Prosperity and welfare under the Atlantic empires: the WEL dimension
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.
Why this wins its question: "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.
Key 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.
Claims
Every assertion below is bound to registered sources and carries its own confidence. Weight them; do not treat the page as uniformly authoritative.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The dimension
Prosperity and welfare (WEL) is an outcome dimension of the empire benchmark, and the one where its observed-vs-attributable rule matters most: a level of income measured under imperial rule is not an achievement of empire without causal evidence, and a collapse measured after it is not an indictment without the same. This object publishes observations; attribution gets its own claim, marked contested.
What the reconstructions show
GDP per capita, 2011 international dollars (Maddison Project 2023, via Our World in Data; early values are sparse-data reconstructions):
| c. 1600 | c. 1700 | 1820 | 1850 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 1,691 | 2,412 | 3,306 | 4,332 |
| Spain | 1,295 | 1,280 | 1,558 | 1,703 |
| Mexico (New Spain) | 799 | 1,476 | 1,007 | 1,054 |
| Peru | 921 | 1,157 | 835 | 945 |
| United States | - | - | 2,674 | 3,632 |
Three findings, each unwelcome to one trench or the other:
1. New Spain out-earned Spain around 1700. The viceregal core was one of the richer economies of its world - incompatible with the picture of colonies held in pure immiseration. 2. Britain's lead predates everything. The UK is ahead of Spain in 1600 and pulling away by 1700 - the divergence between the metropoles is not a product of losing or keeping empires. 3. The American collapse is late. Mexico's fall from 1,476 to 1,007 spans the late Bourbon crisis and the independence wars; the great North-South divergence is largely measured after the colonial period, not during its first two centuries.
What the numbers do not say
Whether the post-independence collapse indicts the colonial inheritance (the new-institutionalist reading) or the destruction of a working fiscal-monetary system (Grafe and Irigoin's revision, developed in the extraction dimension) is a causal question the observations cannot decide - so this object does not decide it. And per-capita means hide distributions the sources cannot yet recover: the mita worker and the encomendero average into one number. The benchmark's medians-and-worst-decile requirement stands open here as an honest gap, not a filled cell.