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"THE SPANIARDS, leaving the island of Cuba ... have encountered cities in which the subjects live according to law, there is commerce and people go around dressed. They have books," wrote a chronicler of the infant Spanish colonies in what became Latin America.
This in a nutshell was one of several critical differences between Spanish colonialism and that of the British in North America and Australia--the enormous variation in indigenous societies. The other was the size of the indigenous population.
The population of the future Latin America when Christopher Columbus arrived in 1492 has been estimated at between 11 and 80 million. That of the present ...