4 ms·
This is exactly how America became America.
by ticviking 4y ago
This is exactly how America became America.
- jonfw 4y agoExcept for the mainland of America has things like warm weather and days of uniform length
- crazygringo 4y agoDo you think frontier and settler life was easy and comfortable?
- jonfw 4y agoI think that this is a silly comparison for a variety of reasons, including the weather
- ticviking 4y agoSure. And the settlers nearly starved the first few winters in every colony despite that.
- midoridensha 4y agoIt was also a big, dangerous wilderness when Europeans first arrived. It wasn't a place you could just go travel to, get a nice cushy job, buy a nice house, and live a comfortable life.
- vkou 4y agoIt had land, free[1] for the taking. And in pre-industrial times, when 70% of the population were farmers, land was a direct, and immediate proxy for wealth. Wealth that stayed with you and your family. You were the owner, instead of some shitty sharecropper for a landlord. [1] I mean, aside from the natives.
- midoridensha 4y agoFrom the European point-of-view, the presence of the natives was yet another big danger and obstacle, in addition to the harsh weather (the winters in the northeast where the first colonies were established are much worse than in most of Europe), lack of infrastructure, etc. As for land being a proxy for wealth that stayed with you, that worked out OK as long as there was lots of land for people to grab up and claim as their own (or take from some natives who don't have the weapons technology to fight back well). And it's the reason people colonized North America: because all the land in Europe had been claimed by some shitty landlord. These days, that's all gone: now you're stuck living with a shitty landlord again, and there's no new continents left to colonize, so we need to come up with a better economic system.