"NIALL FERGUSON:" "This is a tale of two ships." "On board one, landing in northern Peru in 1 528, were 1 3 Spaniards accompanying the conquistador Francisco Pizarro." "Their ambition was to annex a vast new continent for the King of Spain." "On board the second ship, landing in North America a century later, were ordinary English labourers who simply wanted to earn a little land for themselves by the sweat of their brows." "The two ships symboIise this tale of two Americas." "On one, conquistadors." "On the other, indentured servants." "One lot dreamt of plunder, mountains of Inca gold." "The other lot knew they had years of hard slog ahead of them." "A fundamental difference between these two sets of shipmates would change the entire course of Western history propelling one of the Americas to the very top of the league table of prosperity and power." "What was it?" "In this series I'm identifying six unique factors." "I'm calling them the killer applications that put the West on top of the rest." "The first two were competition and science." "In this film, I'm turning to killer app number three and showing why the property-owning democracy arose in North America but not in South." "I'm also asking if we lose our monopoly over apps like these, could Western civilization be consigned to history?" "It was a new world, but it was to be the West's world." "It was Europeans that reached out across the Atlantic Ocean to take possession of a vast land mass that prior to 1 507 simply didn't appear on maps." "America." "It was Europeans - above all from Spain and from England - who, furiously vying for souls, gold and land, were willing to cross oceans and conquer whole continents." "This was one of history's great natural experiments." "Take two European cultures, export them and impose them on a wide range of different lands and peoples " "Britain's culture in the north, Spain's in the south - and then see which does better." "In the end, there could be only one winner." "Looking at the world four centuries on, it's pretty clear that the United States is now the dominant force in Western civilization." "But just how and why did that come about?" "well, you might be forgiven for thinking it's because the people here were more industrious, or because the soil was more fertile, or because there was more oil or gold underneath that soil." "But, actually, it was none of those reasons." "The key to the rise of America was an idea - an idea that changed the world." "In 1 67 0 a modest English ship, the Carolina, arrived at an island off the coast of what today is South Carolina." "Among those on board were servants who had decided to risk their lives on a transatlantic crossing to escape a life of grinding poverty in England." "Ahead of them lay years of hard toil in alien surroundings." "But at the end of it, they would receive one of the world's most attractive assets - prime North American real estate plus a say in the process of Iaw-making." "real estate plus representation - that was the North American dream." "Yet, at the outset, it wasn't these poor English migrants in North America but the conquistadors in South America who seemed destined for greatness." "Because South America was where the money was, and the Spaniards had got there first." "During the 1 6th century, the work of colonising the Americas was left almost entirely to the people of Spain." "Great native empires were subjugated by Spanish adventurers." "Here in Peru," "Pizarro and his conquistadors overthrew the mighty Andean empire of the Incas." "One of the Spaniards who had sailed on that first ship, and one of Pizarro's most trusted confederates, was a young captain from Segovia named Jeronimo de Aliaga." "For de Aliaga, Peru was as weird as it was wonderful." "This is Machu Picchu - the legendary lost city of the Incas." "well, not so much lost, just never found by the Spaniards, despite the fact that it's only 50 miles away from the Inca capital Cuzco." "By the time Jeronimo de AIiaga and his fellow conquistadores came to this region of Peru, they'd already captured and killed the Inca emperor AtahuaIpa and laid claim to his entire empire in the name of the Spanish king." "Machu Picchu is an extraordinary, mysterious place." "It's a sobering reminder that no civilization is immortal, no matter how powerful and mighty it may seem to itself." "While the indigenous population was ravaged by alien diseases and systematic slaughter, a quarter of a million Spaniards came to the Americas to impose their version of Western civilization, lured by tales of vast wealth." "Everywhere they looked, it seemed, there was gold and silver." "As Pizarro's chief accountant, Jeronimo de Aliaga was in the best position to grasp the extent of this new-found wealth." "Between 1 500 and 1 800, precious metal worth roughly £ 1 00 billion at today's prices was shipped from the New World to Europe." "Men like de Aliaga became very rich indeed." "To give concrete expression to his wealth, and to the subjugation of the native people, de Aliaga built this magnificent house in Lima on the foundations of an Inca temple." "It's been occupied by his descendants ever since." "Secure in the conviction that their mission had the blessing of both God and the Pope, the Spaniards seemed to be on the verge of creating a spectacular new version of Western civilization." "It was a civilization that would be run from a few splendid cities by a tiny, super-rich, Spanish-born elite." "The cities of Spanish America grew and flourished." "Hundreds of lavishly adorned churches were built." "Franciscans and Jesuits flocked to South America in their thousands to convert what remained of the indigenous population." "But while the church was influential, ultimate power resided with the Spanish Crown, and, crucially, it owned all the land." "This was in complete contrast to the story of land ownership in North America." "In 1 67 0, a penniless young couple who'd signed up for years of servitude stepped off the first ship to land on the shores of Carolina after a harrowing journey across the Atlantic from England." "How very different America must have seemed to Abraham Smith and MiIIicent How when they arrived here on the forbidding shores of carolina in 1670." "The Spaniards had found gold and silver literally in mountains in Peru and Mexico." "carolina seemed to be just a boneyard of dead trees." "When How and Smith arrived here, they found no El Dorado." "Instead, settlers in North America had to plant corn to eat and tobacco to trade." "For many years, Britain's American colonies remained a patchwork of farms and villages, with a few towns and virtually no true cities." "And here the natives were far from docile." "You could have been forgiven for thinking that Jeronimo de Aliaga's Spanish America was the land of the future, while Millicent How and Abraham Smith's British America was destined to remain a rural backwater." "Western civilization, it seemed, was destined for South America alone." "But it didn't quite turn out that way." "Land." "Thousands of square miles of virgin land." "The New World represented a vast addition of territory to the West European monarchies." "The key question that faced the new settlers in the Americas " "Spaniards in the South, Britons in the North - was how to allocate all this new land." "Their answers to this question would decide the future leadership of Western civilization." "The answers could scarcely have been more different." "When the captain of the first ship to arrive in Carolina stepped onto the beach, he brought with him a revolutionary blueprint for a new world, which had the issue of land at its heart." "This is a truly remarkable document." "The Fundamental Constitutions Of Carolina, designed by the philosopher John Locke to bring order to this newly settled wilderness." "It's funny, because Locke envisaged not a democracy here, but an aristocracy - a hierarchical society complete with margraves and barons." "AII of that, the colonists more or less ignored." "The thing that caught their eye, though, was Locke's assumption that practically everybody here would end up owning some land, even if it was as little as 50 acres." "That was to prove the blueprint for a whole new way of organising society." "This emphasis on the widespread distribution of land as the basis for Britain's new colonies reflected Locke's deeply held political conviction that freedom was inseparable from the ownership of private property." "Everything, therefore, hinged on how the land in Carolina would be divided up." "For months it was thought that the first fleet bound for carolina had been lost at sea." "But when the good news came through that they'd made it, this document, the Barbados Proclamation, was drawn up to regulate the distribution of the land there." "And the critical point was there was a guaranteed minimum." ""To every freeman that shall arrive there to plant and inhabit" ""before the 25 March, 1672, 100 acres land to him and his heirs for ever."" "And there were plenty of those acres to go round." "There was just one problem in realising Locke's vision." "Without a large native population, the new colony faced a severe labour shortage." "The answer was to bring in more Europeans who, in return for their passage and keep, would initially work for nothing." "And in Britain, there was no shortage of volunteers - men and women like Abraham Smith and Millicent How, who'd signed their lives into service with a deed of indenture." "And here it is, dated 20th September, 1669." ""Know all men that I, MiIIicent How of London, spinster," ""the day of the date hereof do firmly bind and oblige myself" ""as a faithful and obedient servant in all things whatsoever, to serve" ""and dwell with Captain Joseph West," ""merchant, in the plantation or province of carolina."" "And once you'd signed, you sailed." "Over the entire Colonial period, some three-quarters of European migrants to British America came as indentured servants." "Life in England had been tough for Smith and How." "But there was one crucial incentive to risk a one-way Atlantic crossing." "After indentured servants had served their time, they would receive land." "Even the lowest of the low had the chance to get a first foot on the property ladder." "Every land transaction since the arrival of the first settlers is recorded here in the North Charleston conveyancing office, covering everything from the large plantations of the settler elite to the small plots granted to the men and women who'd served out their indenture." "And this was how the system worked for MiIIicent How and Abraham Smith." "These are the original warrants dated 1672 and 1678 granting them, respectively," "100 acres and 270 acres of virgin land." "Here's the key line." ""You are forthwith to add measure and layout for Abraham Smith 270 acres of land" ""in some place not yet laid out or marked to be laid out" ""for any other person."" "They got the land to do with as they wished - to farm it or to sell it." "They had arrived." "And they had arrived not only economically but also politically." "For John Locke made it clear in his fundamental Constitutions that in Carolina, it would be landowners who held political power." "The crucial point was this." "If you were a man like Abraham Smith - though not a woman like MiIIicent How - and you owned property, then you got to vote." "And it was this relationship between property ownership and democracy that would fundamentally transform Western civilization." "It was a pretty homespun affair to begin with." "This is where the elected representatives of South carolina originally met - upstairs at number 13 Church Street." "50 acres of land guaranteed a free man a vote, and since every Englishman who arrived here had the chance to work his way to at least 50 acres, it was a recipe for near-universal suffrage." "The property-owning democracy, that revolutionary idea of linking property ownership with voting rights, was born in the British colonies of North America 300 years ago." "It was the birth of the American Dream." "The pattern was repeated right across North America as people moved relentlessly westwards, and white settlers displaced American Indians as owners of the land." "That was why the way the British organised their colonies was so important." "It was all about social mobility." "The fact that a man like Abraham Smith could arrive here on a godforsaken beach in the middle of nowhere, penniless, and then end up, within just a few years, a property owner and a voter." "How very different it was in the Spanish colonies to the south." "Here in this breathtaking valley, the Callejon de Huaylas in the Peruvian Andes, the conquistador Jeronimo de Aliaga found himself surrounded by boundless natural resources." "The valley was abundantly fertile, the mountains full of gold and silver." "The question facing de Aliaga was how to exploit these vast resources." "The answer was a very different one from that devised by John Locke for North America." "This remarkable document from 1544 of a court case allows us to see just how it was that Jeronimo de AIiaga made his vast fortune." "It describes how Francisco Pizarro granted half of this entire valley, something like 30 miles long, to de AIiaga and his partner" "Sebastian de Torres." "But it wasn't the land they were given, it was the labour of the 6,000 or so Indians who lived here." "unlike in British America, where land was widely distributed to settlers, here it was labour that was parcelled out to a tiny elite." "Previously, the Indians had worked for the Inca emperor." "Now their lot was to work for the Spaniards." "The encomiendas were essentially a tribute system, and tribute took the form of toil." "The Indians were de Aliaga's to direct as he pleased - to work the farms or to dig gold and silver out of the hills." "Indian labour made de Aliaga a rich man, built this fine house... (BELL TOLLS) ...and paid for this beautiful church." "The consequence of all this was that the conquistador class now became the idle rich of America." "Gradually, as land began to pass from the Spanish crown to the settler elite, encomiendas evolved into vast hereditary estates - haciendas." "The majority of people were left with no land at all." "This was diametrically different from the model of broad property ownership that evolved in North America." "Under Spanish rule, there was none of the social mobility that characterised British America." "That helps explain the distinctive pattern of land distribution here in rural Peru, with lots of tiny little plots where the indigenous population, even today, barely scrape a living." "But it also explains the very different paths taken by North and South America to political independence." "In 1 77 5, despite all the profound economic and social differences that had developed, both North and South America were still composed of colonies ruled by distant kings." "That, however, was all about to change." "On 2nd july, 1 776, a crowd gathered here on the steps of the charleston Exchange to hear the independence of South carolina proclaimed from Great Britain." "well, about 40 years later, something similar happened in South America where Spanish rule was overthrown." "But the revolution that happened here cemented the democratic rights of property holders and paved the way to two centuries of prosperity." "The other revolution condemned a continent to two centuries of underdevelopment." "Why was that?" "Once upon a time, there was a brilliant general who overthrew an empire and replaced it with the greatest democracy the world has ever seen." "His name was George Washington, and he led 1 3 of Britain's North American colonies to independence." " (GUNSHOT)" " But this is not his story." "It's the story of a South American general who also overthrew an empire" " Spain's - but failed to create a United States Of South America." "His failure explains why it was North America that rose to claim the leadership of Western civilization." "The South American general was Venezuela's favourite son " "Simon Bolivar." "Bolivar was born in Caracas in 1 7 83, the son of a wealthy cocoa planter." "Inspired by Napoleon's invasion of Spain in 1 808, he resolved to lead not just Venezuela but the whole of South America to independence from Spain, to transform a continent from autocracy to democracy." "And yet, while the American Revolution had set the United States on the road to power and prosperity as well as political liberty, independence from Spain left South America with an enduring legacy of conflict, inequality and dictatorship." "So why did capitalism and democracy do so badly in Latin America?" "Why, when I asked a Harvard colleague if he thought Latin America belonged to the West, wasn't he sure?" "Why, in short, was Simon BoIivar not the Latin George Washington?" "Certainly at the beginning, Bolivar received passionate support from the very people Washington had fought against." "McGregor, Robertson, Brown, Farriar and even Ferguson." "Rather incongruous names to find on a monument to the founding fathers of venezuela right here in the heart of Caracas." "But these were just a few of the British and Irish soldiers who fought and in some cases died for the cause of Latin American freedom and democracy." "Between 1 81 7 and 1 824, around 7,000 British and Irish volunteers signed up for an extraordinary military adventure." "Their aim was to help liberate South America from Spanish rule." "Some of these British soldiers were veterans of the Napoleonic Wars who, like the British migrants to North America, were attracted by promises of land." "But many were military novices inspired with the loftier cause that Bolivar seemed to stand for - liberating South Americans from a repressive system of government." "Among them was a young captain from Manchester called Thomas Farriar who soon found himself in command of a brigade called the British Legion." "This was his first view of the new Bolivarian America - the inhospitable banks of the Orinoco River." "And this is where Farriar and his colleagues ended up - a town called Angostura, where the bitters came from, without a few drops of which a Pisco Sour just doesn't taste right." "It was from here that Farriar and his men set out to liberate South America." "For four years, they fought and died in a succession of battles from the Atlantic to the Pacific." "Finally, on 24th June 1 821, the British Legion reached Carabobo." "This was to be the decisive battle of Bolivar's Venezuelan campaign." "6,500 of his men faced 5,000 royalists loyal to Spain." "If Bolivar's men could defeat the Spanish army here, the capital Caracas would be theirs." "BoIivar ordered Farriar and his men to outflank the Spaniards who were dug in on that hill over there." "It was fine as long as they remained hidden from view in those guIIies, but as soon as they were spotted, the Spaniards let them have it with at Ieast two cannon and 3,000 muskets." "In vain and the sweltering heat," "Farriar waited for BoIivar to send reinforcements." "In spite of the carnage, the British Legion held firm until at last the word was given to advance." "The charge that followed was one of the greatest feats ever seen on the battlefields of South America." "With bayonets fixed, the British Legion finally took the Spanish position, but their commander, Thomas Farriar, lay fatally wounded." "After the battle, Bolivar called the British soldiers" ""salvadores de mi patria"," ""saviours of my country"." "At last, the road was open to Caracas and to independence for the new nation-states of Latin America." "Today Simon BoIivar is revered, even idoIised, as the man who liberated not only venezuela but also bolivia," "Peru, Ecuador and colombia from Spanish rule." "That was what earned him the nickname el Libertador - the Liberator." "And yet, on closer inspection, liberation from Spain wasn't quite the same as freedom in the North American sense." "Simon BoIivar's idea of liberation was something very different from George Washington's notion of liberty." "Bolivar's experiences of factional infighting and regional rivalry during the revolution had set him against the parliamentary democracy he'd once avowed." "Two years before the British Legion's heroics at Carabobo," "Bolivar had addressed the newly formed Congress here in Angostura to set out his ideas for the new republic's constitution." "In fact, BoIivar was really rather contemptuous of the North American system." "Here's what he had to say on the subject in this very room." ""although their nation was cradled in liberty, raised on freedom" ""and maintained by liberty alone, it is a marvel" ""that so weak and complicated a government as the federal system" ""managed to rule them through all the difficulties of their past."" "As far as BoIivar could see, the United States constitution needed "a republic of saints" to work." "Part of the problem was the unequal legacy of Spanish rule." "After all, Bolivar's own family had five large estates, covering more than 1 20,000 acres." "Part of the problem was that democracy seemed much too risky in a society with a much larger native population than in the north." "BoIivar's dream turned out to be not democracy" " British or American style - but dictatorship, not federalism but the centralisation of authority." "Why?" "Because, as he put it himself, "Our fellow citizens are not yet ready" ""to exercise their rights in the fullest measure," ""because they lack the political virtues that characterise true republicans."" "For the British soldiers who'd come to fight for liberty, this was tantamount to a betrayal." "They never got their land, nor did they get a vote." "There would be no property-owning democracy in Bolivar's South America." "Just before his death from tuberculosis in December 1 830, the Liberator wrote a last, despairing letter." "In it, he concluded that South America was simply ungovernable, lamenting that," ""lf it were possible for any part of the world to revert to primitive chaos," ""it would be America in her final hour. "" "It was a painfully accurate description of the future of Latin America." "Societies that began with extreme inequality evolved highly unstable political institutions that reinforced that inequality and provoked constant conflict." "The result has been nearly 500 years of social strife, civil war and red revolution as the propertyless have struggled for just a few acres more." "Peru today is in the grip of a wave of peasant protests, and the issue's always the same" " Iand." "But wait a second." "Before we can cheerfully acknowledge that the British model of colonisation came up with arguably the greatest of all of Western civilization's political achievements - the United States Constitution - we have to acknowledge that that constitution itself was tainted by a kind of original sin." "It was the colour of your skin, in North America as much as in South America, that determined your property rights and your political rights." "African-Americans, Iike American Indians, were excluded from the post-revoIutionary republic." "Over there, on the steps of the charleston Exchange, where they read aloud the declaration Of Independence, they also sold slaves." "So how do we resolve this paradox at the very heart of Western civilization?" "A revolution that proclaimed itself in the name of liberty was made by the owners of slaves." "This story is also about two ships bringing a very different kind of immigrant to the Americas." "Both left from the island of Goree off the coast of Senegal." "One was bound for northern Brazil, the other for Charleston, Carolina." "Both carried African slaves, just a small fraction of the 8,000,000 who crossed the Atlantic between 1 450 and 1 820." "These slaves were sailing towards very different new worlds." "One, Latin America, would turn out to be a racial melting pot where whites would mix freely with the indigenous population." "In the North, by contrast, the colour line, the division between the races, would be much more strictly maintained." "The question is, how would these different attitudes towards race affect the future development of the two Americas?" "Why did the New World need the ancient institution of slavery so badly?" "The answer had everything to do with manpower." "This is the house that John Boone built." "Boone had arrived in Carolina on the same ship as Millicent How and Abraham Smith in 1 67 0." "As a member of the colony's governing Grand Council, he had a head start when it came to accumulating property." "Within 20 years he had amassed estates covering 1 7,000 acres." "And the Boones soon found things to grow on their land that turned out to be almost as profitable as the conquistadors' gold - first tobacco and then cotton to supply the textile mills of industrial England." "But indentured english servants were neither numerous enough nor tough enough to stand the toll of the carolina cotton fields." "Another source of labour had to be found, and that, of course, was African slaves." "This is where some of John Boone's lived." "But this was always part of the plan." "Remember John Locke, who made private property the basis for life in the carolina colony?" "well, in article 1 10 of his Fundamental Constitutions, he stated clearly that every carolina freeman had "absolute power and authority over his negro slaves"." "For Locke, the ownership of people was just as important as the ownership of land." "And these human beings would be neither landowners nor voters." "Here, it seemed, there was nothing superior about British colonisation." "The legacy of segregation would endure for centuries." "WOMAN: # Go with me to that land" "# Come and go with me to that land" "# Come and go with me to that land" "# Where I'm bound, where l'm bound" "# Whoa, come and go with me... #" "FERGUSON:" "This is the land of the Gullah, the region stretching from Sandy Island, South Carolina, to Amelia Island, Florida, known as the Gullah Coast." "Here you can see clearly one of the biggest differences between North and South America." "# Nothing but toiI in that land" "# Nothing but toiI in that land... #" "Anthropologists believe that" ""Gullah" is a corruption of "Angola", where the inhabitants' ancestors came from." "The fact that there are traces of angola still to be found here in South carolina today tells us something really significant." "The people who live on these islands are the direct descendants of slaves from AngoIa who came here to work on some of the most profitable plantations of the South." "# ..." "To that land... # ln contrast to South America, where white and black blended into many shades of brown, the survival of Gullah culture is testament to the much stricter enforcement of the colour line in the slave states of North America." "Ironically, the land of the free looked like being, for around a fifth of its population, the land of the permanently unfree." "Slavery had become hereditary." "# ..." "Where I'm bound. #" "In 1846, after 47 years of servitude, a slave by the name of Dred Scott sued for his freedom in this courthouse in Saint Louis." "well, the suit was thrown out, and that judgment was upheld by the US Supreme Court." "Here was the great paradox of the New world - the Iiberty-Ioving english settlers who produced the US Constitution were also determined to maintain the difference between white freedom and black slavery." "The property-owning democracy was based on a foundation of racial inequality." "In the end, the paradox of slavery in a supposedly free society could be resolved only by war." "The American Civil War, between the pro-slavery states of the South, like the Carolinas, and the anti-slavery states of the North." "Appropriately, it was a war that began in Charleston." "Yet although the Civil War ended slavery, many white Americans continued to believe that they owed their prosperity to the dividing line between white and black." "Segregation now!" "Segregation tomorrow!" "And segregation for ever!" "As recently as 1 963, Alabama governor George Wallace could put segregation right at the heart of the American success story." "This was complete nonsense." "It was pure rubbish to believe, as George wallace did, that the United States owed its prosperity and its greater stability than a country like this one," "venezuela, to the fact of racial segregation." "On the contrary, North America did better than South America purely and simply because the British model of widely distributed property ownership and democracy worked better than the Spanish model of concentrated wealth and authoritarian rule." "Far from being indispensable to its success, slavery and segregation were quite simply the original sin of the United States, giving the lie for more than two centuries to the American claim to be the zenith of Western civilization." "Today, however, a man with an African father is President of the United States, and the cities of the North increasingly resemble those of South America." "Large-scale migration from Latin America means that in 40 years' time, non-Hispanic whites will be a minority of the US population." "But if the United States is suffering harder economic times these days, it's certainly not because of the end of white supremacy." "After all, one of star performers of the world economy now is none other than muIti-coIoured brazil." "And that's because economic reform has finally given a rising share of the population a chance to own property and to vote." "500 years since the process of conquest and colonisation began, the great divide between British America and Latin America is finally closing." "Throughout the Western hemisphere, a single civilization is finally and belatedly emerging." "But as we'll see in the next programme, 200 years ago, Western civilization looked very different - and very white - to the people on the receiving end of the next great wave of European expansion... into Africa."