Foreign Countries and World Markets 303
Ellsworth Huntington
Fig. 181. This market in western China represents the earliest kind of market place, which is
merely an open space where goods for sale may be set out on the ground or on low benches.
Most of the vendors sell what thev themselves have produced or have helped to produce
the Guianas constitutes a region where practically all the manufac-
tured goods must be imported from other continents. Nevertheless,
although there are fine modern cities like Buenos Aires and Rio de
Janeiro with hundreds of thousands of highly civilized people, the
majority of the 75,000,000 South Americans are small consumers.
The best South American market is in the temperate regions of the
south where Spaniards, Portuguese, Italians, and other Europeans
make up most of the population, and where the natives themselves
are more energetic than elsewhere in the continent.
The United States and the South American market. One would
think that the United States, being advanced in manufacturing and
near South America, would almost entirely supply the markets of that
continent. In 1926 and 1927, however, which were normal years, we
supplied less than one fourth of the nearly two billion dollars’ worth of
goods imported by all the South American countries. This was less
than half as much as we sent to Great Britain alone. Nevertheless, it
was a great improvement over 1907, when we supplied only one
tenth of the imports of the countries of South America. During the