ABSTRACT
In the mid-1990s, scholars theorising about growth and divergence in the Americas returned to the subject of factor endowments. For some, natural resources were again vaunted as the key determinant of the pace and pattern of economic change. In a continuing comparative debate, others see the causality running not from favourable endowments through institutions to growth, but rooted in institutions that, in turn, conditioned resource use, promoting or limiting growth. 1 Charting a cautious path between the two schools, Coatsworth questions the endowments-as-fate approach, while acknowledging that a ‘Great Divergence’ between Latin America and Anglo America occurred in the decades around 1800. He stresses that, until the later eighteenth century, Latin America could not be considered underdeveloped by most conventional measurements. Indeed, for the early eighteenth century, admittedly sparse data appear to indicate levels of productivity and GDP per capita above those prevailing in the 13 British Atlantic colonies. Conquest and colonization in the Americas resulted in Smithian growth, trade-based specialization and the adaptation of existing technology and institutions to the exploitation of natural resources, that seemed to deliver more impressive results in Latin America than further north (Coatsworth 1998: 24–5, 26; 2007). To borrow from Coatsworth: clearly something happened after this point.
