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Dual Economy
Spanish settlers in colonial Latin America received grants called encomiendas, which usually consisted of a parcel of land and a population of enslaved indigenous people. The highly extractive encomienda labor system enriched this white settler elite and contributed to Latin America’s high levels of inequality.
Encomienda Quotes in Why Nations Fail
The Why Nations Fail quotes below are all either spoken by Encomienda or refer to Encomienda. For each quote, you can also see the other terms and themes related to it (each theme is indicated by its own dot and icon, like this one:
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Chapter 1
Quotes
Throughout the Spanish colonial world in the Americas, similar institutions and social structures emerged. After an initial phase of looting, and gold and silver lust, the Spanish created a web of institutions designed to exploit the indigenous peoples. The full gamut of encomienda, mita, repartimiento, and trajin was designed to force indigenous people’s living standards down to a subsistence level and thus extract all income in excess of this for Spaniards. This was achieved by expropriating their land, forcing them to work, offering low wages for labor services, imposing high taxes, and charging high prices for goods that were not even voluntarily bought. Though these institutions generated a lot of wealth for the Spanish Crown and made the conquistadors and their descendants very rich, they also turned Latin America into the most unequal continent in the world and sapped much of its economic potential.
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Encomienda Term Timeline in Why Nations Fail
The timeline below shows where the term Encomienda appears in Why Nations Fail. The colored dots and icons indicate which themes are associated with that appearance.
Chapter 1: So Close and Yet So Different
...Cortés captured the emperor Moctezuma, seized and melted down all of his gold, and granted encomiendas—parcels of land and groups of indigenous slaves—to Spanish settlers. The priest Bartolomé de las Casas...
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...murder the Inca aristocracy in Cusco, then enslave the indigenous population and organize them into encomiendas. They also forced a seventh of the region’s men to work in a large silver...
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...transport goods on their backs like pack animals. All over the Spanish Empire, between the encomienda system and these extractive laws, the Spanish enriched themselves but impoverished their territories—which now make...
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...This frightened elites in Mexico, who were still profiting off of forced labor in the encomienda system. Although the Spanish monarchy was eventually restored, the military ended up forcing the king...
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Chapter 12: The Vicious Circle
Under the heading “From Encomienda to Land Grab,” Acemoglu and Robinson point out that, in 1993, Guatemala’s president and key...
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In Guatemala, like in Mexico and Peru, the encomienda system enriched Spanish elites by imposing forced labor on the indigenous masses. Independence simply handed...
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