Economy of North America after 1500
Women and men farming in south-eastern North America (1500's AD)
Just as in India,
China, or Europe,
most of the people who lived in North America around 1500 AD
were farmers. There were also some people who hunted
and gathered their food,
like the Cree people who gathered wild
rice, or the California people who gathered acorns to crush into bread.
Traders continued to bring metals, stone, shell and furs all up and down
the rivers from coast to coast.
When most of these people died of smallpox
and measles, in the
1500's and 1600's AD, trade pretty much fell apart for a while. You can
imagine that if you were catching all sorts of unheard-of diseases, you
might not want to see very many strangers! But soon Spanish traders sailed
to North America, looking for things they could bring back to Spain with
them. People saw that these Spanish traders had some pretty cool stuff to
trade. They had guns and gunpowder and bullets. They had whiskey that could
get you drunk. They had horses.
People were happy to trade their furs for the Spanish guns and horses and
whiskey and iron tools.
The horses made a big difference to the economy of North
America. With horses, many people - the Cree,
the Ute, the Blackfoot,
the Sioux - decided to hunt buffalo
on the plains, and be nomads,
instead of farming. Throughout
the 1700's and 1800's, many people followed the buffalo.
At the same time, with so many people dead from smallpox
and measles, and from
being killed by European invaders, there were a lot of abandoned fields
and villages all over North America. And where people were still farming
their land, the United States army forced them to leave it and move further
west. Many people came from Europe to live on this land and farm it. When
there weren't enough of them, they forced many African
people to come to North America as slaves.
So pretty soon the eastern half of North America was covered with farmers
again. These farmers learned to grow North American crops like corn
and beans and squash and sunflowers,
but they also brought European crops like wheat
and beets and European farm animals like sheep,
chickens, pigs
and cows. Most of these farmers
didn't just grow food for themselves to eat. They began to grow food mainly
to sell, and they bought their own food in stores. People built the first
railroads and canals to ship the food to the Atlantic coast, where the big
cities were.
And in those big cities, especially in the north-east,
rich men built a lot of factories in the early 1800's. Instead of buying
things that had been made at home or in factories in Europe, now people
bought factory-made clothes and shoes
and tools. And instead of working on farms, more and more people came to
the cities to work in factories. A lot of people came from Europe and stayed
in the cities to work.
Cree women and children harvesting sugar beets
in Canada in 1910 (photograph by John Woodruff;
Courtesy of Library and Archives Canada)
But in the later 1800's, after the Civil War, a whole
lot more people began living and working in cities, in the factories, instead
of working on farms. For one thing, the United States army killed nearly
all of the buffalo,
and so people couldn't follow the buffalo anymore. After the Civil
War, it was illegal to own people as slaves, and so more people were
sharecroppers instead. Some people in the South
began to build and work in factories. Also, steamships
and railroads made it easier to trade things all over North America and
all over the world. Then the invention of gasoline engines made it possible
to build bigger and bigger factories to make things. In the 1900's, everybody
bought most of their food and other things
in stores, instead of making them in their own town or on their own farm.
And more and more of them left their farms to work in the cities, in the
factories. Instead of most people working on their own (or other people's)
farms, they worked for other people in the factories. It only took a few
people to run the big tractors and machines that did all the farm work.
To find out more about the economy of North America, check out these
books from Amazon.com or from your local library:
Main Economy Page
Main North America Page
Kidipede - History for Kids home
Tell a friend about this page
Did Kidipede answer your question?
Yes, thanks! / No, can you help me?
