readings, however, are quite striking. Certainly it is not difficult to discern that the first reading has a much broader scope than the second. While Engerman and Sokoloff discuss American and Canadian colonies versus Central and South American Colonies, Coclanis discusses only those areas within the United States. Where the first reading takes the United States as a whole, the second breaks it up and looks at its specific regions in more detail. In both articles, the authors are comparing one region that experienced sustained economic growth to another region that lagged behind. It is interesting to note that the area that lagged behind in the second article, the South, was a part of the more prosperous area in the first article. Therefore, perhaps the most obvious and interesting difference is in the relative comparison level between the articles. While the first compares the more prosperous region of an entire hemisphere to the less prosperous, the second is much more focused on one specific region, the United States. Although it is perhaps due to this very difference in scope, the two articles view the South and its relative economic prosperity very differently. In the first article, the authors discuss North-South diversions toward the conclusion. Some parallels are drawn between the South and the less prosperous Latin American colonies – large-scale agriculture with one main crop, high inequality, and an abundance of slave labor. However, the authors rather quickly dismiss the idea that the South differed much from the rest of the United States. They cite two reasons for why the South was actually more like the United States than its Latin American counterparts. First, the actual share of the overall population comprised by slaves was not as extreme as the Caribbean, for example. Second, the political and economic framework of the United States dominated the South and thus gave them an environment in which to...
