The Hidalgo Rebellion and the Problem of Order: The Comparative Lessons of Chile & the United States

THE HIDALGO REBELLION AND THE PROBLEM OF ORDER: THE COMPARATIVE LESSONS OF CHILE & THE UNITED STATES Jerry F. Hough Duke University Robin Grier University of Oklahoma American economists have vigorously debated why the Mexican economy lagged behind the American economy after independence. Except for the last decades of the 20th century, the difference largely reflects the disastrous Mexican performance in the 60 years after the Hidalgo rebellion . By the most accepted estimate, Mexican per capita income fell from $759 in 1820 to $674 in 1870, while U.S. per capita income rose from $1,257 to $2,554 during these years. The difference would be even greater if the period from 1810 to 1820 were included.1 Nobel Prize winner Douglass North attributes the different rates of economic growth in the United States and Mexico to the degree of political order in the two countries after 1776 and 1810 respectively. While Mexico had profound chaos during the war of independence and prolonged disorder for decades afterwards, the United States had a high degree of political order from 1776 until the 1850s. Order was even restored quickly after a Civil War that killed 600,000 people.2 North explains the greater Mexican disorder to its greater value conflict , but this is unconvincing. Creoles in Mexico shared a common culture, religion, language, and fear of Native Americans. North himself believed that “Latin American economic history . . . perpetuated the centralized, bureaucratic traditions carried over from its Spanish/Portuguese heritage” and that this created the conditions for political instability. This seems wrong. Mexico might not have had the preconditions for stable democracy , but its traditions should have led to an orderly, authoritarian state in the 19th century.3 The United States, by contrast, was built on colonies which were each formed for settlers from one of the religions of the bloody English religious wars of the 1600s. Then the Anglican and Quaker colonies south of New York were destabilized after the 1740s by the huge ∗We would like to thank Lyman Johnson for his helpful comments on an earlier draft. C  2010 Southeastern Council on Latin American Studies and Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 59 The Latin Americanist, December 2010 immigration of hostile Presbyterians of Northern Ireland and Scotland into their interior. Charles Andrews, the best American historian on the colonial period as a whole, insisted that in 1750 the English colonies were “far apart [both] geographically and mentally” from each other. He believed “few barriers had been removed” before the revolution.4 George Washington made the same point in 1783: those in the Continental Army, he said, originally “came from the different parts of the Continent, strongly disposed, by the habits of education, to despise and quarrel with each other.” The colonies had “the most violent local prejudices” against each other.5 These prejudices were based on religious and ethnic differences much more than attitudes about property rights in slaves. What caused the disorder in Mexico and ensured order in the United States? We think that the immediate explanation is suggested by the length of time the government needed to quell the relatively powerless Hidalgo Rebellion and then to restore order when political rebellion faded after 1815. Spain actually did not have a centralized bureaucracy in Mexico, and it had virtually no military force. After 1808 Mexico was left with little state at all, and we think that explains the chaos that existed. The English colonies, by contrast, corresponded to the classic definition of a “state:” “an organization with a comparative advantage in violence, extending over a geographic area whose boundaries are determined by its power to tax constituents.”6 The states retained military force and the power of taxation throughout the War of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, and after 1787. This gave them the capacity to maintain order. Our broader purpose—and the main purpose of the book manuscript from which this article is drawn–is to explain why the state in the English colonies was stronger than that in the Mexican colony. We agree with Douglass North that the construction of an effective state and market requires centuries. This means that the Spanish and English “colonial ” legacies began well before 1525 and 1607 respectively...