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What If New England Was A Country? Very Educated And Very Rich
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Mar 31, 2025
New England is one of the most quintessentially American regions. So much so that's it's hard to break it away from the United States as its own country. But at the same time, few other regions in the USA have as strong a regional culture as New Englanders do. In this video we go through the history of New England and then break down the would be country by size, population, demographics, cities, and economy.
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New England is one of the United States' most recognizable regions
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Home to lobster rolls, Harvard University, Dunkin' Donuts, many, many, many, many lighthouses
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few other regions in the United States can boast of such iconic symbols. But while New England is as American as apple pie, it's also a unique region with its own culture
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So what if New England was a country instead? Hello and welcome to What If Geography, where we try and answer the great geographic what-if
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questions of the world. I'm your host Jeff Gibson, and today we're off to New England
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one of the best and most culturally defined regions of the United States
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New England is also responsible for some of the deepest American historical events
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which kind of makes it hard to break New England away from the United States as a whole. But we're going to try anyways
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New England was originally founded by Puritan settlers who immigrated from England to escape
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religious persecution. But prior to the colonization by Puritans, the area we typically
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associate with New England today was actually home and native lands of quite a few Algonquin tribes
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This is important to keep in mind because the early relationships between the Puritans and
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these Native American tribes comprised so much of the foundational history of the region today
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New England was first coined as the name for the region in 1620 by the pilgrims who settled
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Plymouth Colony in what we would call Massachusetts today. These pilgrims came aboard a well-known
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historic ship called the Mayflower. However, the colonists aboard the Mayflower almost immediately
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faced hurdles to their founding of a colony. You see, the pilgrims were not really given any
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authority to settle the area, and some of the passengers of the Mayflower began to question
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their right to land. In response to this, a group of colonists drafted and signed the first governing
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document of the colony, the Mayflower Compact, while still aboard the ship as it lay offshore
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The intent of the compact was to establish a means of governing the colony, though it did little more than confirm that the colony would be governed like any English town
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Now, the original colonies faced some hard first years in New England. Disease and inclement weather hampered much of the progress and scuppered almost all of their supplies
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By the end of the first year, almost half of the original colonists had died. But this period also gave the United States we know today two of its most cherished American folktales
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That being the Native American Squanto teaching the pilgrims how to grow corn, and then the very first ever Thanksgiving feast
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Over the next 150 years, New England grew steadily, forming many more towns and even large cities
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such as Boston. This, of course, all came with many bloody conflicts and wars with the Native American tribes
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who were eventually wiped out Ironically the Puritans who faced religious persecution themselves often persecuted others for not following their very rigid beliefs New England and more specifically Boston hold in their history two of the most important events in the run to the
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American Revolutionary War. The first being the Boston Massacre of 1770, where British soldiers
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opened fire on a civilian crowd. The second being the Boston Tea Party event that saw a group called
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the Sons of Liberty dump about 92,000 pounds of tea into the Boston Harbor. This event gave rise
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to the famous American saying of no taxation without representation. Without New England and
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these two events specifically, it's hard to imagine the United States ever existing at all
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An entire video series could be devoted just to New England. There are so many foundational
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historic events in New England that we just don't have time to cover in this video
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But make no mistake, the United States we know today would not exist without the New England of
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yesterday, which kind of makes thinking about New England as its own country challenging
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But before we get into what New England would look like as its own country, if you're enjoying this video, now would be a great time to subscribe
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More What If Country videos are just one click away. New England is comprised of six states in the far northeast of the current United States
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These states are Connecticut, Maine, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Rhode Island, and Vermont
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New England today would be bordered by Quebec and New Brunswick in the north and northeast, and the state of New York to the west
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Most notably, perhaps, is that New England would share a direct border with the New York City metropolitan area
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Today, many of New England's largest concentrations of people commute daily into New York City
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If New England were to break away and become its own country, there would no doubt be a need for a relatively easy cross-border control system
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This wouldn't really be all that different from places like Johor and Singapore, where thousands of people cross an international border daily for work
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Now, despite comprising six of the current 50 U.S. states, the actual area size of New England is relatively small
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All six states combined currently take up about 72,000 square miles. To put this in perspective, that's about the same size as the state of Washington, and smaller than 19 other states
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Internationally, New England would oddly be fairly close to the same size as Great Britain
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which is comprised of England, Scotland, and Wales, granted with about a quarter of the population
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Speaking of population, New England would be home to just over 15 million people with
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Massachusetts specifically being home to over 7 million people This would make Massachusetts the powerhouse state of New England In contrast to Massachusetts Vermont would be the least populous state in New England with only about 650 people Both of these states are almost exactly the same size as each other
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but Massachusetts has a population density of 897 people per square mile
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as compared to Vermont's 68 people per square mile. Massachusetts' population density is
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actually higher than some major metropolitan areas of the United States, such as Dallas, Texas
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which only has 880 people per square mile. This kind of population density is in part why New England can often feel more European than other areas of the US
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In terms of diversity, New England would actually be overwhelmingly white at about 83.4% of the population
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But while New England is not very racially diverse, it is very culturally diverse
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with many cultural Europeans living within the country. As of 2014, approximately 19.2% of the population identified culturally as Irish
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13.6% identified as Italian, 13.1% as French or French-Canadian, 7.4% German, 4.9% Polish
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3.2% Portuguese, and so on. In fact, culturally English people only make up about 12% of the
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population. In some ways, it almost makes more sense to rename New England to New Ireland
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as it is by far the dominant culture outside of general American culture
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Much of this cultural diversity stems from the early-mid-1900s immigration of Europeans to the
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region. Between 1900 and 1915, more than 15 million people immigrated to the United States
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and many of those to New England and Boston directly. Today, New England remains as one of the best educated parts of the United States
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and even in the world. In fact, New England is home to some of the oldest universities in the
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Western world, many of which are considered to be highly prestigious and desired by students
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Harvard University, Yale University, Brown University, and Dartmouth College all exist within New England and make up fully half of the Ivy League schools
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In addition, New England is home to MIT, the world-renowned science-focused university
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This is all, of course, in addition to the hundreds of additional state and private universities
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that exist throughout the region. Much of this cultural dedication to education stems from the Puritans, because while the
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Puritans were not very tolerant of other religions and ideas, they also believed deeply in the
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institution of education. The Puritans mandated that every boy and girl had an education from a young age
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This mandate has rippled throughout history and established the idea of being well-educated
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as a core part of what it means to be a New Englander today. New England is comprised of hundreds of cities and towns But as a country the Boston metropolitan area would absolutely dominate the economy and culture of New England The Boston metropolitan area would have about one of the total population of New England at about 4 million people
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This would be far and away larger than the next largest metropolitan area of Providence, Rhode Island, which has about 1.6 million people
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This kind of population distribution would make Boston a primate city, where the largest city of the country is roughly twice as large in terms of population
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and overwhelmingly culturally dominant. This would also mean that Boston would, likely
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serve as the capital of the country of New England. Because there are no other major competing cities
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establishing the federal government within the largest major metropolitan area makes a certain amount of sense
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Outside of Boston and Providence, other major metropolitan areas within New England include
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Hartford, Connecticut, New Haven, Connecticut, Bridgeport, Connecticut, Manchester, New Hampshire, and Worcester, Massachusetts
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Burlington, Vermont, and Portland, Maine, while not major population centers, do have a certain cultural relevance to the region as well
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Economically, New England is very powerful for its size. The combined GDP of New England would be $1.15 trillion
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making it the 18th wealthiest nation in the world by GDP. This would place New England just above the Netherlands and just below Saudi Arabia
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This is in part because of the biotech and pharmaceutical industry in Boston, where there are currently over 1,000 companies located
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In addition to this, New England is home to General Electric, Converse, Reebok
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New Balance, Fidelity Investments, and many more large companies. Overall, New England enjoys one of the highest GDP per capita in the world at $77,000
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This would place it eighth according to the United Nations, well above the USA's current $63,000 per capita
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No matter how you cut it, New England would be a dominant economic power in the world
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easily sitting amongst many European and Eastern Asian countries today. New England would make for a well-defined, economically powerful, and culturally diverse country
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However, its history and its roots tie it to the United States in a way that few other regions can
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claim. Because of this, it's hard to imagine New England as a country without the complete
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dissolution of the United States as a whole. After all, New England led the charge during
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the American Civil War to keep the Union together. You don't just break away and form your own country
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