Secondly, this different approach also led the American society to experience a distinct social evolution. The fact that the British colonists were less reluctant to encourage social mobility offered the new settlers the change to become an important member of the society despite his eventual modest origin. Consequently, the highest level of the social scale was that of the colonial aristocrats, represented by wealthy planters and merchants, the middle class was represented by the land owning farmers, while the hired help made up the lower class. Indeed, there were racial frictions as well, which forced African-Americans to be considered the least important in the society. Nonetheless, despite this hierarchy, the geographical conditions enabled every man to go in search of wealth and thus improve his social conditions.
The Spanish and Portuguese colonial empires, although they offered a different social structure for their colonies, they left little mobility between classes. The most important were the landowners, who were most often the conquistadores, which was therefore a rather elite club. Following were the merchants, then the slaves and women. Thus, there was no strong intermediate middle class, which comes to prove the lack of...
Therefore, as opposed to the American society, would promote favoritism rather than those based on personal merits. This is why the Latin American society reached an inferior level of development.
All in all, the different evolution of the North American society as opposed to the Latin part of the continent can be explained to a certain extent by the difference in the social and racial relations governing the colonial period. While the British encouraged personal improvement and offered its colonies the chance to evolve on the social scale, the Spanish and the Portuguese, through their policy of restricted access to the higher levels of the society, promoted a social system based on group adherence rather than individual achievements, which in turn did not allow for people to evolve and have better living and social conditions.
Bibliography
Lewis, Laura. "Spanish ideology and the practice of inequality in the New World." Racism and anti-racism in world perspective. Ed. Benjamin Bowser. London: Sage Publications, 2002.
Loury, Glenn C., Tariq Modood, and Steven Michael Teles. Ethnicity, social mobility, and public policy:comparing the U.S. And UK. London: Cambridge UP, 2005, 22-25.
