North America
"Future. That period of time in which our affairs prosper, our friends are true and our happiness is assured."
Beginnings (to 1922)
The continent of North America is defined by geologists as the continental landmass lying to the north of the South American continent and the Lesser Antilles, including the Central American isthmus, the Greater Antilles, the vast North American landmass itself, and the adjoining islands. The cultural definition of North America, though, is rather more complex, with a substantial and complex set of populations influenced alike by the cultures of the indigenous Native Americans and European colonizers. Archeological evidence suggests that migrants from North Asia, crossing from Siberia into Alaska, first arrived in North America at least ten thousand years before the present, and possibly as long as fifty thousand years before the present.
It was only in 1492, though, that navigators from the Eastern Hemisphere first discovered the continent, and in the 16th century the continent's Mexican heartland was colonized by the Spanish. Following mass epidemics and cruelty of an almost genocidal nature, the Native American populations were decimated; only in present-day Mexico, Yucatán, and Central America do descendants of Native Americans continue to make up majorities of the population. Further north, France and England explored and settled the unpromising northern half of the continent. Beginning in 1689, England (later Great Britain) and France fought a series of wars for global military and colonial supremacy, and for local supremacy in North America. Finally, in the Seven Years' War (1756-1763), France was defeated, and by the terms of the 1763 Treaty of Paris, France was forced to yield to Great Britain all of French Canada and all of Louisiana east of the Mississippi. Spain -- by this time the ally of France -- had been given back the island of Cuba, but it was forced to cede Florida to Britain. In the generation after the end of the Seven Years' War, relations between Great Britain and its colonies deteriorated. Without an imposing French enemy to keep the English colonists dependent upon Great Britain, the two societies began to quarrel over matters of trade, political representation, and territorial expansion. In 1775, a band of American radicals announced the independence of the English colonies from Great Britain, and proceeded to fight a war of independence. Seeing an opportunity to humble its rival, France intervened on behalf of the American rebels in 1778, and was followed by Spain and the Dutch Republic the next year. The War of American Independence ended in 1783 with Britain's recognition of the independence of their former colonies under the name of the United States of America. Britain was left only with its Canadian and Caribbean colonies.
Throughout most of this period the Spanish colonies in North America remained the wealthiest and most populous areas of North America. However, Spain's colonial policy was based upon the extraction of wealth from Spain's North American colonies. To this end, Spain imposed confiscatory taxation of local inhabitants and maintained a monopoly over colonial trade. In the 18th century Spain's Bourbon kings, trying to regenerate the empire, inaugurated reforms that promoted new economic activity, but also challenged the longtime accommodation between the landholding elite and the bureaucracy. This oppressive economic policy and the political tyranny of the Spanish colonial régime created substantial discontent, particularly given the example of the United States.
The young American republic struggled to regain its pre-war prosperity throughout the remainder of the 18th century, but it was soon caught up in the Wars of French Revolution. The massive expenditures of France in the War of American Independence had catalyzed discontent with French royal absolutism, and precipitated a full-fledged revolution in 1789. The establishment of a radical French republic in 1792-1793 started 22 years of continual war between France and Great Britain, even as it led to a collapse of French rule in Saint-Domingue and the emergence of an independent African-populated state named Haïti, after the Arawak name for Hispaniola. Many Americans were inspired by the ideals professed by the French revolutionaries. This ideological inspiration, and disputes with Britain over the British navy's interception of American vessels and the high seas, eventually precipitated a full-fledged Anglo-American war from 1803 until 1814.
This war coincided with the breakdown of Spanish rule over mainland Latin America after the French invasion of Spain in 1807. Three centuries of misrule and inspiration from the War of American Independence and the French Revolution led to New Spain's war of independence, beginning in 1810 but continuing until 1821. A conservative Mexican Empire, under Agustín de Iturbide, was formed, but the collapse of Iturbide's conservative government two years later led to the secession of the southern provinces of Mexico, from Yucatán south to Costa Rica. All of these southern provinces but Yucatán formed a Central American federation in 1823, but intense inter-provincial rivalries and disputes between conservatives, liberals, and the peasants led to the collapse of the Central American federation in 1840. Chiapas joined Mexico after a brief war with Yucatán in that same year, but Mexico itself was torn by the same liberal/conservative and inter-provincial rivalries that had destroyed the Central American federation. The Mexican nation suffered its worst setback since independence in the Mexican-American War (1846-1848), which ended in the United States' conquest of Mexico's northern provinces of California, New Mexico, and Texas and the occupation of most of northern and central Mexico, including Mexico City itself.
The United States' victory in the Mexican-American War signalled its emergence as the dominant state in North America. Despite its defeat in the Anglo-American War, the United States easily outpaced British Canada and Mexico in its rapid expansion. The northeastern states of the Union quickly became world industrial centres of notes, and the cities of the Union -- New York City, Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans -- became the centres for a new and self-confident American culture. Even as American cities and industries grew, American settlers steadily pushed the frontier of settlement west, first beyond the Mississippi (acquired in its entirety with the French sale of the Louisianas in 1803 and 1813), and then to the Pacific ocean. Immigration from the British Isles and Germany combined with a high rate of natural increase to produce a population that grew fivefold in the first half of the 19th century. By the 1850's, the United States had become one of the most important and powerful countries in the world. Despite this power, though, the legacy of the Anglo-American War and the Union's preoccupation with its internal problems -- of western settlement, of urbanization and industrialization, and above all else, of the divisive problem of slavery in the southern states of the Union -- encouraged no small degree of isolationism and xenophobia. Indeed, this xenophobia had reached such a point that beginning in 1853, the Union's immigration laws were changed so as to limit large-scale immigration from Europe into the United States.
In the middle of the 19th century -- in particular, in the 1850's and 1860's -- the post Napoleonic settlements in North America began to collapse. In Canada, this took the form of the creation of a transcontinental union of the scattered British colonies, while in Spanish Cuba it took the form of a rebellion -- the Twenty Years' War, beginning in 1868 -- that ruined Cuba's burgeoning prosperity. The Central American states evolved into liberal dictatorships that promoted the development of coffee and bananas as agricultural exports, while Guatemala's dominant Ladino minority transformed the Maya of Guatemala into a permanent underclass. It was in Mexico and the United States, that this transformation took on its most dramatic form, as a confrontation between liberal modernizers and conservative traditionalists.
The Mexican civil war was mercifully brief. Mexico's crushing defeat by the United States and Yucatán in 1848 had humiliated the vociferously Catholic, upper-class, and white old order. The rising professional classes -- mostly mestizo or Native American, mostly from the lower classes, many educated in Europe, and most influenced by the French concept of laïcité -- soon began to oppose the Mexican old order on nationalist grounds. Only a Mexican nation that was radically reformed with the passage of a liberal constitution, as the Zapotec lawyer Benito Juarez persuasively argued, could possibly survive. The Constitutionalists made steady progress throughout the 1850's, mobilizing the Mexican peasantry behind their cause. In 1857, over the protest of conservative, a liberal constitution was passed that established federalism, universal male suffrage, freedom of speech. The outraged conservatives enlisted Spanish support and waged a civil war, but the greater popularity of the constitutionalist juaristas and the tacit support of the United States allowed for a constitutionalist victory. The new liberal Mexican government yielded to public opinion and began a war against Yucatán in 1861, in order to regain the territories lost in 1848. Had Mexico not been interrupted by events to its north, it might well have conquered the entire Yucatán.
Throughout the 1850's, the fragile settlement on slavery in the United States began to collapse. In the rapidly industrializing northeastern states and in the Midwestern states settled from the northeast, the growth of political radicalism and of an abolitionist strain of evangelical Christianity made acceptance of African slavery in the Southern states increasingly unacceptable. By contrast, the Southern states had already invested so much of their wealth in constructing a system of plantation agriculture based on slavery that talk of abandoning slavery was anathema. The election of an anti-slavery President in 1860, Northerner Abraham Lincoln, galvanized the slaveholding South in favour of secession, and in the summer of 1861 the militias of the "Confederate States of America" began to attack Union-held forts in Southern territory. Before long, a civil war had begun between the North and the South, and raids were mounted by the Union and the Confederacy upon the other's territory. Isolated Francophone Louisiana, complete with its large and wealthy port city of New Orleans declared for the Union in October of 1861, and brought down the Confederate armies upon the loyal state. Though the Louisianais Garde national put up a strong fight, the failure of Union armies to break the Confederate blockade of the Mississippi ensured the eventual fall of that state, with untold consequences for the future of the United States.
In February of 1862, the Imperial Government of France declared itself opposed to the secession of the slaveholding Confederacy from the United States, and to the attempts of the Confederacy to conquer "notre chère Louisiane, terre de nos camarades napoléoniennes." By February, a French naval task force dispatched from Martinique had arrived in the Gulf of Mexico on the Confederate-controlled coast and proceeded to dispatch the Confederate naval forces blockading Louisiana. By April, the Union was able to establish a reliable line of resupply to Louisiana, and could mount an offensive against the Confederacy from two fronts. The French intervention on behalf of the Union was not undertaken for benevolent purposes, though. Napoléon III had hoped that a United States grateful for French aid in its time of need wouldn't mind the establishment of a French empire in Mexico with the support in Mexico of the same Catholic upper classes upset by juarista Mexico's anti-clericalism and radicalism.
In fact, though, news of the first French landings in Veracruz and Yucatán created virulent Francophobia in the minds of Americans, and it was only through careful diplomatic negotiations in 1863 that war was avoided. A series of treaties signed in the autumn of 1863 kept France out of the Mexican heartland, but allowed it a protectorate over the Republic of Yucatán and the joint Franco-Yucatecan conquests in Chiapas. After this imperialistic episode, both Mexico and the United States -- reunited since November of 1863, at a cost of 400 thousand lives -- became decidedly xenophobic, choosing to limit their dealings with the outside world to the minimum necessary for trade and minimal diplomatic relations. Yucatán and Canada, under French and British rule, likewise concentrated upon domestic affairs, while neither the recently-freed African slaves of the British Greater Antilles nor the natives of war-torn Cuba were in any position to take an interest.
In the fifty-one years after the end of the United States Civil War, the North American continent remained concerned with its own affairs. The only change in international borders came in 1866, when the Washington Accord saw the sale of the Russian territory of Alaska to the United States at a price of some seven million dollars. As the United States completed its subjugation of the Native Americans of the Great Plains and the settlement of the area with Anglo-Americans from the east, new states -- Dakota, Montana, Idaho, Colorado -- were established. On a smaller scale, the westward extension of newly-unified British North America to the northern Great Plains and British Columbia likewise entailed the establishment of new provinces and territories, although the reluctance of Canadians to emigrate left Native American societies in the area relatively intact. Even in Mexico, the juarista republic steadily expanded its zone of reliable control to the recalcitrant northern states, even after the death of Juarez in 1872. By the 1890's, all three of the great countries of North America focused upon their internal development, with the sharp decline in immigration to the continent from the mid-19th century leaving native-born inhabitants in charge.
In the last quarter of the 19th century, the Union enjoyed tremendous prosperity. Anglo-Americans enjoyed one of the highest rates of natural increase ever recorded, thanks in part to their unparalleled prosperity -- even in the trying days after the Civil War, Anglo-Americans enjoyed living standards matched only by those of Australians and Uruguayans. As the century came to its end, the very large population of working-class and middle-class consumers -- by 1900, numbering almost 55 million out of a total population of 90 million -- made an irresistible market for investors and manufacturers, both domestic and otherwise. Helped along by the wartime demands of the Union armies, the industrial districts of the North -- New England, New York City and New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Illinois -- enjoyed a tremendous boom in production, attracting millions of Anglo-Americans and almost two million Canadian and European immigrants as workers. Just as in western Europe, but far more spectacularly, suburbs mushroomed around the major cities of the United States. The settlement of the Great Plains created a vast district of grain farms, exporting their substantial produce worldwide via railroad and freighter by the end of the 20th century. In the Pacific coast states of the Union -- California, Oregon, and Washington -- prosperous agriculture, mining, and forestry along with the alluring possibilities of Asian trade attracted almost eight million immigrants in the half-century after these territories were first settled.
To be sure, the Union had substantial problems. In New Mexico, south Texas, and California, Mexican Hispanics faced varying degrees of discrimination in the anti-Spanish language policies adopted by the states of California and Texas, and by the reluctance to recognize Mexican-era land tenures, though the situation of New Mexican Hispanics -- a majority of the population in their territory -- was better than that of their Californian or Texan compatriots. Native Americans outside New Mexico, for their part, were subjected to a savage policy of land appropriates and genocidal massacres and wars that was only aggravated by mass deaths from Eurasian epidemic diseases. (Inside New Mexico, the Puebloan peoples and the Navajo were able to adapt to the Union's presence.) Perhaps the most notable problems were in the South, where African-Americans were nominally enfranchised only to be reduced to a virtual serf caste by plantation owners. African-American families were kept indebted to their plantation owners, and forced to work both the plantation and their own subsistence plots. Plantation and factory owners could safely demand far more work for substantially less pay from this class of African-American than they could for white workers, ultimately driving out most poor Anglo-Americans from the Deep South and creating a disenfranchised African-American majority in the region. Autonomous black communities were confined to relatively liberal Louisiana and to Florida
(It is important to note that in many respects -- for instance, in granting women the right to vote in national elections in 1911, and the early successes of the Socialist and Communalist movements in Midwestern agricultural districts and Northeastern industrial cities alike -- the Union ranked as one of the most progressive and wealthiest countries in the world. Had the United States been an expansionist power like France, Germany, or even Brazil, it would have ranked as the single strongest Great Power in the world. As it was, the Union's only foreign intervention was the establishment of a puppet Hawai'ian republic in 1899, to product Union sugar interests from an assertive native monarchy. On the whole, though, the Union was a highly successful and pluralistic country.)
The Union's southern neighbours were less lucky, though their fates varied considerably. Mexico was perhaps the most progressive country in this group, despite a brief civil war between the juaristas and the conservative Catholics in 1911-1913; the enfranchisement of the Mexican peasantry had created a powerful force in favour of the secular modernization promised by the juarista republic and the associated Partido Nacional. Operating under a functional one-party democratic system that ensured a fair degree of pluralism, Mexican economic growth -- throughout the last quarter of the 19th century, significantly higher than that experienced elsewhere in Middle America -- accelerated despite protectionist measures aimed at protecting its burgeoning industries from foreign competition. Similarly, under a series of enlightened French administrators, the Mayan peasantry of Yucatán was transformed from a desperate landless peasantry to a land-owning peasantry organized in Saint-Simonian-style rural cooperatives and better educated than ever before. Before the First World War, Yucatán had a popular and reasonably effective government that ruled over one of the best-educated and healthiest populations in the entire region.
The republics of Central America and the North American Caribbean were far less successful than either Mexico or Yucatán. The Central American republics were desperate, particularly after British interest in the isthmus declined following the 1862 annexation of British Honduras and the completion in 1863 of the Panama Railroad caused Central American commerce to shift away from Belize to the more accessible Pacific coast ports. Almost unchallenged, the United States entered the isthmus with its vast wealth and superior military might. The construction of the Nicaraguan Canal in the 1870's by a private Franco-American consortium under de Lesseps, builder of the Suez Canal in the previous decade, sealed the fate of Central America as an area of permanent Union strategic and economic interest, without Mexico's size or Yucatán's foreign connections to hold the Union at bay. The 1904 annexation of Hawai'i symbolized the United States' new stature as a Pacific power of note.
In the Caribbean, Haïti and Santo Domingo remained torn by conflicts between different racial groups, between different social classes, and between the urbanizing bourgeoisie and the rural peasantry. In 1911 and 1913, respectively, the United States landed troops in both countries in keeping with President Theodore Roosevelt's "big stick" doctrine, and established informal protectorates over both countries. Cuba remained a Spanish overseas province, but an unhappy one; The British Greater Antilles were somewhat more pluralistic, but were marked by tensions between the black peasantry and the white British elite, and by the endemic poverty that encouraged emigration first to Central America, then to the United States -- in particular, to join the free black communities in Florida and Louisiana, and the new urban African-American community in New York City's district of Harlem. The United States' economic presence in these islands was noticeable, but unlike in Central America it was counterbalanced by British interests.
On to: Decline and Fall (1922-1981)