Nation-building and state formation have been primary aspects of
social development in New Countries; i.e., the United States, Brazil,
Argentina, Australia, and Canada. Part of the reason for this is sought
in the retardation of ethnic and geographic integration, deriving from the
fact that these five countries have large territories and relatively short
histories of settlement. These two properties in combination distinguish
them from the rest of the world, particularly in respect to effects on
social development. Moreover, as these countries have received the largest
\ volume of immigration recorded in history, the problem of the ethnic and
geographic integration involved in nation-building and state formation was
reshaped during the mass immigration period of 1880 to 1930.
The distinctive characteristics of their social development from
settlement colonies to modern states have frequently been referred to in
the social science literature and in the historiography of New Countries,
but there has been little success in constructing a model of the social
development in New Countries. Immigration studies, on the other hand, have
been either too general or too specific to differentiate uniqueness from
generality in the social effects of immigration in New Countries.
In the present study, the process of nation-building and state
formation is not analysed in economic or social psychological terms but
from a social structural perspective. Social demographic data are analysed
in conjunction with qualitative documents in order to explicate the interactive
patterns of social classes. The analysis of social demographic
data was facilitated by the decomposition of the total societal system
into six dimensions of social differentiation: ethnic, regional, urban,
family-role, industrial, and occupational. Special emphasis was given to
changes in the ethnic, regional and urban dimensions because these three
dimensions are directly related to nation-building and .state formation
processes. However, changes in the other three dimensions are briefly
discussed as well. The analysis of social demographic changes and changes
generated by the interaction of social classes showed a parallelism in
nation-building and state formation in particular, and social development
in general, among these New Countrie
