Civilization: The West and the Rest

Property is the next “killer app” on Ferguson’s list. In the third chapter, the author compares the development of the Americas starting from the Early Modern period through this prism. He explores the differences in colonization and settlement styles between North and South America to understand why the latter lagged behind the former. He attributes their differences not just to democracy, but to other related factors, like the rule of law, individual freedoms as well as property rights within a system of a representative government. A “society based upon the opinion of civilians” served as the greatest difference between “the West and the rest” (97). Ferguson also suggests that the Americas became a crucial factor in the establishment of Western Europe as something that surpassed being a “small, backward region of Eurasia” (96).

Ferguson explores the colonization of South America by conquistadors in the 16th century and leaders such as the Spaniard Francisco Pizarro. The conquistadors plundered South American gold and brought an “invisible ally,” deadly diseases, to which the Indigenous population had no immunity (99). They also killed huge portions of the population in the Andes (100). In the author’s view, historical sites like the Peruvian Machu Picchu are a reminder that even complex civilizations disappear sometimes for reasons that are unclear to historians.

In contrast, North American migration was different. Rather than finding significant quantities of precious metals, the settlers had to farm and engage in trade. Initially, there were no large cities. In Ferguson’s view, “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” (104). However, the two crucial features were the “initial resource endowments in the colonized territories” and the “institutional blueprints” from their place of origin (105). When it comes to the latter, Ferguson compares the differences between 17th-century Britain and Spain, as the source countries of their respective migrations.

For Britain, violence declined, and literacy surged as did wages. In turn, trade between Britain and its colonies was also on the rise. In Ferguson’s view, the most significant change involved the nature of politics which first arrived philosophically. The author examines the ideas of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke which moved away from absolute monarchy. For the former, the sovereign could be a parliament. For the latter, power was “merely delegated by ‘Civil Society’” (108). These ideas, especially in the context of the Enlightenment, “would have a seminal influence on the development of both society and politics in North America” (109).

Ferguson believes, in contrast, that Latin American politics were either anarchic or “a crude caricature” of authoritarianism (109). For example, property was unequally distributed in Latin America, whereas in the US “it became even easier for new settlers to acquire land” after the Revolution (124). Therefore, despite the similarities between their respective colonial revolutions, South America did not turn into a “United States of South America” (117-118). Ultimately, Ferguson reduces this question to one of “the tightness of the nexus between land and liberty” (117).

One major exception to what Ferguson deems a free society was “the anomaly of slavery” (136). Enslaved people who ended up in Latin America landed in a “racial melting pot,” but those who ended up in the US became part of a hierarchic, race-based society. In general, enslaved people often worked on plantations and in other types of farming. They, too, were considered property, and it was this “property” that gave North America an additional edge over South America, where slavery was easier to exit.

Specifically, Ferguson focuses on “the fate of the Gullahs,” an enslaved group of people in the southeastern US who were treated inhumanely (129). For instance, a 1669 Virginia law stated that murdering a slave was not a felony. In the US, this question of slavery had to be resolved by the means of the 19th-century Civil War between the pro-slavery South and the anti-slavery North.