Free The Dictionary of Human Geography by Michael Watts Page B

a product both of the difficulty of making ?the United States' into an adjective and the political economic weight of the USA. The majority of the population of the Americas lives in Latin AMERica (542 out of 851 million), named as such because the south and central regions were colonized mainly by Spain and Portugal, in distinction from North America colonized initially by the British and French. As the largest and most developed economy, the USA has long dominated economically and frequently manipulated politically the states and peoples in the rest of the landmass. (NEW PARAGRAPH) The discovery of America by Europeans is usually put down to Christopher Columbus in 1492, though the existence of lands to the west of Europe was mooted in medieval Europe. Effectively, however, in terms of political, eco nomic and intellectual consequences, it is the European encounter after 1492 that is most significant, even though it was not until the late eighteenth century that the shape of the landmass as a whole was finally established. The appearance of America in the mental universe of fifteenth century Europeans repre sented a crucial early moment in the creation of the sense of a geopolitical world (see gEopoLlTics) that was increasingly to match the physical Earth. The ?discovery? was more than just the discovery of a new race of non Europeans. More particularly, it was the discovery of a previously unknown landmass and with it the recognition that ancient Greek cosmology, which had divided the Earth into three parts, had been mistaken (Kupperman, 1995). (NEW PARAGRAPH) Initially, at least, as John Elliott (1972) has argued, the discovery of America encouraged European intellectuals and officials to enlarge their concept of humanity. Eventually, though, the new variety of patterns of human behaviour made for some difficulty in retain ing the natural law belief in an essential and universal human nature. The increasing sense of absolute cultural difference from the natives and the impulse to exploit the new found lands of America combined, however, to create propitious circumstances for the ex pansion of settlement by Europeans. To the English philosopher John Locke, writing in 1689 and providing an early example of the backward modern conception of the stages of human social development, the Roman law known as res nullius applied to the ?empty lands' not put to active agricultural use by the native inhabitants and thus justified their takeover: ?America?, he wrote, ?is still a pattern of the first Ages in Asia and Europe, whilst the Inhabitants were too few for the Country, and want of People and Money gave Men no temptation to enlarge their Possessions of Land, or contest for wider extent of Grounds' (Locke, 1960 [1689], pp. 357 8; see also teRRA nullius). (NEW PARAGRAPH) America was europe?s first ?new world?. As such, it was regarded as a tabula rasa for Euro pean efforts at bringing the whole world into the European world economy (Armitage, (NEW PARAGRAPH) . In this respect, North and South America parted company over how this was done. If from 1492 to 1776 the North was increasingly dominated by an empire in as cendancy, the British, the South was subject to two empires, those of Spain and Portugal, in long term decay. By the late eighteenth century, local settler elites in both parts were in revolt against distant rule. As a result of their relative success, they were able by the early nineteenth century to imagine an America autonomous of Europe in which their ?political independence was accompan ied by a symbolic independence in the geopol itical imagination' (Mignolo, 2000, p. 135). If on the US side this led to the Monroe Doc trine of ?America for the Americans?, on the southern side it led to a developing sense of a ?Latin America' increasingly dominated by its northern neighbour, particularly as the USA emerged as a global power towards the cen tury's end. The struggle to expropriate or qualify the labels ?America? and