North America - Economy, Trade, Resources (2024)

Few episodes in human history have been more remarkable than the economic transformation of North America since about 1700. During the pre-Columbian period, the territories that became the United States and Canada (sometimes called Anglo-America) were areas thinly settled by an aboriginal population that just had begun to practice agriculture on a local scale. In contrast, comparatively old and complex agrarian and urban civilizations had arisen in portions of Mexico and Central America, where relatively elaborate economies and dense populations had developed.

The revolutionary changes occurring after European contact and occupation were the result of an extraordinary combination of circ*mstances, at least in the United States and Canada. The large numbers of energetic immigrants from a rapidly modernizing western Europe, who brought with them the newest technological advances, encountered a habitat that afforded them ample opportunity to create considerable wealth. Many of the vast regions they encountered were well watered, covered by rich, exploitable forests and productive soils; underlain by considerable mineral resources; and blessed with a climate tolerable to Europeans. Moreover, the configuration of ocean shorelines, rivers, lakes, and landforms rendered feasible the construction of a dense and efficient transportation system for both domestic and foreign commerce. In addition, throughout nearly all of this economic transformation, the huge expanse of the continent north of Mexico has been controlled by two remarkably compatible nations—the United States and Canada—which, in their political orientations, have actively promoted aggressive economic development. The outcome of all of these circ*mstances has been a level of physical well-being for their citizens that ranks among the highest in the world. Finally, during much of the 20th century and into the 21st, the United States has been the world’s dominant power in terms of financial resources and economic influence—as well as in agricultural, mineral, and industrial output—and in general it has been the locus of an inordinate share of worldwide production and consumption.

Since the time of the Spanish conquest, the economic development in Mexico, Central America, and the Caribbean region—which constitute the northern portion of what often is called Latin America—has been much less pronounced. The failure to attract large numbers of immigrants (aside from enslaved Africans and East Asian labourers in the West Indies), the fragmentation of Central America and the Caribbean into small colonies or sovereign nations, and the perennial political instability throughout the region have all inhibited development. The quantity or quality of natural resources has been less crucial than social and political factors in relegating these lands to peripheral or so-called less-developed status within the world economy. (New England, for example, prospered despite distinctly mediocre physical resources.) Whatever economic well-being these Latin American and West Indian countries now enjoy depends to a large extent on the export of minerals and the products of plantations, forests, and the sea and on the infusion of foreign capital and expertise. This has given rise to an economic system in many countries in which only a small number of individuals in certain advantaged areas of the region have benefited from the wealth generated by economic development, while the great majority of the region’s population has remained impoverished and little affected.

This so-called core-periphery model of development also is evident—though to a lesser extent—in the United States and Canada. Large disparities in social and economic attainment exist between such generally affluent areas as the northeastern Atlantic Seaboard of the United States, the California coast, and the more urbanized areas of Ontario and Quebec and such economically depressed regions as the southern Appalachian Mountains, the lower Mississippi River valley, and Newfoundland. On a smaller scale, notable differentials can be discerned among neighbourhoods in individual cities and among communities within urban areas.