Uneven Regional Development in the United States

Abstract

The unevenness of development among the major regions of the U.S. reached an extreme at the end of the nineteenth century. Since then, the development of the major regions has become increasingly similar. This article uses Marx's general law of capitalist accumulation as the basis for an analysis of U.S. regional development that focuses on the antagonism between capital and labor. I argue that the transition from competitive to monopoly capitalism at the turn of the twentieth century initiated a shift in the principal spatial unevenness of development from regional unevenness within the U.S., to U.S. participation in uneven development on an international scale. The increasingly drastic inter national differentiation between the advanced and the underdeveloped countries has provided opportunities to reduce the unevenness of development among the major regions of the U.S.