Government, taxation, coercion, and ideology: A comment on Yeager

• 成果类型: Editorial Material
• 署名作者: Rutgers University System; Rutgers University Newark; Rutgers University New Brunswick
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF ECONOMIC HISTORY
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-0507
• DOI: 10.1017/S002205070002060X
• 发表日期: 1998
• 页码: 511-520
• 关键词: labor

摘要

At the very origin of Latin America's institutional structure is the Spanish American encomienda. For economists interested in issues of growth divergence and path dependence, therefore, a clear undertanding of that institution's nature, evolution, and effects is imperative. Tim Yeager's analysis of it in a recent issue of this JOURNAL is a welcome, provocative, and interesting contribution but has conceptual and empirical weaknesses that call its conclusions into question.] I can refer here to the most salient only. The first section considers whether the encomienda was a coerced labor system that the Crown chose to satisfy an ideological bias against slavery and to collect rents. The second section is devoted to the view that the Crown restricted the encomienda's inheritance to secure its rule. The third section discusses whether the encomienda's adoption was paradoxical' because its restrictions implied incentives to destroy more quickly the human capital of indigenous people than did slavery. The fourth section analyzes whether the encomienda was a centralist Castilian institution.