Why is the North rich and the South poor?

This is an excerpt I took from "Open veins of Latin America" by Eduardo Galeano. EXCELLENT.

Why is the north rich and the south poor?
The Rio Grande is much more than a geographical frontier. Is today's profound
disequilibrium, which seems to confirm Hegel's prophecy of inevitable war
between the two Americas, to be traced to U.S. imperialist expansion, or does
it have more ancient roots? In fact, back in the colonial beginnings, north and
south had already generated very different societies with different aims.

The Mayflower pilgrims did not cross the sea to obtain legendary treasures;
they came mainly to establish themselves with their families and to reproduce
in the New World the system of life and work they had practiced in Europe.
They were not soldiers of fortune but pioneers; they came not to conquer but to
colonize, and their colonies were settlements. It is true that a slave-plantation economy like Latin America's developed later south of the Delaware, but there was a difference: the center of gravity in the United States was from the outset the farms and workshops of New England, from which came the victorious
armies of the Civil War. New England colonists, the original nucleus of U.S.
civilization, never acted as colonial agents for European capitalist
accumulation; their own development, and the development of their new land,
were always their motivation. The thirteen colonies served as an outlet for the
army of European peasants and artisans who were being thrown off the labor
market by metropolitan development. Free workers formed the base of that
new society across the ocean.


Spain and Portugal, on the other hand, had an abundance of subjugated
labor in Latin America. Enslavement of the Indians was followed by the
wholesale transplantation of Africans. Through the centuries, a legion of
unemployed peasants was always available to be moved to production centers:
as precious metal or sugar exports rose and fell, flourishing centers coexisted
with centers of decay, and the latter provided labor for the former. This
structure persists to our time; today, as yesterday, it means low wage scales
because of the pressure of the unemployed on the labor market, and frustrates
the growth of an internal consumer market. But also in contrast to the Northern Puritans, internal economic development was never the goal of the ruling
classes of Latin American colonial society. Their profits came from outside;
they were tied more to the foreign market than to their own domain.

Landlords, miners, and merchants had been born to fulfill the mission of
supplying Europe with gold, silver, and food. Goods moved along the roads in
only one direction: to the port and overseas markets. This also provides the key
to the United States' expansion as a national unit and to the fragmentation of
Latin America. Our production centers are not interconnected but take the form
of a fan with a far-away vertex.

One might say that the thirteen colonies had the fortune of bad fortune.
Their history shows the great importance of not being born important. For the
north of America had no gold or silver, no Indian civilizations with dense
concentrations of people already organized for work, no fabulously fertile
tropical soil on the coastal fringe. It was an area where both nature and history
had been miserly: both metals and the slave labor to wrest it from the ground
were missing. Those colonists were lucky. Furthermore, the northern colonies,
from Maryland to New England to Nova Scotia, had a climate and soil similar
to British agriculture and produced exactly the same things. That is, as Sergio
Bagú notes, they did not offer products complementary to the metropolis. The
situation in the Antilles and the mainland Spanish-Portuguese colonies was
quite different. Tropical lands produced sugar, tobacco, cotton, indigo,
turpentine; a small Caribbean island had more economic importance for
England than the thirteen colonies that would become the United States.
These circumstances explain the rise and consolidation of the United States
as an economically autonomous system, one which did not drain abroad the
wealth it produced. The ties between colony and metropolis were slender. In
Barbados and Jamaica, on the other hand, only the capital necessary to replace
worn-out slaves was reinvested. Thus it was not racial factors that decided the
development of the one and the underdevelopment of the other: there was
nothing Spanish or Portuguese about Britain's Antillean islands. The truth is
that the economic insignificance of the thirteen colonies permitted the early
diversification of their exports and set off the early and rapid development of
manufacturing. Even before independence, North American industrialization
had official encouragement and protection. And England took a tolerant
attitude while it strictly forbade its Antillean islands to manufacture so much as
a pin.