3 ms·

Yes, they just were lucky enough to find some fertile and totally uninhabited land .

• WalterBright 3y ago
  Did they find factories, along with skilled labor to run them, too?
  • ffgjgf1 3y ago
    Well there was a 200-250 year gap before they built those factories. Per capita Americans were already significantly better of than average Europeans mainly because of much higher availability of land. It’s hard to imagine enough capital and raw resources would have been available for industrialization without that.
    • WalterBright 3y ago
      Land does not have a history of making a country wealthy. After all, all countries have land.
      • Wytwwww 3y ago
        > After all, all countries have land. It certainly does in preindustrial societes. If we look at Europe before the industrialization there is a very direct relationship between the amount of fertile land per capita and wealth/income per capita (Malthusian trap). In the 1600s and 1700s North Eastern US was probably the best place the world to live if we look at average QoL (.e.g. life expectancy alone was 10-20 years higher than back in England) and Americans were already very wealthy compared to average Europeans long before industrialization started mainly because of high abundance of land relative to population. Which resulted in extremely high natural population growth.