Comparisons between Anglo-Saxon and Spanish America go back a long way, and usually Latin America comes off worse. In the Black Legend the Spaniards are crueller. Though he knew next to nothing about them, the ‘American Farmer’ Crèvecoeur, writing in the 1770s, had no doubt that ‘could we have a perfect representation of the customs and manners of the Spanish Colonies, it would … exhibit a most astonishing contrast, when viewed in opposite to those of these Provinces’. A half century later Alexis de Tocqueville, deeply enamoured of the New England Town Meeting, would from time to time let his prejudices rip about the benighted inhabitants of the southern half of the hemisphere, who had enjoyed no such apprenticeship. This lazy and judgmental tradition, in which North Americans pass and South Americans fail, is by no means dead: economic historians seeking to explain North American wealth and South American poverty often prefer muttering about ‘path dependence’ and ‘institutions’ — this last term can now mean practically anything — to having a good close look at the whole gamut of possible analysis. They rarely if ever compare the more successful regions of Latin America with the less successful parts of the United States, say, Argentina with Alabama, or central Chile with West Virginia. Spanish America as a whole would no doubt still come off worse in this sort of contest, but the odds would be fairer. Likewise, in many exercises in comparative hemispheric history, slavery in the USA and its long enduring political and social consequences tend, in John Elliott’s phrase here, to be ‘airbrushed out’.
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