Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
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Until the political reforms of 2000, Nogales, Sonora, just like the rest of Mexico, was under the corrupt control of the Institutional Revolutionary Party, or Partido Revolucionario Institucional (PRI).
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1516 the Spanish navigator Juan Díaz de Solís sailed into a wide estuary on the Eastern Seaboard of South America.
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silver.
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the Charrúas in what is now Uruguay, and the Querandí on the plains that were to be known as the Pampas in modern Argentina—regarded the newcomers with hostility.
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In 1534 the Spanish, still optimistic, sent out a first mission of settlers from Spain under the leadership of Pedro de Mendoza.
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The Charrúas and the Querandí were not obliging,
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The area had no silver or gold to exploit, and the silver that de Solís found had actually come all the way from the Inca state in the Andes,
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In 1537 one of these expeditions, under the leadership of Juan de Ayolas, penetrated up the Paraná River, searching for a route to the Incas.
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Guaraní, a sedentary people with an agricultural economy based on maize and cassava.
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The conquistadors married the Guaraní princesses and quickly set themselves up as a new aristocracy.
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that followed Christopher Columbus’s sighting of one of the islands of the Bahamas on October 12, 1492.
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invasion of Mexico by Hernán Cortés in 1519, the expedition of Francisco Pizarro to Peru a decade and a half later, and the expedition of Pedro de Mendoza to the Río de la Plata just two years after that.
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to subdue opposition was to capture the indigenous leader.
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setting themselves up as the new elite
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When Cortés and his men arrived at the great Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan on November 8, 1519, they were welcomed by Moctezuma, the Aztec emperor,
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The military conquest of the Aztecs was completed by 1521. Cortés, as governor of the province of New Spain, then began dividing up the most valuable resource, the indigenous population, through the institution of the encomienda.
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it was a grant of indigenous peoples to a Spaniard, known as the encomendero.
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De las Casas arrived on the Spanish island of Hispaniola in 1502 with a fleet of ships led by the new governor, Nicolás de Ovando.
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Nowhere was this done more effectively than in Pizarro’s conquest of Peru.
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On November 15, 1532, he reached the mountain town of Cajamarca, where the Inca emperor Atahualpa was encamped with his army.
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The Spanish laid a trap and sprang it. They killed Atahualpa’s guards and retainers, possibly as many as two thousand people, and captured the king.
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reneging on their promises, strangled him in July 1533.
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That November, the Spanish captured the Inca capital of Cusco, where the Incan aristocracy received the same treatment as Atahualpa,
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The encomienda was the main institution used for the control and organization of labor in the early colonial period, but it soon faced a vigorous contender.
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This was part of a vast mountain of silver, which the Spanish baptized El Cerro Rico, “The Rich Hill.” Around it grew the city of Potosí, which at its height in 1650 had a population of 160,000 people,
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De Toledo, arriving in Peru in 1569, first spent five years traveling around and investigating his new charge. He also commissioned a massive survey of the entire adult population.
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first moved almost the entire indigenous population, concentrating them in new towns called reducciones—literally
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revived and adapted an Inca labor institution known as the mita,
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become the largest and most onerous scheme of labor exploitation in the Spanish colonial period.
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were required to work in the mines at Potosí. The Potosí mita endured throughout the entire colonial period and was abolished only in 1825.
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The major historical difference between Acomayo and Calca is that Acomayo was in the catchment area of the Potosí mita. Calca was not.
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de Toledo consolidated the encomienda into a head tax,
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the repartimiento de mercancias,
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trajin—meaning,
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England was a minor European power recovering from the devastating effects of a civil war, the Wars of the Roses.
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They chose North America not because it was attractive, but because it was all that was available.
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The first English attempt to plant a colony, at Roanoke, in North Carolina, between 1585 and 1587, was a complete failure.
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The colonists, under the auspices of the Virginia Company, sailed into Chesapeake Bay and up a river they named the James, after the ruling English monarch, James I. On May 14, 1607, they founded the settlement of Jamestown.
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within the territory claimed by the Powhatan Confederacy, a coalition of some thirty polities owing allegiance to a king called Wahunsunacock.
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lacked the overwhelming centralized political control of the Incas.
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it was Smith who saved the colony. He initiated a series of trading missions that secured vital food supplies.
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Freed on January 2, 1608,
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When Newport sailed for England in April 1608 he took a cargo of pyrite, fool’s gold. He returned at the end of September with orders from the Virginia Company to take firmer control over the locals.
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He imposed a trade embargo.
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Newport set sail once more for England, in December 1608. He took with him a letter written by Smith pleading with the directors of the Virginia Company to change the way they thought about the colony.
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it was the colonists who would have to work. He therefore pleaded with the directors to send the right sort of people:
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He managed to cajole and bully local indigenous groups to trade with him,
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Back in the settlement, Smith was completely in charge and imposed the rule that “he that will not worke shall not eat.”
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new model of governance, replacing the ruling council with a single governor.
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events of the winter of 1609/1610—the so-called “starving time.”
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