In the century after independence, political consolidation and economic integration varied across the Americas. The North of the United States became the continent’s main engine of capital accumulation, immigration, and industrialization. In other regions political and economic conditions produced different results. In the U.S. South and Brazil reliance on slavery weakened internal markets, inhibited immigration, and slowed industrialization. In Spanish America the lack of a governing consensus until the second half of the nineteenth century led new countries to fall behind not only relative to other regions of the world but even relative to their past colonial experiences.
The cycle of war that began in the 1850s and continued for the next two decades reshaped the Americas politically and economically, consolidating a liberal order that placed great wealth in few hands while dealing misery and dislocation to many others. Liberalism had a modernizing influence on trade and industry, but it further concentrated wealth. Just as the United States waged wars against the Indians and pushed its frontier westward, so too did the countries of Latin America. Racial prejudice kept most African Americans at the social and economic margins.
By the beginning of the twentieth century, the economies of American nations were tightly integrated into the world economy, and powerful currents of immigration further deepened ties between countries. Industrialization that began in the northeast of the United States developed elsewhere in the continent, but the lead in industrialization held by the United States allowed it to increasingly impose its will over other nations. The economic and social dislocations produced by the liberal model of export-