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American History Chapter 3

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First and foremost chapter three of the American nation didn’t seem expedient to the question on hand, but I found chapter 2 more interconnected to the question on hand. Beyond America extraordinary economic success, it is challenging to generalize about the economic history of British America, predominantly because of the extraordinary miscellany of the experience. As early as 1650, distinct regional patterns were firmly established in British America, and it seems more accurate to speak of several regional economies rather than a single entity. Given this distribution of population, it should not be surprising that roughly 90 percent of the workforce labored in agriculture. In the introduction of chapter 2 “American society in the making” …show more content…

They had admittance to the opulent resources of the American environment and they created new "mestizo" agricultural traditions that amalgamated crops and technologies drawn from indigenous Americans, Europe, and Africa to create new and uniquely American agricultural systems more productive than any of their ancestries. As a result, rural Americans lived well, by 17th-century standards, and their revenues propagated as the century proceeded. From the period of preliminary settlement in the 1620s to about the 1680s, per capita wealth rose in most regions, as colonists turned forests into working farms and worked out their new mestizo systems of husbandry. They cleared land; built houses, barns, and fences; planted orchards; and built up livestock herds, in so doing providing a capital-starved economy with a scarce resource. At the same time, they provided much of the impetus for the imposing intensifications in per capita wealth achieved in the early colonial period. In most places, this era of growth persisted until about 1680, when the farm-building process had run its course and the new-fangled farming styles were in place. A period of stagnation followed that lasted into the 18th century, when European population progression again brought snowballing demand for American products and renewed opulence to colonial

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