19th Century Americas

Comparing Post-Colonial Societies

Common elements

• Rich natural resources, land

• Indigenous people decline rapidly

• High rates of immigration, multi-racial society

• Slavery

• Christianity

• Colonial societies that attain liberation

• Enlightenment influences

• Foreign investment

Divergence

• Political Stability

– Civil War emergency and Lincoln's assassination

– caudillos

• Economic Development

– Peripheral South

– Mercantile/Industrial North

• Cultural Change

– Women's Movement

Similarities mask differences

North

• Self-rule

• Protestantism, diversity

• Plantations and Trade

• Racial binary, anti-immigrant movements but white society relatively open

• Native Americans moved, not used as labor

South

• Viceroyalities

• Catholicism, some syncretic elements

• Haciendas and mining

• Racial continuum, no major anti-immigrant movements, but hierarchical

• Native Americans exploited, integrated

"It's not enough merely to list xnumber of causes. It is the task of the historian to reduce a given list of causes to order by establishing a causal hierarchy, and to relate the items in this hierarchy to one another."

-- Fredrik Logevall, H-NET (H-Diplo, H-Asia).

Root causes? Hard to Pin Down

• Not Likely:

– Protestant v. Catholic

– Racial mix or hierarchy

• Possibilities:

– English Self-Rule v. Spanish Viceroyalties

– semi-metropole v. periphery

• Jonathan Dresner, "Comparing 19c North and South America" http://dresnerworld.edublogs.org/resources/19c-north-and-south-america/

• Faden, W., A Map of America, or the New World, etc. 1797 http://www.voyagerantiquemaps.com/maps/137/a-map-of-america-or-the-new-world.html