The region is located northeast of New England in the United States, south and southeast of Quebec's Gaspé Peninsula, and southwest of the island of Newfoundland.

But the term Maritimes has historically been collectively applied to New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, all of which border the Atlantic Ocean.

There is evidence that Viking explorers discovered and settled in the Vinland region around 1000 AD, which is when the L'Anse aux Meadows settlement in Newfoundland and Labrador has been dated.

Early examples of Acadian fishing settlements developed in southwestern Nova Scotia and in Île-Royale, as well as along the south and west coasts of Newfoundland, the Gaspé Peninsula, and the present-day Côte-Nord region of Quebec.

The growing English colonies along the American seaboard to the south and various European wars between England and France during the 17th and 18th centuries brought Acadia to the centre of world-scale geopolitical forces.

Important settlements also began in the Beaubassin region of the present-day Isthmus of Chignecto, and in the Saint John River valley, as well as smaller communities on Île-Saint-Jean and Île-Royale.

During this time period Acadians participated in various militia operations against the British and maintained vital supply lines to the French Fortress of Louisbourg and Fort Beausejour.

This combination of events, coupled with an ongoing decline in British military and economic support to the region as the Home Office favoured newer colonial endeavours in Africa and elsewhere, led to a call among Maritime politicians for a conference on Maritime Union, to be held in early September 1864 in Charlottetown – chosen in part because of Prince Edward Island's reluctance to give up its jurisdictional sovereignty in favour of uniting with New Brunswick and Nova Scotia into a single colony.

The Charlottetown Conference, as it came to be called, was also attended by a slew of visiting delegates from the neighbouring Crown colony, the Province of Canada, who had largely arrived at their own invitation with their own agenda.

This agenda saw the conference dominated by discussions of creating an even larger union of the entire territory of British North America into a united colony.

Of the Maritime provinces, only Nova Scotia and New Brunswick were initially party to the BNA Act: Prince Edward Island's reluctance, combined with a booming agricultural and fishing export economy having led to that colony opting not to sign on.

The major communities of the region include Halifax and Cape Breton in Nova Scotia, Moncton, Saint John, and Fredericton in New Brunswick, and Charlottetown in Prince Edward Island.

Additional service-related industries in information technology, pharmaceuticals, insurance and financial sectors—as well as research-related spin-offs from the region's numerous universities and colleges—are significant economic contributors.

Mostly concentrated on the continental shelf of the province's Atlantic coast in the vicinity of Sable Island, exploration activities began in the 1960s and resulted in the first commercial production field for oil beginning in the 1980s.

While urban areas are growing and thriving, economic adjustments have been harsh in rural and resource-dependent communities, and emigration has been an ongoing phenomenon for some parts of the region.

Property values are depressed, resulting in a smaller tax base for these three provinces, particularly when compared with the national average which benefits from central and western Canadian economic growth.

This has been particularly problematic with the growth of the welfare state in Canada since the 1950s, resulting in the need to draw upon equalization payments to provide nationally mandated social services.

That being said, New Brunswick has one of the largest military bases in the Commonwealth of Nations (CFB Gagetown), which plays a significant role in the cultural and economic spheres of Fredericton, the province's capital city.

Historian Kris Inwood places the date very early, at least in Nova Scotia, finding clear signs that the Maritimes "Golden Age" of the mid-19th century was over by 1870, before Confederation or the National Policy could have had any significant impact.

Acheson takes a similar view and provides considerable evidence that the early 1880s were in fact a booming period in Nova Scotia and this growth was only undermined towards the end of that decade.

David Alexander argues that any earlier declines were simply part of the global Long Depression, and that the Maritimes first fell behind the rest of Canada when the great boom period of the early 20th century had little effect on the region.

Coincident with the construction of railways in the region, the age of the wooden sailing ship began to come to an end, being replaced by larger and faster steel steamships.

The larger ships were also less likely to call on the smaller population centres such as Saint John and Halifax, preferring to travel to cities like New York and Montreal.

Montreal and Toronto were well-suited to benefit from the development of large-scale manufacturing and extensive railway systems in Quebec and Ontario, these being the goals of the Macdonald and Laurier governments.

During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, just the opposite was the case with little to no population concentration in major industrial centres as the predominantly rural resource-dependent Maritime economy continued on the same path as it had since European settlement on the region's shores.

He repeats Acheson's argument that the region lacks major urban centres, but adds that the Maritimes were also lacking the great rivers that led to the cheap and abundant hydro-electric power, key to Quebec and Ontario's urban and manufacturing development, that the extraction costs of Maritime resources were higher (particularly in the case of Cape Breton coal), and that the soils of the region were poorer and thus the agricultural sector weaker.

The NDP has elected members of parliament (MPs) from New Brunswick, but most of the focus of the party at the federal and provincial levels is currently in the Halifax area of Nova Scotia.

Industrial Cape Breton has historically been a region of labour activism, electing Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (and later NDP) MPs, and even produced many early members of the Communist Party of Canada in the pre-Second World War era.

In the 1997 federal election, Prime Minister Jean Chrétien's Liberals endured a bitter defeat to the PCs and NDP in many ridings as a result of unpopular cuts to unemployment benefits for seasonal workers, as well as closures of several Canadian Forces bases, the refusal to honour a promise to rescind the Goods and Services Tax, cutbacks to provincial equalization payments, health care, post-secondary education and regional transportation infrastructure such as airports, fishing harbours, seaports, and railways [citation needed].

This court decision resulted from a complaint by the Government of Prince Edward Island after that province's number of MPs was proposed to change from 4 to 3, accounting for its declining proportion of the national population at that time.