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

parliamentarism and Spain down the primrose path to absolutism. With an additional source of revenue outside the control of parliament, Charles I might have maintained his ‘Personal Rule’ and avoided the fateful confrontation that produced the British Civil War. His Puritan opponents in the House of Commons were elderly men by 1640. A few more years would have seen their challenge fade. 21 Nor was there any certainty that Britain would be steered a second time away from absolutism by the Dutch invasion and coup that installed William of Orange as king. 22 The chain of events that led from the financial travails of James I to the deposition of James II might easily have been broken on many occasions. No narrative is more tendentious than the Whig interpretation of English history, with its assumption that the Glorious Revolution of 1688 was a divinely ordained compromise between monarch andlegislature. Even after 1688 the dominance of the Whig aristocrats who were the real beneficiaries of the Stuarts’ ouster was still periodically vulnerable to Jacobite counter-coups, which enjoyed considerable support on the Celtic periphery.
    The crux of the matter is the relative importance in the historical process of, on the one hand, initial resource endowments in the colonized territories of the New World and, on the other hand, the institutional blueprints the colonizers brought with them from Europe. If initial conditions were determining, then it did not much matter if Englishmen or Spaniards turned up in Peru; the result would have been much the same, because Englishmen would have been just as tempted to plunder the Incas and just as likely to succumb to the ‘resource curse’ of cheap gold and silver. 23 Presumably, too, Spanish settlers might have been more innovative had they found themselves goldless in the Chesapeake Bay. But if you believe that the key variable was the institutions the settlers brought with them, then quite different alternatives suggest themselves.
    British colonization generally produced better economic results than Spanish or Portuguese, wherever it was tried. There is no perfect test for this proposition, since no two colonies were exactly alike, but Arizona is richer than Mexico and Hong Kong is richer than Manila. So perhaps British colonization of Mexico and Peru would have had better long-run results than Spanish, ultimately producing some kind of United States of Central and South America. And perhaps Spanish colonization of North America would have left that region both relatively impoverished and divided into quarrelsome republics: multiple nation-states like Colombia rather than a single District of Columbia as the seat of a federal government, and undying enmity between Wisconsin and Minnesota, rather than between Colombia and Venezuela.
    England was already different from Spain in 1670, long before the advent of industrialization. Violence as measured by the homicide rate had been declining steadily since the 1300s. With the Glorious Revolution of 1688, an era of intermittent civil war had come to an end, though hard battles remained to be fought to impose order on the Celtic periphery, especially Northern Scotland and Southern Ireland. Beginning in around 1640, the English birth rate rose steadily from around twenty-six per 1,000 to a peak of forty per 1,000 in theearly 1800s. Yet the Malthusian trap did not close, as it had in the past and continued to do elsewhere. Real wages moved upwards. Rents trended downwards. And literacy rose markedly. 24 A crucial change was the availability of an exit option for those willing to risk a transatlantic voyage. As early as the 1640s net emigration exceeded 100,000, and it ranged between 30,000 and 70,000 in every decade until the 1790s. 25 Those who feared that these adventurous types were being lost to the land of their birth failed to see the reciprocal benefits of transatlantic migration as trade between the American colonies and Europe