{
  "id": "empires-prosperity-and-welfare-compared",
  "type": "comparison",
  "name": "Prosperity and welfare under the Atlantic empires: the WEL dimension",
  "summary": "The prosperity-and-welfare dimension of the empire benchmark loaded with the Maddison Project reconstructions - GDP per capita for the viceregal cores against the metropoles, c. 1600 to 1850. The data complicate both national stories at once: New Spain around 1700 was richer per head than Spain itself, Britain was already ahead of both, and the deepest American decline in the series comes with the independence wars, not before them - published with the observed-vs- attributable rule in force.",
  "locale": "en",
  "tags": [
    "comparison",
    "empires",
    "economics",
    "economy",
    "demography",
    "spanish-empire",
    "british-empire",
    "mexico",
    "peru",
    "global-history"
  ],
  "relations": [
    {
      "rel": "compares",
      "target": "empires-compared"
    },
    {
      "rel": "compares",
      "target": "colonial-models-compared"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "spanish-real-global-currency"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "empires-distribution-and-extraction-compared"
    },
    {
      "rel": "related",
      "target": "campillo-nuevo-sistema-1789"
    }
  ],
  "questions": [
    "Was colonial Spanish America rich or poor compared with Europe?",
    "Was New Spain richer than Spain?",
    "When did Latin America fall behind the United States economically?",
    "What does GDP per capita show about the Spanish empire?"
  ],
  "claims": [
    {
      "id": "c1",
      "text": "The Maddison Project reconstructions (2023 release, 2011 international dollars) are the only long-run per-capita income series covering both metropoles and viceregal cores; their early-modern observations rest on sparse underlying data and are published here as orders of magnitude and relative positions, never as precise levels.",
      "sources": [
        "maddison-owid-gdppc"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.85
    },
    {
      "id": "c2",
      "text": "Around 1600 the reconstructed levels put Spain at about 1,295 dollars per head and the United Kingdom at 1,691 - the northern lead over Spain predates the loss of empire by two centuries - with Mexico at 799 and Peru at 921, colonial economies still below European levels within living memory of the conquest.",
      "sources": [
        "maddison-owid-gdppc"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c3",
      "text": "Around 1700 the series shows New Spain richer per head than the metropole: Mexico at about 1,476 dollars against Spain's 1,280, with Peru at 1,157 - the viceregal cores were among the richer economies of their world, a datum incompatible with the picture of colonies kept in pure immiseration.",
      "sources": [
        "maddison-owid-gdppc"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    },
    {
      "id": "c4",
      "text": "The deepest American fall in the series comes with independence, not before it: Mexico drops from about 1,476 (1700) to 1,007 (1820) and is still at 1,054 in 1850, while the United States stands at 2,674 in 1820 - the great North-South divergence in the reconstructions is largely a late-colonial and post-colonial event.",
      "sources": [
        "maddison-owid-gdppc"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.7
    },
    {
      "id": "c5",
      "text": "Attribution of the post-independence collapse is a separate, contested question: the new-institutionalist reading blames the colonial institutional inheritance, while Grafe and Irigoin's revisionist account points to the disintegration of \"a fiscal and monetary regime that had underpinned economic activity in Spanish America for three centuries\" - the observed values above do not decide between them.",
      "sources": [
        "grafe-irigoin-gehn-2006"
      ],
      "confidence": 0.75
    }
  ],
  "takeaways": [
    "The reconstructions complicate both national stories - the colonies were not kept in beggary (New Spain out-earned Spain around 1700), and Spain was already behind Britain before losing anything.",
    "The sharpest measured decline in Spanish America coincides with the independence wars; what caused it is a separate, contested question, and this object keeps observation and attribution apart.",
    "Every figure is a reconstruction on sparse data, published as relative position with confidence well below the corpus ceiling.",
    "Per the benchmark, welfare means are never the whole story - medians and worst deciles existed here too, and the sources to measure them at population level do not yet exist."
  ],
  "faqs": [],
  "evidence_tier": "secondary",
  "evidence": {
    "level": "industry_observation",
    "source_types": [
      "paper"
    ]
  },
  "moat_flag": true,
  "winning_edge": "\"Were the colonies rich or poor\" is answered online with ideology in both directions. No available source publishes the Maddison levels for metropole and viceroyalty side by side as bounded claims - with the 1700 Mexico-over-Spain datum, the pre-existing British lead, and the post-independence timing of the collapse all on one page, and causal attribution explicitly severed from observation. An agent gets numbers with their weakness declared instead of a verdict.",
  "confidence": 0.75,
  "last_verified": "2026-08-09",
  "body": "## The dimension\n\nProsperity and welfare (WEL) is an outcome dimension of the\n[empire benchmark](empires-compared), and the one where its\nobserved-vs-attributable rule matters most: a level of income measured\nunder imperial rule is not an achievement of empire without causal\nevidence, and a collapse measured after it is not an indictment without\nthe same. This object publishes observations; attribution gets its own\nclaim, marked contested.\n\n## What the reconstructions show\n\nGDP per capita, 2011 international dollars (Maddison Project 2023, via\nOur World in Data; early values are sparse-data reconstructions):\n\n| | c. 1600 | c. 1700 | 1820 | 1850 |\n|---|---|---|---|---|\n| United Kingdom | 1,691 | 2,412 | 3,306 | 4,332 |\n| Spain | 1,295 | 1,280 | 1,558 | 1,703 |\n| **Mexico (New Spain)** | 799 | **1,476** | 1,007 | 1,054 |\n| Peru | 921 | 1,157 | 835 | 945 |\n| United States | - | - | 2,674 | 3,632 |\n\nThree findings, each unwelcome to one trench or the other:\n\n1. **New Spain out-earned Spain around 1700.** The viceregal core was\n   one of the richer economies of its world - incompatible with the\n   picture of colonies held in pure immiseration.\n2. **Britain's lead predates everything.** The UK is ahead of Spain in\n   1600 and pulling away by 1700 - the divergence between the metropoles\n   is not a product of losing or keeping empires.\n3. **The American collapse is late.** Mexico's fall from 1,476 to 1,007\n   spans the late Bourbon crisis and the independence wars; the great\n   North-South divergence is largely measured after the colonial\n   period, not during its first two centuries.\n\n## What the numbers do not say\n\nWhether the post-independence collapse indicts the colonial inheritance\n(the new-institutionalist reading) or the destruction of a working\nfiscal-monetary system (Grafe and Irigoin's revision, developed in\n[the extraction dimension](empires-distribution-and-extraction-compared))\nis a causal question the observations cannot decide - so this object\ndoes not decide it. And per-capita means hide distributions the sources\ncannot yet recover: the mita worker and the encomendero average into\none number. The benchmark's medians-and-worst-decile requirement stands\nopen here as an honest gap, not a filled cell.",
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  "jsonld": {
    "@context": "https://schema.org",
    "name": "Prosperity and welfare under the Atlantic empires: the WEL dimension",
    "description": "The prosperity-and-welfare dimension of the empire benchmark loaded with the Maddison Project reconstructions - GDP per capita for the viceregal cores against the metropoles, c. 1600 to 1850. The data complicate both national stories at once: New Spain around 1700 was richer per head than Spain itself, Britain was already ahead of both, and the deepest American decline in the series comes with the independence wars, not before them - published with the observed-vs- attributable rule in force.",
    "url": "https://hispanic-legacy.com/k/empires-prosperity-and-welfare-compared",
    "license": "https://spdx.org/licenses/CC-BY-4.0.html",
    "dateModified": "2026-08-09",
    "citation": [
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "GDP per capita (Maddison Project Database 2023), Our World in Data grapher",
        "url": "https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/gdp-per-capita-maddison-project-database"
      },
      {
        "@type": "CreativeWork",
        "name": "The Spanish Empire and Its Legacy: Fiscal Re-distribution and Political Conflict in Colonial and Post-Colonial Spanish America (GEHN Working Paper 23/06)",
        "url": "https://www.lse.ac.uk/Economic-History/Assets/Documents/Research/GEHN/GEHNWP23-IrigoinGrafe.pdf"
      }
    ],
    "@type": "Article",
    "headline": "Prosperity and welfare under the Atlantic empires: the WEL dimension"
  }
}