I haven’t read Niall Ferguson before, but I do find this summary to be problematic mainly because it is such a large generalization. Generalizations can be handy, and his seems accurate at first glance. But when we look closer, the colonial experience was so much more complicated than Ferguson implies. So let’s try and add some nuance to this generalization!

First, keep in mind that Spanish colonies stretched from Tierra del Fuego all the way to Canada (until 1848). Think of the people, geography, and distance implied in such a vast space! Encompassed in it were varying densities of indigenous populations, natural resources, and access to Spanish investment capital. As a result, the Spanish colonial experience was different both regionally and locally, depending on where you look. The same can be said of British territories. For example, there was a significant difference within the 13 colonies. The Northeast was very different from the South. Urban areas were different from the frontier. Their economies were different, migration patterns were different, and their experiences with slavery were different. And that’s not even discussing other colonies like Belize, Somali, Australia, or Ireland. Perhaps you will get answers from people who know more about the colonial experience of Mexico, the Caribbean, or Peru. Or you could try asking a specific question about land ownership in those places since not too many people seem to have bitten on this thread. I feel most comfortable talking about the Río de la Plata, which should help add to my point about the variety of Spanish colonial experience.

In the Río de la Plata, land was actually quite easy to acquire since it was surrounded by a frontier (and the vast Pampas). Prices of land varied depending on their location, access to water, risk of invasion from raiding indigenous groups, and access to urban markets like Buenos Aires or Montevideo. And while it is true that there were powerful elites, it took a long time for a dominating wealthy class to develop, and as Tulio Halperín-Donghi showed in his classic Politics, Economics and Society in Argentina in the Revolutionary Period, the elite social class changed a lot over time, responding to different market and political opportunities. According to Juan Carlos Garavaglia and Jorge Gelman in “Rural History of the Río de la Plata,” “during the colonial period, the supply of fertile land was fluid, especially in the most recently colonized zones. In these areas, the process of filling and establishing a land claim might have been simpler for more powerful individuals but did not exclude poorer settlers. In fact, it is difficult to find any clear preference on the part of the colonial government for consolidating landownership more readily for the large landowners to the detriment of smallholders” (81). Even on big estancias, as demonstrated by Hilda Sabato in Agrarian Capitalism and the World Market, tenants could rent areas of the large farms, assist with cattle, herd sheep, and cultivate wheat to support their families. These trends occurred both during the colonial period and the nineteenth century. But even within the Río de la Plata, the experience varied. In Uruguay and parts of what would eventually be northern Argentina, large estancieros did dominate, yet even here, relationships between the landowners and campesinos was so complicated that it is beyond the scope of a reddit post (and is still much debated by historians). In Paraguay for much of the colonial period, the Jesuits had large missions with upwards of one hundred thousand indigenous workers gathered together to labor for the Spanish missionaries. But once the Jesuits were expelled, the indigenous people fanned out across the region, finding work in cities, farms, and ranches in Paraguay, the Littoral, and the Banda Oriental depending on their individual skills. They were certainly not passive recipients of poverty; instead, they actively worked to support themselves and their familes. So hopefully you can see that the Spanish colonial experience wasn’t uniform and doesn’t fit perfectly into Ferguson’s description.

The conclusions that he draws about inequality and democracy are, as you might have imagined, just as complicated. It’s easy to lump of Latin America together, but the experience of these countries is surprisingly varied. Jose Moya wrote a beautiful essay about the complexity of Latin America in the Oxford Handbook of Latin American History, which I will summarize here. Peru and Mexico’s mining industries represented some of the most industrialized locations in the world during the 1600’s. The Caribbean Islands were some of the wealthiest and most prized colonies during much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Argentina and Uruguay, by 1900, had GDPs and GDPs per capita on par with France and other European nations and were both among the top ten richest countries in the world. Additionally, independence of Spanish colonies in 1810 represented the cutting edge of democracy, closely following the first modern democratic experiments in the United States, Haiti, and France. Uruguay and Chile have some of the longest democratic traditions in the entire world (excluding the disastrous dictatorships of the Cold War). On the other hand, Paraguay is one of the most unequal and isolated countries in the world; however, this resulted more from the devastation wrought by the Paraguayan War and its isolation deep in the heart of South America. Historians continue to debate the role colonialism and inequality played on democracy in Latin America, but the struggles result from many causes, not just Spanish colonial heritage.