| The settlers who went to South America with the dreams of plucking gold bars out of the fruit trees and using an enslaved population to make hard farm work a breeze met a harsher reality. I don't know for certain, but I assume that the land was harder to make arable, the weather was less forgiving, the rainforests brought additional problems (like persistence of mosquitos and ticks). Plus South America didn't unify like the USA did, which might have presented an obstacle. I think I once heard a statistic like at the height of slavery 50% of the USA's exports were cotton. The industrial revolution was a great driver of the demand for America's cotton. "The American South is known for its long, hot summers, and rich soils in river valleys making it an ideal location for growing cotton. By 1860, Southern plantations supplied 75% of the world's cotton, with shipments from Houston, New Orleans, Charleston, Mobile, Savannah, and a few other ports. The insatiable European demand for cotton was a result of the Industrial Revolution which created the machinery and factories to process raw cotton into clothing that was better and cheaper than hand-made product." [0] It might be the case that this prosperity didn't happen in South America because they were not strategically fulfilling cotton demand of the industrial revolution. The reason that the conquistadors had started slaving was to fulfill a "gold revolution"; and they did at least gain prosperity in doing so. But the demand of the "gold revolution" for their monarchies was much smaller than the demand of the industrial revolution. However, Egypt and India also had significant exports of cotton. The effect that did happen is that the Civil War led to great increases of prosperity due to cotton exports for those countries [0][1] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton [1] http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-american-civil-war... |
Brazil had a higher slave-to-free ratio than the US, and imported more slaves than any other colony/country in the Americas (it was also the last country to ban slavery). Actually, the US was never a major slave importer--the US and Canada combined imported only about 4-5% of the total Atlantic slave trade, and the highest slave ratio in the US was only 57% (South Carolina), both of which are outdone by individual Caribbean islands. It's also worth pointing out that the truly productive gold and silver minds were in South America--Cerro Rico may have produced 60% of the world's silver at its height.
Put another way, South America was where it was, in fact, possible to have slaves dig free money out of the ground for you and do all of your hard labor, whereas this wasn't really possible in North America (at least not until after the invention of the cotton gin around 1800 and the discovery of highly productive mines in the late 1800s).