Free Civilization: The West and the Rest by Niall Ferguson Page A

America to bleed her white and to breed with their victims. Later the illegitimate offspring of these unions joined with the offspring of slaves transported from Africa. With such racial mixture and such a moral record, can we afford to place laws above leaders and principles above men?
Simón Bolívar
     

LAND OF THE FREE
     
    In 1670 a penniless young English couple stepped off the first ship to land on the shores of South Carolina, after a harrowing transatlantic journey. Like her travelling companion Abraham Smith, Millicent How had signed herself into service with a standard deed of indenture made in September 1669:
Know all men that I Millicent How of London Spinster the day of the date hereof doe firmely by these pnts [points] bind and oblige my selfe as a faithfull & obedient Servant in all things whatsoever, to serve and dwell with Capt. Joseph West of the sd City of London Merchant, in the plantation, or province of Carolina. 16
     
    Between 65 and 80 per cent of all the Britons who came to the Chesapeake in the course of the seventeenth century did so on this basis. 17 That was by no means exceptional. Fully three-quarters of all European migrants to British America over the entire colonial period came as indentured servants. 18
    This was a very different migration from the one experienced by Jerónimo de Aliaga. The Spaniards had literally found mountains of silver in Mexico and Peru. All there seemed to be on the shores of Carolina was a bone-yard of bleached tree-trunks. This was no El Dorado. Instead, settlers in North America had to plant corn to eat and tobacco to trade. 19 For many years Britain’s American colonies remained a patchwork of farms and villages, with a few towns and virtually no true cities. And here the natives, though less numerous, were not so easily subjugated. Even in 1670 you could still have been forgiven for thinking that Jerónimo de Aliaga’s America was the land of the future, while Millicent How’s was destined to remain an obscure Ruritania.
    What if it had been the other way round? What if de Aliaga had ended up in a Spanish Carolina and How and Smith had ended up in a British Peru? ‘If [England’s] Henry VII had been willing to sponsor Columbus’s first voyage,’ the historian J. H. Elliott once half-playfully reflected,
and if an expeditionary force of [Englishmen] had conquered Mexico for Henry VIII, it is possible to imagine a … massive increase in thewealth of the English crown as growing quantities of American silver flowed into the royal coffers; the development of a coherent imperial strategy to exploit the resources of the New World; the creation of an imperial bureaucracy to govern the settler societies and their subjugated populations; the declining influence of parliament in the national life, and the establishment of an absolutist English monarchy financed by the silver of America. 20
     
    In other words, it is not at all self-evident that the British colonies would have turned out as they did if they had been established in South rather than North America.
    What if New England had been in Mexico and New Spain in Massachusetts? If it is possible to imagine England, rather than Castile, seduced into absolutism by the silver of the Peruvian mines, is it equally possible to imagine Castile, rather than England, planting the seeds of republican virtue at higher latitudes? Might the
cortes
– the nearest thing early-modern Spain had to a parliament – have built up enough power to establish the first constitutional monarchy in Western Europe? And might the Estados Unidos have emerged from a crisis of Hispanic rather than British imperial authority, speaking Spanish from its very inception? Such a role reversal is not so implausible. The United Provinces, after all, emerged from the Dutch Revolt against Spanish rule. Perhaps it was mere contingency – the absence or presence of New World gold and silver – that sent England along the high road to