came from commodity sales, and went into a very small number of elite pockets, or else right back out to cover foreign debt as the governments highly leveraged public projects and arms purchases.
Embraer, based in Brazil, is a major manufacturer of aircraft, including commercial passenger planes, executive jets, and military aircraft. They are the #3 global producer of civil aircraft, behind Boeing and Airbus.
In the U.S., many of the “regional jets” which are flown by the major airlines (United, American, Delta) are Embraers.
Basically this. it’s impossible to know how rich Argentina was at that point, there are no reliable PBI estimates.
What IS possible is to see is the source of all those riches, which was basically exporting meat and hides to the British Empire.
It lasted until the British went protectionist and that was it.
The dominant class sure built themselves beautiful palaces and made “spend like an argentinian” a saying in Europe, but they were absolutely happy being just a somewhat bizarre British colony, very little effort was made to industrialize the country using that money and we are still paying for that short-sightedness.
Look at their governments…both Brazil and Argentina score a 38 on the corruption index, where -0- is the most corrupt you can be and 100 is the cleanest you can be. For comparison USA 's score is a 69, and China is a 45. Denmark is the least corrupt with a score of 90 and Somalia is the most corrupt with a score of 12.
Britain had extensive investments in Argentina before WW2, it was virtually a second ‘economic empire’. And was forced to liquidate them at firesale rates as the price of Lend-Lease aid.
Though that’s a symptom not a cause. Massively unequal societies where you have a tiny landowning elite and a massive rural poor making up the vast majority of society (with nothing in between) tend to be corrupt and unstable. Not that there is no corruption or instability in countries with a large middle class and less inequality, but on the whole neither is so bad it threatens the functioning of society.
Also if I’m not mistaken the way the “corruption index” is measured is by asking the population how corrupt they believe their government to be, when your economic situation is bad you tend to think that the government is more corrupt.
(not that there’s no corruption in Argentina, Diego knows there is a lot, but there is also a national tendency to believe everything is worse here than in a mythic first world everybody has in their heads and doesn’t really exist.
I’ve had long discussions with people who swear crime here is worse than in the U.S. for example, and refused to believe their own eyes when I showed them statistics that prove that this is one of the safest countries in the Americas)
And is that because Spanish and Portuguese economy was base of slaves where the British was base on people moving to the colonies and working and living there.
So the Spanish and Portuguese was just striping the land of resources and having slaves work on plantation or mining and the money and wealth sent back to home country unlike the British where base on people moving to the colonies and working and living there.
Keeping in mind, though, that the Brits did plenty of the extraction-colony business themselves (especially in Africa). And a certain set of former-British colonies in the New World had nooooo problem with slave economies well into the mid 1800s…
So as with everything in this world: “it’s complicated and there’s no single answer”.
There is a good number of (IMHO) not very intelligent people in Argentina who from time to time express a wish that the British had won when they invaded Buenos Aires twice in the early 1800s, saying that we would be a developed nation now like Australia.
The usual retort is that we’d probably be closer to Bangladesh.
You mean Spain and Portugal? The British look at Canada, US and also Australia we have more land now that is part of the UK we can build houses in that new land and factories and live and work there under British law.
Well Spain and Portugal looked at South America that’s just rob and strip the land of resources and why would anyone want to move there but rich landowners to keep the slaves in check that’s make the money and exploit them than later on move back to Spain or Portugal. Well even the rich landowners was suppose to be temporary stay it was not suppose to be colony like the British did that stay there and work there.
No, that sequence of posts was about how in British colonies like Maryland, Virginia, the Carolinas, Georgia, Jamaica, Trinidad and the rest of the West Indies there WAS also a significant slave plantation economy, and griffin1977 was replying to me that, however, that was not a majority of what would become the US economy (though it did become a huge part of the economies of specific Southern states).
In any case Spanish Latin America did not have a uniform system either, for instance what became Argentina as far as I can tell did not have very extensive use of chattel slavery and in places like Mexico or the Andean countries the practice was more often that of use of the large native population as the dispossessed laboring underclass in a form of serfdom or peonage.
Why do I get the feeling those people probably are somehow convinced they would be the ones who would have wound up in the “elite” group groomed by the proper Brits to be the ones running the place.
)