ABSTRACT
Economic historians of the United States, with their traditional reliance on Europe as the reference point, normally focus on factor endowments in accounting for the record of economic growth. They routinely attribute the country's long history of high and relatively equally distributed incomes, as well as impressive rates of advance, to an extraordinarily favorable resource endowment. This chapter explores the possibility that the role of factor endowments has been underestimated and the independence of institutional development from the factor endowments exaggerated. It suggests that various features of the factor endowments of three categories of New World economies have predisposed the New World colonies toward paths of development associated with different degrees of inequality in wealth, human capital, and political power, as well as with different potentials for economic growth. The three categories include soils, climates, and the size or density of the native population.
