In the 250 years since the United States declared its independence from Great Britain, the nation has grown from a sparsely populated collection of settlements along the Atlantic coast into a global power spread across a continent. Starting from the original 13 colonies covering 430,000 square miles, its geographic footprint has increased eightfold to approximately 3.7 million square miles. The population has undergone a similarly dramatic expansion: from roughly four million Americans in 1790, including slaves, to 343 million by 2025 — an 8,475% increase.
President Donald Trump’s key political promises — limiting immigration, and expanding US power and territory — echo the country’s earliest distinctions and divisions, according to a BBC analysis. Those divisions were present from the start: heated debates over slavery, the constitution and the economic and political system created clear fractures among the population. As Heather Cox Richardson, a US history professor at Boston College, put it: “Anybody who was looking at the colonies trying to create this nation is saying, all we need to do is stay over here and wait till they tear themselves apart and go back and pick them up.”
“In 250 years, the US expanded eightfold in land and 8,475% in population — Trump's policies echo its earliest divisions.”
Colin Woodard, director of the Nationhood Lab at Salve Regina University, divides the US into distinct identities tied to those early fissures. The northern region, which Woodard calls “Yankeeland”, is rooted in Puritan settlers who fled religious persecution, with later German and Scandinavian arrivals solidifying a pluralistic outlook. A middle belt, “Greater Appalachia”, was first settled by independent-minded Scots and Irish whose experience with English oppression made them suspicious of government authority.
But a wider view of history, argues an UnHerd essay, reveals a more mundane explanation for America’s rise: land abundance. The collapse of the Roman Empire was a major inflection point. New kingdoms founded by Germanic tribal warlords lacked the bureaucracy to tax effectively or raise standing armies, so they compensated volunteer soldiers with the spoils of war — including land. Out of this exchange came the military order of feudalism, where a king’s power was measured by the military might of his vassals, who held land and could conscript peasants. The more land a vassal held, the larger his army. Yet every vassal was a potential rival, and every fief granted increased the threat to the king’s hegemony.
Today, as Trump promises to expand US territory and restrict immigration, the echoes of these ancient land dynamics persist — a reminder that America’s exceptionalism may have less to do with divine providence than with the simple abundance of land that shaped its feudal origins.