Colonialism not only helped to create the countries of Spanish America; it also sorted them into different positions in the world hierarchy of development. And once these positions were occupied, most countries did not achieve significant improvements or suffer major setbacks in their relative standing. Instead, they tended to maintain their relative levels of development vis-à-vis one another.

Persistence is an old theme in work on Latin America. “More than in any other region,” writes Jeremy Adelman, “the formulation of the past as persistence has shaped regional and national narratives of Latin American societies.” This quotation comes from a substantial anthology entitled Colonial Legacies: The Problem of Persistence in Latin American History. In it, contributors assess the extent to which social formations created during the colonial period have persisted (or not) into the present. My concern here, however, is different. My argument is not that colonial institutions themselves persisted into the present; rather, most of the colonial institutions analyzed here – and their affiliated actors – were gradually rearranged or even abolished in the first decades that followed independence from Spain. It was the positions of the countries in the world hierarchy of development that persisted over the long run.