Chapter One
The Land, The People, and the Law
Abraham Lincoln thought that a nation however much the whole might exceed the sum of its parts consists of nothing more than its people, its land, and its laws.
For the nations of the Old World, the three parts are inextricably bound up together in the long individual histories of those nations. But the United States, like all nations founded by European settlers in the great expansion of Western culture that began in the late fifteenth century, has no ancient history. At the beginning of American history, there was only the land.
The land that would become the United States presented a world that was at once hauntingly familiar and quite unlike the one in which the first European explorers and settlers had grown up. Western Europe was a world of dense populat ...
read full excerpt from Empire of Wealth, An ebook
