how did the U.S. become a global powerhouse?

Question

Excuse my poor history knowledge, but the Europeans sailed here to find new lands, settled, and then after generations, they were overthrown by their descendants. The British empire still ruled around the world for centuries yet, the U.S. arguably is in a better state of economics, military, and such.

In: 13

Answer 1

USA had and still have a very large population, a quick google search give a number of 76 million at year 1900 while UK was at 30 million and obviously the difference is much larger today.

It was one of the first countries that started their industralization process in early 1800s, average height of americans seems to been significantly better than european countries at this time and life expectency on par or better than UK, quality of life for free people probably was higher in USA in early 1800s than in pretty much any european country. This obviously encouraged people to immigrate to USA, thus both growing its population and leading to future power development.

WW1 also helped USA as it weakned the other great powers, same can be said about WW2 which solidified USA as a super power. On other hand by around great depression some other countries like Sweden or Netherlands seems to have surpassed USA in human welfare messurements such as average height or life expectency and by 70s it seems USA wages have stagnated and life expectency seems to started to decline in 2015, if anything by the time it was considered a superpower, its quality of life lead was already erroding and now it seems to fallen behind many of the european countries.

But by 1930 it already had a population by 123 million, about 3 times UK population, only like Soviet Union could compete but it was very far behind in human welfare indicators, like having a life expectency in 1930 of 38 years while USA was at 58 years (so a 20 years difference).

So basically during the 1800s USA was perhaps the best country (or atleast amongst the absolute best) to live in and that allowed it to get a lot of immigrants, also it managed to avoid the destruction of two world wars, on other hand it seems like it did better before it became a great power in terms of human welfare compared to other countries, from being far ahead in 1800s to fallen significantly behind other developed countries 2 centuries later.