In the following readings of Guarneri’s, America Compared, the essay writers: Bergquist and Jordan, discuss the Atlantic System; Palmer and McFarlane discuss the American Revolution. Charles Bergquist, in his essay The Paradox of Development in the Americas, illustrates how the distribution of slave and free labor within the Atlantic economy produced different New World winners and losers in the short and long run. Race, climate and culture are essential to understanding the different progress of the societies of the North and South Americas; however, each was facilitated historically by the economic roles the colonies came to play in the wider Atlantic trading system. It was these roles that structured the advancement of the labor
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The northern British colonies of New England were initially the poorest of the Americas with no precious metals or the proper climate to produce agriculture staples that were needed in Europe, they met their subsidence and local needs largely through small-scale diversified farming and craft production based on family and free wage labor. By the eighteenth century New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies were able to assume a function within the Atlantic economy, setting them on a path towards industrialization and political democracy that sharply distinguished their development from the other colonies of the Americas. It was not some unique cultural or racial attribute that explains their exceptionalism; however, it was their inability to produce primary commodities for export to Europe, allowed them to preserve and develop their unique free-labor system. By the end of the colonial period these …show more content…
Palmer discusses the comparison between the American War for Independence and the French Revolution of 1789, while looking towards the twentieth century anti colonial revolutions. It is in principles, purposes, and ideas that the resemblance between the American and the French revolutions is most evident. The modern doctrines of liberty and equality were first proclaimed by the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence announced that “all men are created equal” with an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This happiness was a common idea of the European Enlightenment, it was a revolutionary belief that men may take action to improve their conditions of life, even against the established authorities of law, state, church, or society. The ideas, the constitution convention, the bill of rights, the written constitution, the separation of powers and the new basis for political representation, the equality of rights, the career open to talent, the separation of church and state, soon became common to the great European or Atlantic revolution, from the French Constituent Assembly of 1789 and the French Convention of 1792, through new regimes in Holland, Switzerland, and Italy to the French Constituent Assembly of 1848, the German Frankfurt Parliament, and other European developments of the same
The northern British colonies of New England were initially the poorest of the Americas with no precious metals or the proper climate to produce agriculture staples that were needed in Europe, they met their subsidence and local needs largely through small-scale diversified farming and craft production based on family and free wage labor. By the eighteenth century New England and the mid-Atlantic colonies were able to assume a function within the Atlantic economy, setting them on a path towards industrialization and political democracy that sharply distinguished their development from the other colonies of the Americas. It was not some unique cultural or racial attribute that explains their exceptionalism; however, it was their inability to produce primary commodities for export to Europe, allowed them to preserve and develop their unique free-labor system. By the end of the colonial period these …show more content…
Palmer discusses the comparison between the American War for Independence and the French Revolution of 1789, while looking towards the twentieth century anti colonial revolutions. It is in principles, purposes, and ideas that the resemblance between the American and the French revolutions is most evident. The modern doctrines of liberty and equality were first proclaimed by the American Revolution. The Declaration of Independence announced that “all men are created equal” with an equal right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. This happiness was a common idea of the European Enlightenment, it was a revolutionary belief that men may take action to improve their conditions of life, even against the established authorities of law, state, church, or society. The ideas, the constitution convention, the bill of rights, the written constitution, the separation of powers and the new basis for political representation, the equality of rights, the career open to talent, the separation of church and state, soon became common to the great European or Atlantic revolution, from the French Constituent Assembly of 1789 and the French Convention of 1792, through new regimes in Holland, Switzerland, and Italy to the French Constituent Assembly of 1848, the German Frankfurt Parliament, and other European developments of the same