Abstract

The land area referred to as the Americas is enormous, composed of two of the world’s seven recognized continents and approximating the total area of Asia in its entirety. Clearly, it is impossible to survey globalization processes in the Americas by means of six chapters. The Americas encompasses divergent geographies, ranging from the Canadian Arctic down to the Antarctic islands of Tierra del Fuego. It features a great diversity of indigenous culture from the North American Plains and the Rocky Mountains, past the Middle American isthmian tropics and including the archipelago of the Caribbean Sea, into the Amazonian lowlands, featuring the second largest river in the world, which in turn is fed by the melt water and sediments eroding out of the world’s longest mountain range, the Andes.