nthusiastic in, and officially capable of taking advantage of, certain America’s resources greater than others, and attention shifted to regions with such resources, regardless of which group of Europeans was concerned (Wiarda 1982).
Mexico and Peru, as people have seen, were sanctuaries of what may be referred to as the central, entirely permanent settlers, and the same regions also enveloped the largest and most accessible deposits of the American products in highest demand in the Europe of the period, namely, expensive metals. These two regions received the foremost effect of sixteenth-century European immigration, with resultant immediate creation of remarkable European-style social and economic institutions, while immigration to all other regions was insignificant in numbers, and change was more gradual, until a later period (ibid).
The plainness of this schema tends to be covered by reflections of European nationality. To a certain extent due to Portugal’s deep contribution to maritime ventures on other continents, and somewhat due to the working of chance, the Spaniards were the earliest to colonize America profoundly, and thus they were the people to settle Mexico and Peru, the people to build massive, intricate structures that achieved an intelligent maturity prior to the end of the sixteenth century. Portuguese, Brazil, on the contrary, appeared to wait behind until the growth of a sugar industry located in the northeast following 1580 in retort to trends in Europe and Africa. Observing this discrepancy, scholars have occasionally argued of Spanish action in Americas as well-built or premature as opposed to the Portuguese, which they have considered feeble or late, in every feature from immigration to the establishment of institutions (Lockhart & Schwartz 1983). The reality is that the Spaniards hurried into intense founding activity merely where there were permanently settled Indians and abundant supply of mineral resources.