A.G. Frank Reading

Frank raises numerous interesting questions in his article "Development and Underdevelopment in the New World." He points out the economic exploitation of the present-day U.S. South and the Caribbean by the Spanish and then the British and French. These economic systems were, in essence, exploitative with slave labor. Plantation systems of these two regions dominated the economic output of the New World for a couple of centuries, without returning economic benefit to the region itself (except for the wealthy merchants and plantation owners themselves). Essentially, colonial powers received both labor and natural resources for free and profited with little overhead. Frank asks: "If the Yankees were so entrepreneurial, why did they not continue to go south" by the 17th and 18th centuries? First, I would argue that some still did. The Mayflower/Puritans, for example, originally set out for Virginia, but were blown off course and "accidentally" settled in what would become New England. Moreover, by the late 17th and 18th centuries, PA, RI, NY and even MA were, in a sense, "Freer" societies economically, socially and politically (except for the Puritan villages). A wealthy elite dominated NC, VA, and SC both socially and politically.

Britain was economically less interested in NE in the 17th c., from an exploitative standpoint, as it was not as profitable. Tobacco, grown in the South, was gold. It was the industrial revolution of the 19th c. (in machinery, factory production, transport, banking and communication) that turned the New England area into a profit-making enterprise. By that time, however, it was independent of British rule. Thus, there was a fundamental shift in international economic interaction, policy-making and demand. In the 16th-17th centuries, the focus was on cash-cropping since it was most profitable.

Furthermore, the South, following independence from British rule, remained a plantation system/semi-feudal/semi-colonial region in relation to Europe. The northern U.S., on the other hand, became part of the symbiotic trans-Atlantic trade system, benefiting the north domestically and internationally through wage labor. The Civil War was the catalyst to initiate the economic "catching-up" of the South. Even the emerging American West of the early to mid 19th c. linked itself to the international-wage-labor economic system of the north.