ABSTRACT
The British may have held a kind of sway as a part of their Rule Britannia. The rise of the United States has also been associated with a shift in its demographic and economic balance from east to west. A country as large as the United States inevitably has regions differentiated by physical environment and by the particular interaction between humankind and environment. Given the relative advantages of the North American colonies, it is perhaps not surprising that the United States swept past Great Britain in terms of both leadership in industrial technology and the level of prosperity achieved. The existence of large numbers of potential workers offered a temptation for the colonists in Latin America to become merely parasitic, to live on the backs of the native population. North America was characterized by both dense markets and dense government, each structure embedded in strong communities.
