Periodic Reporting for period 4 - HISTROOTS (HISTORICAL ROOTS OF CONFLICT AND DEVELOPMENT: FROM PREHISTORY TO THE COLONIZATION EXPERIENCE)
Período documentado: 2019-11-01 hasta 2020-04-30
The “Archivo de Indias” provides the best source of information on the first Europeans who moved to America. In this archive, it is possible to obtain data on the first colonizers of Latin America, including their name, city of origin, city of destination, occupation, family, etc. These data has allowed the construction of a dataset that could qualify the level of instruction of the first colonizers and break the simplistic assimilation of European origin with human capital.
I have also been able to locate the European migrants in Latin America in subnational areas which, given the administrative information available for each of them, allows me to determine the share of European colonizers by occupation. This part has been really difficult because some of the names of the cities have changed, so we had to keep track on each settlement to know the name that has today in order to be able to Geo-localize it.
In this project I will try to move one step further in this debate by taking an approach that uses administrative data on the first colonizers of Latin America, and using within-country analysis since we have information on the precise destinations of the first “pobladores” (settlers) and different institutional set-ups for different geographical areas in Latin America. Those data also contain some personal characteristics of each of the settlers such as occupation and migrations inside Latin America. As far as I am aware, this will be the first time that information on human capital of the first colonizers will have been used for economic research. The advantages and potential of this information opens up many possibilities for a new ground-breaking research agenda on the study of the colonial origins of economic development.