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The North America Region, as defined for the purpose of this study, comprises only the United States and Canada, with Mexico, which is sometimes included, here treated as part of Latin America. In topographic terms, it covers an area of almost 20 M km2, being flanked by the Pacific, North Atlantic, and Arctic Oceans, as well as the Caribbean. The Rocky Mountains form the western margin, while the more ancient Appalachians adjoin the eastern seabord. A series of great lakes straddles the interior boundary between the two countries, while the Hudson Bay forms a large embayment in northern Canada. The great Mississippi River drains the interior, flowing south into the Caribbean at New Orleans.
The Region supports a population of 325 million with an average density of 16.3 per km2. The fertility rate is a near-stable two children per woman, although the population is expanding thanks to immigration, mainly from Latin America.
The early history is little known, but the region was evidently settled by migrants who managed to cross the Bering Strait from Asia at the end of the Ice Age, becoming the well-known Red Indians, who lived on buffalo in the great interior plains. Florida and the southwest were previously under Spanish dominion before being overun by large scale immigration. Britain had established a series of colonies along the east coast of the United States in 17th Century to absorb its surplus population while the French took control of Louisiana, and Quebec in Canada. Slavery brought in large numbers of Africans to the southern States until its abolition in 1830, and the Irish famine prompted another wave immigrants around 1850. Most of the European immigrants were forced out of their home countries by raw necessity when the growing populations became insupportable. It had even become necessary to import bird excrement from South America in sailing ships to try to improve crop yields. The indigenous population of North America was virtually exterminated by the immigrants, partly under the notion of what was described as their Manifold Destiny.
Resentment over the payment of tax to the British Crown had led to a successful war of independence, supported by France, which ended in a peace treaty in 1783. However, various internal disputes continued, and erupted into civil war between the north and the more agrarian south from 1861 to 1865, with slavery being one of the elements in dispute. The interior and western parts of the country were opened up over the ensuing years, being partly encouraged by the discovery of gold in California. Political union between the various States was achieved in a series of steps. Canada, for its part, remained under British control, following a conflict with the French, to become a Dominion of the British Commonwealth. French Canadians remember their cultural heritage in Quebec, where French is still spoken. Alaska was purchased from the Russian Czar for $7.2 million dollars in 1867, becoming the 49th State of the American Union in 1959.
Oil was found in Pennsylvania in 1859, being at first used as a substititute for whale oil as fuel for lamps, while vast deposits of coal and other minerals were tapped to provide the basis for an Industrial Revolution during the latter part of the 19th Century. The Federal Reserve Bank, which was founded by a group of London financiers, grew in stature as a form of privately-owned Central Bank to fund the economic expansion. It threw up various capitalistic dynasties, which gradually extended their influence around the world, as the British Empire went into eclipse as a result of two world wars. The United States, which was home to many German immigrants, had remained neutral for much of the First World War before joining in the latter stages of the conflict in April 1917, when Britain confirmed the Balfour Declaration of 1916, establishing a homeland for the Jewish people in Palestine. Substantial loans had been made to Britain and France which would have been at serious risk if these countries had lost the war. Victory gave the country a new geopolitical importance in the ensuing peace treaty which, amongst other things, led to the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, which previously controlled the oil-rich Middle East outside Persia (Iran).
The US economy blossomed after the First World War before over-reaching itself in a speculative bubble that burst on the trading floors in October 1929, leading to the first Great Depression. This was a searing experience, putting one-third of the US workforce out of work, and led to an epoch of almost socialist policies under the so-called New Deal. That was followed by the Second World War, which the United States joined in 1940 following a Japanese attack upon its fleet in Pearl Harbour in Hawaii. The incident, of which there was apparently fore-knowledge from radio intercepts, gave popular support for the declaration of war. Having campaigned from the Pacific to North Africa, the country emerged victorious in 1945 having dropped two atomic bombs to vapourise Japanese cities. Victory paved the way for a new financial hegemony under the dollar.
A new enemy in the form of the Soviet Union, its wartime ally, was then identified, prompting the so-called Cold War, when the two sides, now armed with nuclear weapons, glared at each other across a divided world. Armed conflict as such was confined to Korea and Viet Nam, ending in something close to stalemates. The Cold War gave rise to a massive and highly profitable arms industry, underpinning a new global market in which the dollar played a profitable role as the premier trading currency. The Cold War came to an end around 1990, following the fall of the Communist Government of Russia, but has now been succeeded by the so-called War on Terror, which has led to the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq. They were intended to strengthen the US presence in the oil-rich Middle East and Caspian regions but the outcome remains uncertain given the alienation of the peoples of the Region.
In terms of oil history, the initial finds in Pennsylvania were followed during the early years of the last Century by major discoveries in Illinois, Oklahoma, California and Texas. These developments involved exceptionally large drilling campaigns both because the exploration technology was relatively primitive in those early days and because of a unique legal environment, whereby the mineral rights belonged to the landowner. Although the industry was fragmented for these reasons, it did spawn some of the world’s largest oil companies, comprising Texaco, Gulf Oil and the daughters of the Standard Oil empire of Mr Rockefeller (Exxon, Mobil, Chevron, Arco, and Amoco), which later consolidated and contracted through merger. Subsequent phases of development included the opening of an oil province in Western Canada in the 1950s, offshore exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, California and eastern Canada, as well as Arctic operations in Alaska and northern Canada. The final step arrives with a move to deepwater exploration in the Gulf of Mexico.
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