South America is central to the book’s account of how colonial institutions, rather than climate alone, shaped the Americas’ economic divergence. Its history runs from early Spanish expeditions and attempts to extract labor and wealth to later evidence that regional rankings endured for centuries, even though the continent’s fortunes had once stood in striking contrast to those of North America.

Colonial Encounters and Extraction

In 1516, the Spanish navigator Juan Díaz de Solís entered the estuary later named the Río de la Plata, or River of Silver, after local people were reported to possess silver. The Charrúas, in what is now Uruguay, and the Querandí, on the plains later known as the Pampas, lived in small hunter-gatherer groups without strong centralized political authorities. They resisted the incursion; a group of Charrúas killed de Solís as he explored territory he sought to claim for Spain.

Spain tried again in 1534, sending settlers under Pedro de Mendoza, who founded a town at the site of Buenos Aires. The settlement’s temperate climate did not compensate for the colonists’ failure to find what they had come for: resources to extract and people to compel to work. The Charrúas and Querandí refused to supply food or labor, and attacked the settlement. The Spanish, unprepared to feed themselves, went hungry. Nor did the area contain the gold or silver they sought: the silver encountered by de Solís had come from the Inca state in the Andes, far to the west.

The first Spanish stay at Buenos Aires was short-lived; the town was not resettled until 1580. The episode illustrates a broader colonial logic: European settlers wanted other people to cultivate the land and sought riches to plunder, rather than intending to till the soil themselves. In the wider conquest of the Americas, Spanish methods could be very different where powerful centralized societies offered rulers, tribute systems, and labor forces to seize. South America’s varied local political circumstances therefore mattered to the form and prospects of colonization.

A Continent in a Wider Conquest

Spanish expansion accelerated after the voyages that followed Christopher Columbus’s 1492 sighting in the Bahamas. Hernán Cortés invaded Mexico in 1519; Francisco Pizarro’s expedition to Peru followed about a decade and a half later; and Pedro de Mendoza reached the Río de la Plata two years after that. Over the following century, Spain conquered and colonized much of central, western, and southern South America, while Portugal claimed Brazil to the east.

The book contrasts the failed early settlement at Buenos Aires with the Spanish strategy used against centralized indigenous states. First developed by Cortés in Mexico, that strategy centered on capturing the indigenous leader, taking control of accumulated wealth, and compelling people to provide tribute and food. Spanish conquerors then installed themselves as a new elite and took over existing arrangements for taxation, tribute, and forced labor. South America thus belonged to a continental history in which conquest did not follow one uniform pattern: local political organization affected what Europeans could seize and how they imposed control.

Persistent Rankings and Reversals

In the Americas, economic rankings show a durable divide within South America as well as between the continent and its northern neighbors. In the comparison presented in the book, the United States and Canada lead, followed by Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, and Uruguay, with Venezuela’s position varying with oil prices. Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Ecuador, and Peru come next; Bolivia and Paraguay appear in a poorer group alongside Guatemala. The broad ordering is reported as similar across fifty-, one-hundred-, and one-hundred-and-fifty-year comparisons. The persistence points to long-lived differences between countries, not simply a north–south divide.

That modern pattern is not an eternal one. At the time Europeans arrived, the regions that now include Mexico, Central America, Peru, and Bolivia were home to the politically centralized Aztec and Inca civilizations, while areas that now include the United States, Canada, Argentina, and Chile were mostly inhabited by societies the book characterizes as lacking comparable technologies. The relative prosperity of the United States and Canada therefore represents a reversal of fortune, not evidence of a timeless geographical advantage. The book locates the explanation in the different ways the regions were colonized and developed, rather than in latitude or climate.

Evidence and the Limits of Geography

The book’s broader argument uses multiple kinds of historical evidence to resist treating present-day economic differences as natural or permanent. For example, its account of Copán draws on settlement mapping and dated obsidian to estimate a population of about 28,000 at its peak in AD 750–799; by AD 1200, the population had fallen to roughly its level eight centuries earlier. This is evidence about a Maya city, not a measure of South America as a whole, but it reinforces the book’s wider point that societies and their fortunes change over time.

The same caution applies to the book’s economic indicators. Its comparisons of national income are snapshots tied to particular periods, while its historical account asks how rankings changed across longer spans. South America’s significance lies partly in this contrast: contemporary inequalities can look entrenched, yet the continent’s earlier position in the Americas was very different. Geography supplies the setting; colonial institutions and subsequent historical change explain why that setting did not dictate one fixed economic outcome.