Part VI. Domestic Reshufflings, Such as Transport and Coal, Do Not Explain the Modern World
Nor Geography, nor Natural Resources
Geography is still another popular explanation that does not in fact work very well. The title page of my copy of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years (1997) contains an excited notation from when I first read it, in August 2000: “The best book I’ve read in years.” It’s still true, and I read a lot of books. Diamond argues very persuasively that the east-west axis of Eurasia from Spain to Japan made for shared domestications of plants and animals—wheat, rice, horses, chickens—that the north-south places like sub-Saharan Africa or the isolated places like Australasia or the north-south and isolated places like the Americas could not enjoy. His is a powerful argument for why “advanced” societies tended strongly to be Eurasian, from China to Rome (though he does emphasize that in Africa and in Polynesia and the Americas the advance was coming along, slowly—though in the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries it was shorted out by European conquests).
Diamond reports the question of his New Guinean friend Yali, and says that he takes it as his guide: “Why is that you white people developed so much cargo?”21 Good question. But Diamond’s geographical argument breaks down when the focus narrows geographically, as it must be narrowed to really answer Yali’s Question: why did the northwestern Europeans (and their offspring the white settlers of Australia, and their imitators the Japanese, perhaps “white” from a New Guinean point of view) have an Industrial Revolution? The correct answer, which Diamond does not give, is that the northwest European “white people” had an Industrial Revolution and the other people—whether Eurasian or African or Mesoamerican—did not, until after the northwest Europeans had led the way. Italians, Iraqis, Indians, Chinese, and other beneficiaries of the 4000-year head start in civilization coming out of the Fertile Crescent did not get there first. The Dutch and British did, closely followed by the French and Germans and Americans. Why? Diamond’s brilliant explanation of why China and Turkey both had domesticated chickens and wheat tells why you would not have expected an industrial revolution among the Incas or the Zulus— at any rate not in 1400 C.E. or 1800 C.E. But it sheds no light at all on why Holland and then Britain made the first modern economies out of the widely shared heritage of Eurasia, and therefore developed so much cargo.
Diamond in fact gets sidetracked, as people tend to do, into the very different question of why European people were so good at violent conquest after 1492. He gives for example an account of Pizarro’s capture of the Inca emperor in 1533 in a long Chapter 3, “Collision at Cajamarca,” concluding that “the title of this book will serve as a shorthand for [the] proximate factors,” namely guns, germs [smallpox especially], [sword and armor] steel, horses, ships, empires, and writing.22 Such factors, and a mad confidence born from the myth of the Christian knight, certainly do explain Pizarro’s exploits. But such exploits have nothing to do with steam engines and electric lights and cargo planes, which constitute the “cargo” that Yali asked about. After a while, for example, the conquered people had themselves, by the very fact of conquest, new access to the Eurasian crops and animals and iron so laboriously accumulated. The 8000-year-old divergence thereby became irrelevant to Yali’s inquiry. What now mattered was the divergence after 1700 and especially after 1800 of Europe from the Chinese or the Ottoman or the Mughal or the other advanced Eurasian empires.
Indeed, the particular selection of Diamond’s title—guns, germs, and steel—were irrelevant to the Industrial Revolution in the narrow sense. Before the late nineteenth century, steel in its exact chemical definition (iron with less than 2 percent carbon) was very expensive, and was therefore used only for edge weapons and armor for the aristocracy, the better to cut down peasants and Incan soldiers and most frequently other European aristocrats. You can argue correctly that boring of cannon led to precision boring of steam cylinders, but until the late nineteenth-century the metal bored was not low-carbon “steel”: it was bronze available all over Eurasia and Africa, or cast iron produced in bulk, a technique invented by the Chinese or the Bantu Africans, take your pick. Asians bored cannon, too (and indeed steel made in modest bulk was an Indian invention around 300 B.C.E.). Muskets and pistols had little to do with industrialization (interchangeable parts could have come from any mass produced mechanical device—clocks, for example). Precision scientific instruments and clockmaking had more to do with ingenious cast and wrought iron (wrought iron is iron with very small amounts of carbon, but also with impurities in the form of embedded slag), and expensive steel machine parts such as springs on a tiny scale, than military production did. And anyway the cotton textile machinery was first made largely out of wood, and only later out of iron, and only late in the nineteenth century did it come to made out of the newly cheapened steel. Germs derived from Eurasian domestic animals (smallpox from cow pox) killed 95 percent of native Australians and Americans, depopulating for example an Amazonia that before the Europeans sustained many millions of people in an agriculture that until recently was thought impossible with the poor, leached soils of the rain forest. But the holocausts during and after the sixteenth century contribute nothing to understanding why white people in the nineteenth and twentieth developed so much cargo—an abundance that stunned Yali and his countrymen into cargo cults attempting during and after World War II to bring back the big airplanes of the Japanese and European conquerors. Killing people, whether on purpose or by accident of disease, does not make you rich.
Diamond concludes the Pizarro chapter by announcing that the rest of the book will discuss “no longer the questions of proximate causation that this chapter has been discussing,” but “why all those immediate advantages came to lie more with Europe than the New World.”23 He’s back to touting the advantages of Eurasia. But something has gone wrong with the line of argument. True, the conquests can be explained by the immediate advantages (most of it recently borrowed by the Europeans from the East). But conquest is not the same thing as enrichment by the factor of sixteen. In 1800 most Europeans still earned the ancient $3 a day. Yali’s question about cargo in the late twentieth century has been lost in answers about violence in the sixteenth century. You can see it in the outcome of an incident Diamond relates. Pizarro extracted from the Incan emperor a ransom of 3000 cubic feet of gold (after getting it, of course, he killed the emperor anyway: Pizarro was no gentleman). It was a down-payment on the river of gold and silver that poured into Spain for hundreds of years. Yet by 1800 Spain was among the poorest countries in Europe, well into the $3-a-day category, and stayed well behind northwestern Europe until late into the twentieth century. Though once far famed for violent conquest, Spain had not learned even by 1900, except in the Basque or Catalan regions, how to industrialize, and even by 1975 it had not learned how to post-industrialize. Diamond’s focus on the reasons for conquest after 1492 has diverted him from the reasons for the revolution after 1700 in the making of cargo. He doesn’t answer the question he poses.
Jeffrey Sachs and his co-authors cannot be charged with not answering the question they pose: do “tropical ecozones and landlocked countries face obstacles to development not faced by temperate-zone and coastal economies”? Yes, they do: “the tropical regions are nearly uniformly poor, while temperate regions have a wide income range with a small proportion (7 percent) of the temperate-zone populations at income levels below $2000, compared with 42 percent of the tropical-zone population.”24 But Sachs is not asking how northwestern Europe stole a march after 1700 on other temperate-zone populations such as the Chinese or the Ottomans. His tropical focus is persuasively argued, and he is not claiming that the tropics are geographically doomed—merely that they need tropical-specific research, such as cheap vaccines for malaria. But the temperate-tropical division, like Diamond’s axes of continents, cannot explain what needs explanation historically: why English people got so much cargo, and why by contrast temperate-zone Chinese people in 1700 C.E. or temperate-zone Roman people in 100 C.E. did not. After all, northwestern Europe initiated the modern world when still debilitated by cholera and smallpox and tuberculosis and especially by the malaria so devastating to modern Africa, under the name of “ague” (from which Oliver Cromwell died), called among the industrious Italians mala aria, “bad air.”25 Malaria reached its global peak, including much of Europe, in the nineteenth century, just as Europe was industrializing. Something other than disease patterns was involved in the Industrial Revolution.
Mellinger, Sachs, and Gallup also argue persuasively that in recent time access to cheap ocean-going transport is crucial. But their world map of “land within 100 km of an ice-free coast or sea-navigable river,” defined as the 9-meter draft of modern ocean-goers, shows north China and Egypt as instances.26 In former times, with shallower drafts of smaller ships, and none of the post-industrial improvements in Europe and the United States of rivers and harbors (the St. Lawrence Seaway; the numerous European ship canals as in the Netherlands), the map in 1700 would look less favorable to Europe and the United States, and would look relatively more favorable to places like China, Japan, and the Ottoman Empire that nonetheless did not stage an industrial revolution. Sachs and his co-authors, of course, are not attempting to explain the Industrial Revolution geographically. They would probably agree—Montesquieu and Henry Buckle to the contrary—that geography does not explain Europe’s head start. The vigorous northern air featured in geographical theories (by Europeans) weakened people through lung infection, such as the chronic bronchitis that plagues England to this day. And as I said the bad air too once carried female Anopheles mosquitoes.
A subspecies of the geographical argument is “resources.” Economists call natural resources “the original and indestructible properties of the soil,” in Ricardo’s phrase, or simply “land.” Some economic historians continue to put weight on Britain’s unusual gifts from Nature. Most don’t. The gifts of nature are what non-economist journalists call “resources” when they wonder why Congo and Russia with so much gold, diamonds, copper, chromium, cassiterite, and coltan are not as rich as France and Japan with none. The journalists and diplomats talk about oil, say, as being essential—which they believe implies that conquering the oil is a good idea, invading (say) Sumatra or Iraq. Such fractured economic logic exhibits the political problem with supposing that land makes for growth. It supports a species of diplomatic stupidity about “resources” which the economists have tried and tried without success to dislodge. The result has been such political catastrophes as the Japanese-American disputes about oil in the 1930s, or German theories of Lebensraum.
The scientific problem, and the reason that most economists do not believe the resource theory, is that land has fallen steadily in importance since 1800. The share of land in national income, including the value of oil lands, has shrunk in a modern economy so much that the gifts of nature have ended as economically speaking trivial—at two or three percent of national income. We saw the unimportance of land during the run-up of oil prices in 2008. Prices at the pump that non-economists believed would herald the end of Western civilization had modest economic effects. People feel instinctively that oil is “basic,” because it enters into so many products. To this the economist answers that all products are basic, which is to say that all products enter directly or indirectly into the production of others. “Basic” is therefore pretty much meaningless. Pencils and flower pots and bed frames are as “basic” as oil. The shred of meaningfulness it maintains is the ball-bearing theory of strategic bombing—bomb the ball-bearing factories, you see, and the German war machine stops. But in the event the Germans (and the North Vietnamese and others on whom the theory has been tried) go elsewhere, such as underground, or in the Soviet case east of the Urals.
In one version the resource theory of growth resembles the accumulation theory of growth. You get some profit from land or fish or oil or coal, it is said, and then reinvest it, and get rich. (By the way, Ricardo emphasized the indestructible character of [say] land close to London, and pointed out that mere extraction of fertility or coal [or later oil] is not a use of land defined as indestructible but rather the use of capital defined as a stock to be used up. A stand of trees is a stock of capital, to be used up slowly or quickly depending on the rate of interest, not an “original and indestructible character” of the soil or location.) The resource theory has the same flaw as the accumulation theory—that it cannot explain the gigantic enrichment of the average modern person.
Belief in the resource theory, for example, distorted South African economic policy for decades. It then dawned on white South Africans that merely having a stock of gold and diamonds in the ground does not make a modern economy—and that most particularly it does not do so if innovations depending on high human capital do not get used because you are intent for quite different reasons on keeping blacks and coloreds uneducated. Hong Kong and Singapore and even Japan with little in the way of natural resources leapt into the modern world, while most of the South African population did not. The Icelanders, to pick a very different case, worship fish as the source of their wealth. Yet it was Icelandic education intersecting with the demands of a modern world, not the wide ocean, that made the place rich, and allowed it to recover so quickly in 2010 from its unhappy experiment with U.S. mortgage-backed securities. As the economic historian Eric Jones puts it, about the United States, “the more meaningful assets of the United States were [not its resource endowments but] markets and institutions capable of vigorously exploiting its endowment.”27
