Two areas, Eastern Europe (especially Poland) and Latin America, exhibited characteristics of peripheral regions. In Poland, kings lost power to the nobility as the region became a prime exporter of wheat to the rest of Europe. To gain sufficient cheap and easily controlled labor, landlords forced rural workers into a "second serfdom" on their commercial estates.
In Latin America, the Spanish and Portuguese conquests destroyed indigenous authority structures and replaced them with weak bureaucracies under the control of these European states. Powerful local landlords of Hispanic origin became aristocratic capitalist farmers.