Mariam operates a machine that weaves rugs

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

DAVID S. LANDES

W. W. NORTON & COMPANY New York London

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Copyright © 1999, 1998 by David S. Landes

All rights reserved First published as a Norton 1999

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue,

New York, NY 10110.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Landes, David S. The wealth and poverty of nations: why some are so rich and some

so poor / by David S. Landes. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references. ISBN: 978-0-393-04017-3

1. Wealth—Europe—History. 2. Wealth—History. 3. Poverty— Europe—History. 4. Poverty—History. 5. Regional economic

disparities—History. 6. Economic history. 7. Economic development—Social aspects. I. Title.

HC240.Z9W45 1998 330.1’6—dc21 97-27508

CIP

ISBN 978-0-393-06981-5 (e-book)

W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10110

www.wwnorton.com

W. W. Norton & Company Ltd. 15 Carlisle Street, London W1D 3BS

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http://www.wwnorton.com
Praise for The Wealth and Poverty of Nations

“Truly wonderful. No question that this will establish David Landes as preeminent in his field and in his time.”

—John Kenneth Galbraith

“David Landes’s new historical study of the emergence of the current distribution of wealth and poverty among the nations of the world is a picture of enormous sweep and brilliant insight. The sense of historical contingency does not detract from the emergence of repeated themes in the encounters which led to European economic leadership. The incredible wealth of learning is embodied in a light and vigorous prose which carries the reader along irresistibly.”

—Kenneth Arrow

“David Landes has written a masterly survey of the great successes and failures among the world’s historic economies. He does it with verve, broad vision, and a whole series of sharp opinions that he is not shy about stating plainly. Anyone who thinks that a society’s economic success is independent of its moral and cultural imperatives obviously has another think coming.”

—Robert Solow

“Mr. Landes writes with verve and gusto…. This is indeed good history.” —Douglass C. North, Wall Street Journal

“You cannot even begin to think about problems of economic development and convergence without knowing the story that Landes tells…. I know of no better place to start thinking about the wealth and poverty of nations.”

—J. Bradford DeLong, Washington Post

“Enormously erudite and provocative…. Never less than scintillating, witty, and brilliant.”

—Kirkus Reviews

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Also by DAVID S. LANDES

BANKERS AND PASHAS THE UNBOUND PROMETHEUS

REVOLUTION IN TIME

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For my children and grandchildren, with love.

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…the causes of the wealth and poverty of nations—the grand object of all enquiries in Political Economy.

—Malthus to Ricardo, letter of 26 January 1817*

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Contents

PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

1. Nature’s Inequalities

2. Answers to Geography: Europe and China

3. European Exceptionalism: A Different Path

4. The Invention of Invention

5. The Great Opening

6. Eastward Ho!

7. From Discoveries to Empire

8. Bittersweet Isles

9. Empire in the East

10. For Love of Gain

11. Golconda

12. Winners and Losers: The Balance Sheet of Empire

13. The Nature of Industrial Revolution

14. Why Europe? Why Then?

15. Britain and the Others

16. Pursuit of Albion

17. You Need Money to Make Money

18. The Wealth of Knowledge

19. Frontiers

20. The South American Way

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21. Celestial Empire: Stasis and Retreat

22. Japan: And the Last Shall Be First

23. The Meiji Restoration

24. History Gone Wrong?

25. Empire and After

26. Loss of Leadership

27. Winners and…

28. Losers

29. How Did We Get Here? Where Are We Going?

EPILOGUE 1999

NOTES

BIBLIOGRAPHY

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Preface and Acknowledgments

My aim in writing this book is to do world history. Not, however, in the multicultural, anthropological sense of intrinsic parity: all peoples are equal and the historian tries to attend to them all. Rather, I thought to trace and understand the main stream of economic advance and modernization: how have we come to where and what we are, in the sense of making, getting, and spending. That goal allows for more focus and less coverage. Even so, this is a very big task, long in the preparing, and at best represents a first approximation. Such a task would be impossible without the input and advice of others—colleagues, friends, students, journalists, witnesses to history, dead and alive.

My first debt is to students and colleagues in courses at Columbia University, the University of California at Berkeley, Harvard University, and other places of shorter stays. In particular, I have learned from working and teaching in Harvard’s undergraduate programs in Social Studies and the Core Curriculum. In both of these, teachers come into contact with students and assistants from the full range of concentrations and other faculties and have to field challenges from bright, contentious, independent people, unintimidated by differences in age, rank, and experience.

Second, thanks largely to the sympathetic understanding of Dr. Alberta Arthurs, this work received early support from the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded research and writing and brought a number of scholars together for inspiration and intellectual exchange in its beautiful Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy—there where the younger Pliny once reconciled beauty, work, and leisure on the shores of Lake Como. Easy to succumb. The meeting led to publication of Favorites of Fortune (eds. Patrice Higonnet, Henry Rosovsky, and myself) and gave me the opportunity to write a first essay on the recent econometric historiography of European growth. Among the people who helped me then and on other occasions, my two co-editors, Higonnet and Roskovsky; also Robert Fogel, Paul David, Rudolf Braun, Wolfram Fischer, Paul Bairoch, Joel Mokyr, Robert Allen, Francois Crouzet, William Lazonick, Jonathan Hughes, Francois Jequier, Peter Temin, Jeff Williamson, Walt Rostow, Al

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Chandler, Anne Krueger, Irma Adelman, and Claudia Goldin. The Rockefeller Foundation also supported two thematic conferences

—one on Latin America in 1988 and another on the role of gender in economic activity and development the following year. Among those who contributed to these stimulating dialogues, exercises in rapid-fire instruction, I want to cite David Rock, Jack Womack, John Coatsworth, David Felix, Steve Haber, Wilson Suzigan, Juan Dominguez, Werner Baer, Claudia Goldin, Alberta Arthurs, and Judith Vichniac.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to Armand Clesse and the Luxembourg Institute for European and International Studies. Mr. Clesse has become one of the key figures in the mobilization of scholars and intellectuals for the discussion and analysis of contemporary political, social, and economic problems. His main theme is the “vitality of nations,” which has been interpreted broadly to mean just about anything relevant to national performance. The product has been a series of conferences, which have not only yielded associated volumes but promoted a growing and invaluable network of personal contacts among scholars and specialists. A Clesse conference is a wonderful mixture of debate and sociability—a usually friendly exercise in agreement and disagreement. In 1996, Mr. Clesse organized just such a meeting to deal with the unfinished manuscript of this book. Among those present: William McNeill, global historian and successor in omniscience to that earlier historian of Greece, Arnold Toynbee; Stanley Engerman, America’s economic history reader and critic extraordinary; Walt Rostow, perhaps the only scholar to return to original scholarship after government service; Rondo Cameron, lone crusader against the concept and term of Industrial Revolution; Paul Bairoch and Angus Maddison, collectors and calculators of the numbers of growth and productivity.

A similar meeting, on “The Singularity of European Civilization,” was held in June 1996 in Israel, under the sponsorship of the Yad Ha-Nadiv Rothschild Foundation (Guy Stroumsa, coordinator), bringing some of the same people plus another team, medieval and other: Patricia Crone, Ron Bartlett, Emanuel Sivan, Esther Cohen, Yaacov Metzer, Miriam Eliav- Feldon, Richard Landes, Gadi Algazi, et al.

Other venues where I was able to try out some of this material were meetings in Ferrara and Milan (Bocconi University) in 1991; the III Curso de Historia de la Técnica in the Universidad de Salamanca in 1992 (organizers Julio Sanchez Gomez and Guillermo Mira); a Convegno in 1993 of the Società Italiana degli Storici dell’Economia (Vera Zamagni, secretary) on the theme of “Innovazione e Sviluppo” several sessions of the Economic History Workshop at Harvard; the “Jornadas Bancarias” of

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the Asociación de Bancos de la República Argentina in Buenos Aires in 1993 on “Las Estrategias del Desarrollo” a congress in Hull, England, in 1993 (Economic History Society, Tawney Lecture); a conference in Cambridge University on “Technological Change and Economic Growth” (Emma Rothschild, organizer) in 1993; Jacques Marseille and Maurice Levy-Lcboyer’s colloquium (Institut d’Histoire économique, Paris, 1993) on “Les performances des entreprises françaises au XXe siècle” a conference on “Convergence or Decline in British and American Economic History” at Notre Dame University in 1994 (Edward Lorenz and Philip Mirowski organizers, Donald McCloskey promoter); a session on the Industrial Revolution (John Komlos organizer) at the Eleventh International Economic History Congress in Milan in 1994; and a session at the Social Science History Association in Atlanta in 1994.

Also lectures in the universities of Oslo and Bergen in 1995 (Kristine Bruland and Fritz Hodne, organizers); a symposium in Paris in 1995 on the work of Alain Peyrefitte (“Valeurs, Comportements, Développement, Modernité,” Raymond Boudon organizer) dealing inter alia with regional differences in European economic development; further symposia in 1995 on “The Wealth and Poverty of Nations” in Reggio Emilia and the Bocconi University in Milan (Franco Amatori, organizer).

Also a conference in the University of Oslo in 1996 on “Technological Revolutions in Europe, 1760-1860” under the direction of Kristine Bruland and Maxine Berg; in 1996, too, at the Fondazione Eni Enrico Mattei in Milan on “Technology, Environment, Economy and Society” (Michele Salvati and Domenico Siniscalco, organizers). And in 1997, a planning meeting in Madrid for the forthcoming Twelfth International Economic History Congress on the theme “Economic Consequences of Empire 1492- 1989” (Leandro Prados de la Escosura and Patrick K. O’Brien, organizers).

Each of these encounters, needless to say, focused on those points of particular interest to the participants, with gains to my understanding of both the larger theme and its special aspects.

Given the multiplicity of these meetings plus a large number of personal conversations and consultations, it is not easy to pull together a comprehensive list of those who have helped me on these and other occasions. My teachers first, whose lessons and example have stayed with me: A. P. Usher, M. M. Postan, Donald C. McKay, Arthur H. Cole. Also my colleagues in departments of economics and history in Columbia University (Carter Goodrich, Fritz Stern, Albert Hart, and George Stigler especially); in the University of California at Berkeley (Kenneth Stampp, Hans Rosenberg, Richard Herr, Carlo Cipolla, Henry Rosovsky, and

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Albert Fishlow especially); and at Harvard (Simon Kuznets, C. Crane Brinton, Alexander Gerschenkron, Richard Pipes, David and Aida Donald, Benjamin Schwartz, Harvey Leibenstein, Robert Fogel, Zvi Griliches, Dale Jorgensen, Amartya Sen, Ray Vernon, Robert Barro, Jeff Sachs, Jess Williamson, Claudia Goldin, Daniel Bell, Nathan Glazer, Talcott Parsons, Brad DeLong, Patrice Higonnet, Martin Peretz, Judith Vichniac, Stephen Marglin, Winnie Rothenberg).

Nor should I forget the extraordinary stimulation I received from a year at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences in Palo Alto. This was in 1957-58, and I was the beneficiary of a banner crop of economists: Kenneth Arrow, Milton Friedman, George Stigler, Robert Solow (four future winners of the Nobel Prize!). Get a paper past them, and one was ready for any audience.

And then, in addition to those colleagues mentioned above, others at home and abroad. In the United States: William Parker, Roberto Lopez, Charles Kindleberger, Liah Greenfield, Bernard Lewis, Leila Fawaz, Alfred Chandler, Peter Temin, Mancur Olson, William Lazonick, Richard Sylla, Ivan Berend, D. N. McCloskey, Robert Brenner, Patricia Seed, Margaret Jacob, William H. McNeill, Andrew Kamarck, Tibor Scitovsky, Bob Summers, Morton and Phyllis Keller, John Kautsky, Richard Landes, Tosun Aricanh. In Britain: M. M. Postan, Lance Beales, Hrothgar John Habakkuk, Peter Mathias, Barry Supple, Berrick Saul, Charles Feinstein, Maxine Berg, Patrick K. O’Brien, P. C. Barker, Partha Dasguppa, Emma Rothschild, Andrew Shonfìeld. In France: Francois Crouzet, Maurice Levy-Leboyer, Claude Fohlen, Bertrand Gille, Emmanuel Leroy-Ladurie, Francois Furet, Jacques LeGoff, Joseph Goy, Rémy Leveau, François Caron, Albert Broder, Pierre Nora, Pierre Chaunu, Rémy Prudhomme, Riva Kastoryano, Jean-Pierre Dormois. In Germany: Wolfram Fischer, Hans Ulrich Wehler, Jürgen Kocka, John Komlos. In Switzerland: Paul Bairoch, Rudolf Braun, J.-F. Bergier, Jean Batou, Francois Jequier. In Italy: Franco Amatori, Aldo de Madalena, Ester Fano, Roby Davico, Vera Zamagni, Stefano Fenoaltea, Carlo Poni, Gianni Toniolo, Peter Hertner. In Japan: Akira Hayami, Akio Ishizaka, Heita Kawakatsu, Isao Sut , Eisuke Dait . In Israel: Shmuel Eisenstadt, Don Patinkin, Yehoshua Arieli, Eytan Shishinsky, Jacob Metzer, Nahum Gross, Elise Brezis. And elsewhere: Herman van der Wee, Francis Sejersted, Erik Reinert, H. Floris Cohen, Dharma Kumar, Gabriel Tortella, Leandro Prados de la Escosura, Kristof Glamann. To all these and others I owe suggestions, criticisms, data, insights. We have not always agreed, but so much the better.

I want to give special thanks to my extraordinary editor, Edwin Barber, who not only challenged and improved the text but taught me a few things

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about writing. It’s never too late to learn. Finally, I want to thank my wife, Sonia, who has sweetly put up with

years of heaping books, offprints, papers, letters, and other debris. Even multiple work studies have not been big enough, and only the computer has saved the day. Now for the cleanup.

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Introduction

No new light has been thrown on the reason why poor countries are poor and rich countries are rich.

—PAUL SAMUELSON, in 19761

In June of 1836, Nathan Rothschild left London for Frankfurt to attend the wedding of his son Lionel to his niece (Lionel’s cousin Charlotte), and to discuss with his brothers the entry of Nathan’s children into the family business. Nathan was probably the richest man in the world, at least in liquid assets. He could, needless to say, afford whatever he pleased.

Then fifty-nine years old, Nathan was in good health if somewhat portly, a bundle of energy, untiring in his devotion to work and indomitable of temperament. When he left London, however, he was suffering from an inflammation on his lower back, toward the base of his spine. (A German physician diagnosed it as a boil, but it may have been an abscess.)2 In spite of medical treatment, this festered and grew painful. No matter: Nathan got up from his sickbed and attended the wedding. Had he been bedridden, the wedding would have been celebrated in the hotel. For all his suffering, Nathan continued to deal with business matters, with his wife taking dictation. Meanwhile the great Dr. Travers was summoned from London, and when he could not cure the problem, a leading German surgeon was called in, presumably to open and clean the wound. Nothing availed; the poison spread; and on 28 July 1836, Nathan died. We are told that the Rothschild pigeon post took the message back to London: Il est mort.

Nathan Rothschild died probably of staphylococcus or streptococcus septicemia—what used to be called blood poisoning. In the absence of more detailed information, it is hard to say whether the boil (abscess) killed him or secondary contamination from the surgeons’ knives. This was before the germ theory existed, hence before any notion of the importance of cleanliness. No bactericides then, much less antibiotics. And so the man who could buy anything died, of a routine infection easily cured today for anyone who could find his way to a doctor or a hospital, even a pharmacy.

Medicine has made enormous strides since Nathan Rothschild’s time. But better, more efficacious medicine—the treatment of illness and repair

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of injury—is only part of the story. Much of the increased life expectancy of these years has come from gains in prevention, cleaner living rather than better medicine. Clean water and expeditious waste removal, plus improvements in personal cleanliness, have made all the difference. For a long time the great killer was gastrointestinal infection, transmitted from waste to hands to food to digestive tract; and this unseen but deadly enemy, ever present, was reinforced from time to time by epidemic microbes such as the vibrio of cholera. The best avenue of transmission was the common privy, where contact with wastes was fostered by want of paper for cleaning and lack of washable underclothing. Who lives in unwashed woolens—and woolens do not wash well—will itch and scratch. So hands were dirty, and the great mistake was failure to wash before eating. This was why those religious groups that prescribed washing—the Jews, the Muslims—had lower disease and death rates; which did not always count to their advantage. People were easily persuaded that if fewer Jews died, it was because they had poisoned Christian wells.

The answer was found, not in changed religious belief or doctrine, but in industrial innovation. The principal product of the new technology that we know as the Industrial Revolution was cheap, washable cotton; and along with it mass-produced soap made of vegetable oils. For the first time, the common man could afford underwear, once known as body linen because that was the washable fabric that the well-to-do wore next to their skin. He (or she) could wash with soap and even bathe, although too much bathing was seen as a sign of dirtiness. Why would clean people have to wash so often? No matter. Personal hygiene changed drastically, so that commoners of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century often lived cleaner than the kings and queens of a century earlier.

The third element in the decline of disease and death was better nutrition. This owed much to increases in food supply, even more to better, faster transport. Famines, often the product of local shortages, became rarer; diet grew more varied and richer in animal protein. These changes translated among other things into taller, stronger physiques. This was a much slower process than those medical and hygienic gains that could be instituted from above, in large part because it depended on habit and taste as well as income. As late as World War I, the Turks who fought the British expeditionary force at Gallipoli were struck by the difference in height between the steak-and mutton-fed troops from Australia and New Zealand and the stunted youth of British mill towns. And anyone who follows immigrant populations from poor countries into rich will note that the children are taller and better knit than their parents.

From these improvements, life expectancy has shot up, while the

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differences between rich and poor have narrowed. The major causes of adult death are no longer infection, especially gastrointestinal infection, but rather the wasting ailments of old age. These gains have been greatest in rich industrial nations with medical care for all, but even some poorer countries have achieved impressive results.

Advances in medicine and hygiene exemplify a much larger phenomenon: the gains from the application of knowledge and science to technology. These give us reason to be hopeful about the problems that cloud present and future. They even encourage us toward fantasies of eternal life or, better yet, eternal youth.

Yet these fantasies, when science-based, that is, based on reality, are the dreams of the rich and fortunate. Gains to knowledge have not been evenly distributed, even within rich nations. We live in a world of inequality and diversity. This world is divided roughly into three kinds of nations: those that spend lots of money to keep their weight down; those whose people eat to live; and those whose people don’t know where the next meal is coming from. Along with these differences go sharp contrasts in disease rates and life expectancy. The people of the rich nations worry about their old age, which gets ever longer. They exercise to stay fit, measure and fight cholesterol, while away the time with television, telephone, and games, console themselves with such euphemisms as “the golden years” and the troisième age. “Young” is good; “old,” disparaging and problematic. Meanwhile the people of poor countries try to stay alive. They do not have to worry about cholesterol and fatty arteries, partly because of lean diet, partly because they die early. They try to ensure a secure old age, if old age there be, by having lots of children who will grow up with a proper sense of filial obligation.

The old division of the world into two power blocs, East and West, has subsided. Now the big challenge and threat is the gap in wealth and health that separates rich and poor. These are often styled North and South, because the division is geographic; but a more accurate signifìer would be the West and the Rest, because the division is also historic. Here is the greatest single problem and danger facing the world of the Third Millennium. The only other worry that comes close is environmental deterioration, and the two are intimately connected, indeed are one. They are one because wealth entails not only consumption but also waste, not only production but also destruction. It is this waste and destruction, which has increased enormously with output and income, that threatens the space we live and move in.

How big is the gap between rich and poor and what is happening to it? Very roughly and briefly: the difference in income per head between the

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richest industrial nation, say Switzerland, and the poorest nonindustrial country, Mozambique, is about 400 to 1. Two hundred and fifty years ago, this gap between richest and poorest was perhaps 5 to 1, and the difference between Europe and, say, East or South Asia (China or India) was around 1.5 or 2 to 1.3

Is the gap still growing today? At the extremes, clearly yes. Some countries are not only not gaining; they are growing poorer, relatively and sometimes absolutely. Others are barely holding their own. Others are catching up. Our task (the rich countries), in our own interest as well as theirs, is to help the poor become healthier and wealthier. If we do not, they will seek to take what they cannot make; and if they cannot earn by exporting commodities, they will export people. In short, wealth is an irresistible magnet; and poverty is a potentially raging contaminant: it cannot be segregated, and our peace and prosperity depend in the long run on the well-being of others.

How shall the others do this? How do we help? This book will try to contribute to an answer. I emphasize the word “contribute.” No one has a simple answer, and all proposals of panaceas are in a class with millenarian dreams.

I propose to approach these problems historically. I do so because I am a historian by training and temperament, and in difficult matters of this kind, it is best to do what one knows and does best. But I do so also because the best way to understand a problem is to ask: How and why did we get where we are? How did the rich countries get so rich? Why are the poor countries so poor? Why did Europe (“the West”) take the lead in changing the world?

A historical approach does not ensure an answer. Others have thought about these matters and come up with diverse explanations. Most of these fall into one of two schools. Some see Western wealth and dominion as the triumph of good over bad. The Europeans, they say, were smarter, better organized, harder working; the others were ignorant, arrogant, lazy, backward, superstitious. Others invert the categories: The Europeans, they say, were aggressive, ruthless, greedy, unscrupulous, hypocritical; their victims were happy, innocent, weak—waiting victims and hence thoroughly victimized. We shall see that both of these manichean visions have elements of truth, as well as of ideological fantasy. Things are always more complicated than we would have them.

A third school would argue that the West-Rest dichotomy is simply false. In the large stream of world history, Europe is a latecomer and free rider on the earlier achievements of others. That is patently incorrect. As the historical record shows, for the last thousand years, Europe (the West)

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has been the prime mover of development and modernity. That still leaves the moral issue. Some would say that Eurocentrism is

bad for us, indeed bad for the world, hence to be avoided. Those people should avoid it. As for me, I prefer truth to goodthink. I feel surer of my ground.

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THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS

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1 Nature’s Inequalities

Geography has fallen on hard times. As a student in elementary school, I had to read and trace maps, even draw them from memory. We learned about strange places, peoples, and customs, and this long before anyone had invented the word “multiculturalism.” At the same time, at higher levels far removed, schools of economic and cultural geography flourished. In France, no one would think of doing a study of regional history without first laying out the material conditions of life and social activity.1 And in the United States, Ellsworth Huntington and his disciples were studying the ways that geography, especially climate, influenced human development.

Yet in spite of much useful and revealing research, Huntington gave geography a bad name.2 He went too far. He was so impressed by the connections between physical environment and human activity that he attributed more and more to geography, starting with physical influences and moving on to cultural. In the end, he was classifying civilizations hierarchically and assigning the best—what he defined as best—to the favors of climate. Huntington taught at Yale University and not coincidentally thought New Haven, Connecticut, had the world’s most invigorating climate. Lucky man. The rest of the world went down from there, with the lands of the peoples of color toward or at the bottom of the heap.

Yet in saying these things, Huntington was simply echoing the tradition of moral geography. Philosophers easily linked environment with temperament (hence the long-standing contrast between cold and hot, between sober thoughtfulness on the one hand, ebullient pleasure seeking on the other); while the infant discipline of anthropology in the nineteenth century presumed to demonstrate the effects of geography on the distribution of merit and wisdom, invariably most abundant in the writer’s own group.3 In our own day, the tables are sometimes reversed, and Afro-

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American mythmakers contrast happy, creative “sun people” with cold, inhuman “ice people.”

That kind of self-congratulatory analysis may have been acceptable in an intellectual world that liked to define performance and character in racial terms, but it lost credibility and acceptability as people became sensitized and hostile to invidious group comparisons. And geography lost with it. When Harvard simply abolished its geography department after World War II, hardly a voice protested—outside the small group of those dismissed.4 Subsequently a string of leading universities—Michigan, Northwestern, Chicago, Columbia—followed suit, again without serious objection.

These repudiations have no parallel in the history of American higher education and undoubtedly reflect the intellectual weaknesses of the field: the lack of a theoretical basis, the all-embracing opportunism (more euphemistically, the catholic openness), the special “easiness” of human geography. But behind those criticisms lay a dissatisfaction with some of the results. Geography had been tarred with a racist brush, and no one wanted to be contaminated.

And yet, if by “racism” we mean the linking, whether for better or worse, of individual performance and behavior to membership in a group, especially a group defined by biology, no subject or discipline can be less racist than geography. Here we have a discipline that, confining itself to the influence of environment, talks about anything but group-generated characteristics. No one can be praised or blamed for the temperature of the air, or the volume and timing of rainfall, or the lay of the land.

Even so, geography emits a sulfurous odor of heresy. Why? Other intellectual disciplines have also propagated nonsense or excess, yet no other has been so depreciated and disparaged, if only by neglect. My own sense is that geography is discredited, if not discreditable, by its nature. It tells an unpleasant truth, namely, that nature like life is unfair, unequal in its favors; further, that nature’s unfairness is not easily remedied. A civilization like ours, with its drive to mastery, does not like to be thwarted. It disapproves of discouraging words, which geographic comparisons abound in.5

Geography, in short, brings bad tidings, and everyone knows what you do to that kind of messenger. As one practitioner puts it: “Unlike other history…the researcher may be held responsible for the results, much as the weather forecaster is held responsible for the failure of the sun to appear when one wishes to go to the beach.”6

Yet we are not the wiser for denial. On a map of the world in terms of

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product or income per head, the rich countries lie in the temperate zones, particularly in the northern hemisphere; the poor countries, in the tropics and semitropics. As John Kenneth Galbraith put it when he was an agricultural economist: “[If] one marks off a belt a couple of thousand miles in width encircling the earth at the equator one finds within it nodeveloped countries…. Everywhere the standard of living is low and the span of human life is short.”7 And Paul Streeten, who notes in passing the instinctive resistance to bad news:

Perhaps the most striking fact is that most underdeveloped countries lie in the tropical and semi-tropical zones, between the Tropic of Cancer and Tropic of Capricorn. Recent writers have too easily glossed over this fact and considered it largely fortuitous. This reveals the deepseated optimistic bias with which we approach problems of development and the reluctance to admit the vast differences in initial conditions with which today’s poor countries are faced compared with the pre-industrial phase of more advanced countries.8

To be sure, geography is only one factor in play here. Some scholars blame technology and the rich countries that have developed it: they are charged with inventing methods suited to temperate climates, so that potentially fertile tropical soil remains fallow. Others accuse the colonial powers of disrupting the equatorial societies, so that they have lost control of their environment. Thus the slave trade, by depopulating large areas and allowing them to revert to bush, is said to have encouraged the tsetse fly and the spread of trypanosomiasis (sleeping sickness). Most writers prefer to say nothing on the subject.

One must not take that easy way out. The historian may not erase or rewrite the past to make it more pleasing; and the economist, whose easy assumption that every country is destined to develop sooner or later, must be ready to look hard at failure.9 Whatever one may say about the weakening of geographical constraints today in an age of tropical medicine and high technology, they have not vanished and were clearly more powerful earlier. The world has never been a level playing field, and everything costs.

We begin with the simple, direct effects of environment and go on to the more complex, more mediated links.

Climate first. The world shows a wide range of temperatures and temperature patterns, reflecting location, altitude, and the declination of

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the sun. These differences directly affect the rhythm of activity of all species: in cold, northern winters, some animals simply curl up and hibernate; in hot, shadeless deserts, lizards and serpents seek the cool under rocks or under the earth itself. (That is why so many desert fauna are reptiles: reptiles are crawlers.) Mankind generally avoids the extremes. People pass, but do not stay; hence such names as the “Empty Quarter” in the Arabian desert. Only greed—the discovery of gold or petroleum—or the duties of scientific inquiry can overcome a rational repugnance for such hardship and justify the cost.

In general the discomfort of heat exceeds that of cold.* We all know the fable of the sun and wind. One deals with cold by putting on clothing, by building or finding shelter, by making fire. These techniques go back tens of thousands of years and account for the early dispersion of humanity from an African origin to colder climes. Heat is another story. Three quarters of the energy released by working muscle takes the form of heat, which the body, like any machine or engine, must release or eliminate to maintain a proper temperature. Unfortunately, the human animal has few biological devices to this purpose. The most important is perspiration, especially when reinforced by rapid evaporation. Damp, “sweaty” climes reduce the cooling effect of perspiration—unless, that is, one has a servant or slave to work a fan and speed up evaporation. Fanning oneself may help psychologically, but the real cooling effect will be canceled by the heat produced by the motor activity. That is a law of nature: nothing for nothing; or in technical terminology, the law of conservation of energy and mass.

The easiest way to reduce this waste problem is not to generate heat; in other words, keep still and don’t work. Hence such social adaptations as the siesta, which is designed to keep people inactive in the heat of midday. In British India, the saying had it, only mad dogs and Englishmen went out in the noonday sun. The natives knew better.

Slavery makes other people do the hard work. It is no accident that slave labor has historically been associated with tropical and semitropical climes.* The same holds for division of labor by gender: in warm lands particularly, the women toil in the fields and tend to housework, while the men specialize in warfare and hunting; or in modern society, in coffee, cards, and motor vehicles. The aim is to shift the work and pain to those not able to say no.

The ultimate answer to heat has been air conditioning. But that came in very late—really after World War II, although in the United States it was known before in cinemas, doctors’ and dentists’ offices, and the workplaces of important people such as the denizens of the Pentagon. In

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America, air conditioning made possible the economic prosperity of the New South. Without it, cities like Atlanta, Houston, and New Orleans would still be sleepy-time towns.

But air cooling is a costly technology, not affordable by most of the world’s poor. Moreover, it simply redistributes the heat from the fortunate to the unfortunate. It needs and consumes energy, which generates heat in both the making and using (nothing for nothing), thereby raising the temperature and humidity of uncooled surroundings—as anyone knows who has walked near the exhaust vent of an air conditioner. And of course, for most of history it was not available. The productivity of labor in tropical countries was reduced accordingly.†

So much for direct effects. Heat, especially year-round heat, has an even more deleterious consequence: it encourages the proliferation of life forms hostile to man. Insects swarm as the temperature rises, and parasites within them mature and breed more rapidly. The result is faster transmission of disease and development of immunities to countermeasures. This rate of reproduction is the critical measure of the danger of epidemic: a rate of 1 means that the disease is stable—one new case for one old. For infectious diseases like mumps or diphtheria, the maximum rate is about 8. For malaria it is 90. Insect-borne diseases in warm climes can be rampageous.10 Winter, then, in spite of what poets may say about it, is the great friend of humanity: the silent white killer, slayer of insects and parasites, cleanser of pests.

Tropical countries, except at higher altitudes, do not know frost; average temperature in the coldest month runs above 18C. As a result they are a hive of biological activity, much of it destructive to human beings. Sub-Saharan Africa threatens all who live or go there. We are only beginning to know the extent of the problem because of the appearance of new nations with armies and medical examinations for recruits. We now know for example that many people harbor not one parasite but several; hence are too sick to work and are steadily deteriorating.

One or two examples will convey the gruesome picture. Warm African and Asian waters, whether canals or ponds or streams,

harbor a snail that is home to a worm (schistosome) that reproduces by releasing thousands of minute tailed larvae (cercariae) into the water to seek and enter a mammal host body through bites or scratches or other breaks in the skin. Once comfortably lodged in a vein, the larvae grow into small worms and mate. The females lay thousands of thorned eggs— thorned to prevent the host from dislodging them. These make their way to liver or intestines, tearing tissues as they go. The effect on organs may be

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imagined: they waste the liver, cause intestinal bleeding, produce carcinogenic lesions, interfere with digestion and elimination. The victim comes down with chills and fever, suffers all manner of aches, is unable to work, and is so vulnerable to other illnesses and parasites that it is often hard to say what is killing him.

We know this scourge as snail fever, liver fluke, or, in more scientific jargon, as schistosomiasis or bilharzia, after the physician who first linked the worm to the disease in 1852. It is particularly widespread in tropical Africa, but afflicts the whole of that continent, plus semitropical areas in Asia and, in a related form, South America. It poses a particular problem wherever people work in water—in wet rice cultivation, for example.11

In recent decades, medical science has come up with a number of partial remedies, although the destructive power of these vermicides makes the cure almost as bad as the disease. The same for chemical attacks on the snail host: the molluscicides kill the fish as well as the snails. The gains of one year are canceled by the losses of the next: schistosomiasis is still with us. It was even deadlier in the past.

Better known is trypanosomiasis—a family of illnesses that includes nagana (an animal disease), sleeping sickness, and in South America Chagas’ disease. The source of these maladies is trypanosomes, parasitic protozoans so named because of their augur-shaped bodies; they are borers. The Trypanosoma brucei is also “a wily beast, with a unique ability to alter its antigens.”12 We now know a hundred of these; there may be thousands. Now you see it, now you don’t. The body’s immune system cannot fight it, because it cannot find it. The only hope for resistance, then, is drugs—still in the experimental stage—and attacks on the vector.

In the case of African trypanosomiasis, the vector is the tsetse fly, a nasty little insect that would dry up and die without frequent sucks of mammal blood. Even today, with powerful drugs available, the density of these insects makes large areas of tropical Africa uninhabitable by cattle and hostile to humans. In the past, before the advent of scientific tropical medicine and pharmacology, the entire economy was distorted by this scourge: animal husbandry and transport were impossible; only goods of high value and low volume could be moved, and then only by human porters. Needless to say, volunteers for this work were not forthcoming. The solution was found in slavery, its own kind of habit-forming plague, exposing much of the continent to unending raids and insecurity. All of these factors discouraged intertribal commerce and communication and made urban life, with its dependence on food from outside, just about unviable. The effect was to slow the exchanges that drive cultural and technological development.* (Table 1.1 shows data on tropical and

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semitropical diseases.)

TABLE 1.1. Scope and Incidence of Tropical Diseases, 1990

SOURCE: World Health Organization (WHO), Special Program for Research and Training in Tropical Diseases, 1990, cited in Omar Sattaur, “WHO to Speed Up Work on Drugs for Tropical Diseases,” p. 17.

To be sure, medicine has made great strides in combatting these maladies. Its role goes back almost to the beginning of the European presence: Europeans, physically unprepared for the special rigors and dangers of warm climes, brought doctors with them. In those early days, of course, ignorant if well-intentioned physicians did more harm than good; but they did put people out of their misery. Not until the second half of the nineteenth century did the germ theory of disease lay the basis for directed research and effective prevention and treatment. Before that, one relied on guesswork empiricism and imagination. These techniques, fortunately, were not haphazard. The stress on observation and the reality principle— you can believe what you see, so long as you see what I see—paid off beyond understanding.

Take the biggest killer worldwide: malaria. Before the discovery of microbic pathogens, physicians attributed “fevers” to marshy miasmas— wrong cause, but not an unreasonable inference from proximity. So the French in Algeria, appalled by losses to illness, undertook systematic drainage of swamps to get rid of bad air (malaria). These projects may or may not have cleared the air, but they certainly banished mosquitoes. Military deaths from malaria fell by 61 percent in the period 1846-48 to 1862-66, while morbidity fell even more sharply from the 1830s to the 1860s.13 Such measures, moreover, yielded beneficial side effects. We do not have figures for civilians, but their health must also have improved,

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natives as well as French colonists. Say what you will about French policies and actions in Algeria, they enabled millions of Algerians to live longer and healthier. (To which an Algerian Muslim might reply, drainage also increased the land available for European colonists.)

The Algerian experience illustrates the gain to environmental improvement: better to keep people from getting sick than to cure them once ill. Over the past century, medicine and public hygiene in alliance have made an enormous difference to life expectancy—the figure for tropical and poor populations have been converging with those of kinder, richer climes. Thus in 1992 a baby born in a low-income economy (population over 1 billion people if one excludes China and India) could expect to live to fifty-six, whereas one born in a rich country (population 828 million) could look forward to seventy-seven years. This difference (37.5 percent longer), not small but smaller than before, will get smaller yet as poor countries grow richer and gains in longevity in rich societies bump up against a biological ceiling and the environmental diseases of affluence.14 The most decisive improvements have occurred in the care of infants (under one year): a fall in mortality from 146 per thousand live births in 1965 in the poorest countries (114 in China and India) in 1965 to 91 in 1992 (79 in India, 31 in China). Still, the contrast with rich countries remains: their low infant death rates fell even faster, 25 to 7, over the same period.15 They can’t go much lower.

All of this does not justify complacency. Modern medicine can save babies and keep people alive longer, but that does not necessarily mean they are healthy. Indeed, mortality and morbidity are statistically contradictory. Dead people do not count as ill, as the researcher for the American tobacco industry implied when he argued straightfacedly that estimates of the high health costs of smoking should be reduced by smokers’ shorter life expectancy. So, conversely, for the tropics: antibiotics, inoculations, and vaccinations save people, but often to live sickly lives. The very existence of a specialty known as tropical medicine tells the character of the problem. As much as this field has accomplished, the bill, among scientific researchers as well as among indigenous victims and sundry imperialists, has been high.16

Meanwhile prevention is costly and treatment often entails a protracted regimen of medication that local facilities cannot supply and that patients find hard to use. As of 1990, most people with tropical illnesses lived in countries with average annual incomes of less than $400. Their governments were spending less than $4 per person on health care. No surprise, then, that pharmaceutical companies, which say it costs about $

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100 million to develop a drug or vaccine and bring it to market, are reluctant to cater for that kind of customer.17 Even in rich countries, the cost of medication can exceed patients’ resources and the tolerance of medical insurance. The latest therapies for AIDS, for example, cost $10,000 to $15,000 a year for a lifetime—an unthinkable fortune for Third World victims.18

Finally, habits and institutions can favor disease and thwart medical solutions. Diseases are almost invariably shaped by patterns of human behavior, and remedies entail not only medication but changes in comportment. There’s the rub: it is easier to take an injection than to change one’s way of living. Look at AIDS in Africa. In contrast to other places, the disease afflicts women and men equally, originating overwhelmingly in heterosexual contacts. Epidemiologists are still seeking answers, but among the suggested factors are: widespread and expected male promiscuity; recourse to anal sex as a technique of birth control; and the persistent wound of female circumcision (clitorectomy), intended as a deterrent to sexual pleasure and appetite. None of these vectors is properly medical, so that all the doctors can do is alleviate the suffering of victims and delay the onset of the full-blown disease. Given the poverty of these societies, this is not much.

Aside from material constraints, modern medicine must also reckon with ideological and religious obstacles—everywhere, but more so in poorer, technically backward societies. Traditional nostrums and magical invocations may be preferred to foreign, godless remedies. A science- oriented Westerner will dismiss such practices as superstition and ignorance. Yet they may offer psychosomatic relief, and native potions, even if not chemically pure and concentrated, do sometimes work. That is why modern scientists and drug companies spend money exploring the virtues of exotic materia medica.

The pattern of occasional empiricist success, in combination with anticolonist resentment and a sentimental attachment to indigenous culture (to say nothing of the vested interest of old-style practitioners), has given rise to political and anthropological criticisms of tropical (modern) medicine and a defense, however guarded, of “alternative” practice.19 For Africa, this literature argues that tropical medicine, in its overweening pride and its contempt for indigenous therapies, has done less than it might have; further, that Europe-drawn frontiers and European-style commercial agriculture have wiped out traditional barriers to disease vectors (bugs, parasites, etc.). Even “perfectly sensible” measures of public health may offend indigenous susceptibilities, while medical tests and precautions

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may be seen as condescending and exploitative.20

Water is another problem. Tropical areas generally average enough rainfall, but the timing is often irregular and unpredictable, the downpours anything but gentle. The drops are large; the rate of fall torrential. The averages mean nothing when one goes from one extreme to the other, from one year or season or one day to the next.21 In northern Nigeria, 90 percent of all rain falls in storms of over 25 mm. per hour; that makes half the average monthly rainfall at Kew Gardens, outside London. Java has heavier pours: a quarter of the annual rainfall comes down at 60 mm. per hour.

In such climes, cultivation does not compete easily with jungle and rain forest: these treasure houses of biodiversity favor every species but man and his limited array of crops. The result is a kind of war that leaves both nature and man losers. Attempts to cut down valuable plants and timber take the form of wasteful, slashing hunts. Nor does the exuberance of the jungle offer a good clue to what is possible under cultivation. Clear and plant, and the unshaded sun beats down; heavy rains pelt the ground— their fall unbroken by leaves and branches—leach out soil nutrients, create a new kind of waste. If the soil is clayey, composed in large part of iron and aluminum oxides, sun plus rain bakes the ground into a hard coat of armor. Two or three years of crops are followed by an indefinite forced fallow. Newly cleared ground is rapidly abandoned, and soon the vines and tendrils choke the presumptuous dwellings and temples. Again towns cannot thrive, for they need to draw on food surpluses from surrounding areas. Urbanization in Africa today, often chaotic, rests heavily on food imports from abroad.

At the other extreme, dry areas turn to desert, and the sands of the desert become an implacable invader, smothering once fertile lands on the periphery. Around 1970, the Sahara was advancing into the Sahel at the rate of 18 feet an hour—in geological terms, a gallop.22 Such expansions of wasteland are a problem in all semi-arid climes: on the Great Plains of the United States (remember the Okies of Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath), in the Israeli Negev and the lands just east of the Jordan, in western Siberia. Less rainfall, and the crops die of thirst and the topsoil blows away. In temperate latitudes, however, the crops come back when rainfall picks up; tropical and semitropical deserts are less forgiving.

One answer to irregular moisture is storage and irrigation; but this is countered in these regions by incredibly high rates of evaporation. In the Agra region of India, for example, rainfall exceeds the current needs of agriculture for only two months in the year, and the excess held in the soil

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in those wet months dries up in only three weeks. It is no accident, then, that settlement and civilization followed the

rivers, which bring down water from catchment areas and with it an annual deposit of fertile soil: thus the Nile, the Indus, the Tigris and Euphrates. These centers of ancient civilization were first and foremost centers of nourishment—though the Bible reminds us that even the Egyptians had to worry about famine. Not all streams are so generous. The Volta drains over 100,000 square kilometers in West Africa—half the area of Great Britain—but when low, averages at its mouth a meager flow of only 28 cubic meters per second, as against 3,500-9,800 at the peak. Drought in the Volta basin comes at the hottest and windiest time of year, and loss of water to evaporation is discouragingly high.23

Then we have the catastrophes—the so-called once-in-a-hundred-year floods and storms and droughts that happen once or twice every decade. In 1961-70, some twenty-two countries in “climatically hostile areas” (flood- prone, drought-prone, deserts) suffered almost $10 billion in damages from cyclones, typhoons, droughts, and similar disasters—almost as much as they got in loans from the World Bank, leaving just about nothing for development. The cyclone of 1970 in Bangladesh, which is a sea-level plain and easily awash, killed about half a million and drove twice that number from their homes. In India, which has been striving to achieve 2-3 percent annual growth in food crops, one bad growing season can lower output by over 15 percent.24 The impact of such unexceptional exceptions can be extremely costly even to rich societies, witness the losses due to Hurricane Andrew in 1992 and the great midwestern floods of 1993 and 1997 in the United States. For marginally poor populations living on the edge of subsistence, the effects are murderous. We know something about these if there are television cameras present; if not, who hears or sees the millions who drown and starve? And if they are unheard and unseen, who cares?

Life in poor climes, then, is precarious, depressed, brutish. The mistakes of man, however well intentioned, aggravate the cruelties of nature. Even the good ideas do not go unpunished. No wonder that these zones remain poor; that many of them have been growing poorer; that numerous widely heralded projects for development have failed abysmally (one hears more of these before than after); that gains in health peter out in new maladies and give way to counterattacks by old.

Africa especially has had a hard struggle against these handicaps, and although much progress has been made, as mortality rates and life expectancy data show, morbidity remains high, nourishment is inadequate, famine follows famine, and productivity stays low. Once able to feed its

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population, it can do so no longer. Foreign aid is primarily food aid. People there operate at a fraction of their potential. Government cannot cope. In view of these stubborn natural burdens, the amazing thing is that Africans have done so well as they have.

Yet it would be a mistake to see geography as destiny. Its significance can be reduced or evaded, though invariably at a price. Science and technology are the key: the more we know, the more can be done to prevent disease and provide better living and working conditions. We can clearly do more today than yesterday, and the prognosis for tropical areas is better than it used to be. Meanwhile improvement in this area requires awareness and attention. We must take off the rose-colored glasses. Defining away or ignoring the problem will not make it go away or help us solve it.

“I Have Always Felt Reinforced and Stimulated by the Temperate Climate”

Personal experiences can be misleading, if only because of the variance among individuals. One person’s discomfort is another’s pleasure. Still, the law of heat exhaustion applies to all, and few manage to work at full capacity when hot and wet. Here is a Bangladeshi diplomat recalling his own experience and that of compatriots when visiting temperate climes:

“In countries like India, Pakistan, Indonesia, Nigeria and Ghana I have always felt enervated by the slightest physical or mental exertion, whereas in the UK, France, Germany or the US I have always felt reinforced and stimulated by the temperate climate, not only during long stays, but even during brief travels. And I know that all tropical peoples visiting temperate countries have had a similar experience. I have also seen hundreds of people from the temperate zone in the tropics feeling enervated and exhausted whenever they were not inside an air-conditioned room.

“In India and other tropical countries I have noticed farmers, industrial labourers, and in fact all kinds of manual and office workers working in slow rhythm with long and frequent rest pauses. But in the temperate zone I have noticed the same classes of people working in quick rhythm with great vigour and energy, and with very few rest pauses. I have known from personal experience and the experience of other tropical peoples in the temperate zone that this spectacular difference in working energy and efficiency could not be due entirely or even mainly to different levels of nutrition.”25

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2 Answers to Geography: Europe and China

The unevenness of nature shows in the contrast between this unhappy picture and the far more favorable conditions in temperate zones; and within these, in Europe above all; and within Europe, in western Europe first and foremost.

Take climate. Europe does have winters, cold enough to keep down pathogens and pests. Winter’s severity increases as one moves east into continental climes, but even the milder versions fend off festering morbidity. Endemic disease is present, but nothing like the disablers and killers found in hot lands. Parasitism is the exception. Some have argued that this exemption accounts for the vulnerability of Europeans to epidemic plagues: they were not sufficiently exposed to pathogens to build up resistance.

Even in winter, West European temperatures are kind. If one traces lines of equal temperature around the globe (isotherms), nowhere do they bend so far north as along Europe’s Atlantic coast. The mean winter temperature in coastal Norway, north latitude 58 to 71 degrees, exceeds that in Vermont or Ohio, some 20 degrees closer to the equator. As a result, Europeans were able to grow crops year round.

They were assisted here by a relatively even rainfall pattern, distributed around the year and rarely torrential: “it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” This is a pattern found only exceptionally around the globe. Summer rain falls abundantly right across the Eurasian landmass; winter rain, no. Precipitation coming off the Atlantic in the winter fails by the time it gets to the plains of Central and Eastern Europe. The landlocked steppes of Asia starve for water; hence such places as the Gobi Desert. Southern and eastern China are saved by rains coming up from the seas off Indochina; the same for the southeastern United States, heir to moisture from the Gulf of Mexico.

This dependable and equable supply of water made for a different pattern of social and political organization from that prevailing in riverine

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civilizations. Along rivers, control of food fell inevitably to those who held the stream and the canals it fed. Centralized government appeared early, because the master of food was master of people. (The biblical account of Joseph and Pharaoh tells this process in allegory. In order to get food, the starving Egyptians gave up to Pharaoh first their money, then their livestock, then their land, then their persons [Genesis 47:13-22].) Nothing like this was possible in Europe.

This privileged European climate was the gift of the large warm current that we know as the Gulf Stream, rising in tropical waters off Africa, working its way westward across the Atlantic and through the Caribbean, then recrossing the Atlantic in a generally northeast direction. The clockwise rotation is produced by the spin of the earth in combination with water rising as it warms; in the southern hemisphere, equatorial currents go counterclockwise (see Map 1). In both hemispheres, equatorial currents proceed from east to west, bearing heat and rich marine life with them.

Normally north and south equatorial currents should be roughly equal in volume, but in the Atlantic, an accident of geology turns the north equatorial into the largest such oceanic flow in the world. This accident: the shape taken by South America as tectonic continental plates parted and the Americas broke off from the African landmass, specifically, the great eastward bulge of Brazil (roughly corresponding to the eastward bend in the Atlantic coast of Africa). Brazil’s salient splits the south equatorial current and sends roughly half of it northward to join its northern counterpart, producing a huge warm-water mass that washes finally against the coasts of Ireland and Norway (see Map 1). This geological good fortune gives western Europe warm winds and gentle rain, water in all seasons, and low rates of evaporation—the makings of good crops, big livestock, and dense hardwood forests.

To be sure, Europe knows more than one climate. Rainfall is heaviest and most equable along the Atlantic, there where the moisture-laden west winds leave the water for land. As one moves east toward the Polish and Russian steppe, climate becomes more “continental” with wider extremes of both moisture and temperature. The same for the Mediterranean lands: the temperatures are kind, but rain is sparser, more uneven. In Spain, Portugal, southern Italy, and Greece, the soil yields less, olive trees and grapes do better than cereals, pasture pays more than agriculture. Some would argue that these geographical handicaps led to poverty, even to industrial retardation, in southern as against northern Europe.1 (We shall see later that other, cultural reasons may have been at least as important.)

If so, why was Europe so slow to develop, thousands of years after

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Egypt and Sumer? The answer, again, is geography: those hardwood forests. Edmund Burke spoke well when he contrasted the Indians and the English: “a people for ages civilized and cultivated…while we were yet in the woods.”2 Not until people had iron cutting tools, in the first millennium before our era (B.C.E.), could they clear those otherwise fertile plains north of the Alps. No accident, then, that settlement of what was to become Europe took place first along lakeshores (what we know as lacustrine settlements, often on stilts) and on grasslands—not necessarily the most fertile lands, but the ones accessible to primitive, nonferrous technology. Only later could Europe grow enough food to sustain denser populations and the surpluses that support urban centers of cultural exchange and development. Even so, most of the forest remained, even gaining when population shrank in the centuries following the fall of Rome. The folk memory comes down to us in legend and tale, in Little Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, Tom Thumb, and other stories of woods and wolves and witches and danger close by.

As these tales make clear, it would be a mistake to present the European geographic environment as idyllic. Europe knew famine and disease, long waves of cooling and warming, epidemics and pandemics. Peasants knew they could survive one and perhaps two bad crops, but after that came starvation. Here again the forest played a crucial role—source of berries, nuts, even acorns and chestnuts. And here too the steady water meant that farming was not marginal, that a dry spell would soon be followed by a return of rain and crops. One has to look at the dry places, there where cultivation is a gamble and the land risks turning into desert— not only the areas south of the invasive Sahara, or the lands east of the Jordan River on the northern margin of the Arabian desert, but the American plains west of the 100th meridian, or the Siberian steppe where Khrushchev tried to grow wheat, or the cotton lands around Lake Baikal— to get a sense of how narrow the edge where rains are fickle and rare.

This favorable environment enabled Europeans to leave more of the land for forest and fallow and so raise livestock without seeking far for pasture. Their animals were bigger and stronger than those of other lands. The Mongolian pony, scourge of the steppe, stood tiny next to a European battle steed; the same for Arab mounts. Much of India could not breed horses at all because of the climate. Yet both small and large animals offered advantages. The Mongol and Tartar could move easily across their empty inland sea, striking fast and hard against the sedentary populations round. The European horse, carrying an armored warrior, amounted to a living tank, irresistible in charges, unbeatable in set combat.

The conflict between these two tactics gave rise to some of the greatest

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battles in history. In 732, Charles Martel, grandfather of Charlemagne and Frankish Mayor of the Palace, led an army of mounted knights against the Arab invaders near Tours and set a westward limit to what had seemed irresistible Muslim expansion.* Some four hundred fifty years later, in 1187, the Saracen troops of Saladin let the European knights charge down at them at the Horns of Hattin, stepping aside at the last moment to let them through. By then the crusader mounts, which had been carrying their riders all day in the blazing sun, were exhausted. The Saracens had only to close and cut down the Europeans from the rear. So ended the crusading kingdom of Jerusalem and Christian feudal power in the Holy Land.

In the long run, however, the Europeans won. Larger animals meant an advantage in heavy work and transport. Dray horses could plow the clayey soils of the great northern plain (the horse is more powerful than the ox, that is, it moves faster and does more work in less time), while moving fresh crops to urban markets. Later on they would haul field guns to war and into combat. European herds were typically larger and yielded lots of animal fertilizer (as against the human night soil employed in East Asia). This enabled more intensive cultivation and larger crops, which gave more feed, and so on in an upward spiral. As a result, Europeans kept a diet rich in dairy products, meat, and animal proteins. They grew taller and stronger while staying relatively free of the worm infestations that plagued China and India.* (Only a few years ago, one fifth of all Chinese who received blood transfusions came down with hepatitis, because donors’ livers had been ravaged by parasites and blood screening was incompetent.)3

Healthier Europeans lived longer and worked closer to their potential.† 4 This is not to say that European crop yields per area or population

densities were higher than those in warm irrigation societies. The gains from animal fertilizer, plowing (which brings nutrients up from below), and fallow could not match the fertile silt of the Nile, the Euphrates, or the Indus; even less, the alluvial deposits of the Yellow and Yangtze rivers, and the multiple cropping made possible by year-round warmth.** On the other hand, irregular interruptions in riverine cultivation, whether by want or excess of water or by enemy action against irrigation systems, could hurt far more than dry or wet spells in a rainy climate.‡ Averages are deceiving. Monsoon rains, generous over time, vary a lot from season to season and year to year. Floods and droughts are the norm. In China and India, repair and replenishment were that much more urgent. Even without catastrophe, the demand for labor in the rainy season and the big yields of wet cultivation promoted high densities of population—30 times that of Africa per unit of arable, 40 times that of Europe, 100 times that of

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America.5 Hence early and almost universal marriage, without regard to material resources.*

In contrast, Christian and especially western Europe accepted celibacy, late marriage (not until one could afford it), and more widely spaced births. Medieval Europeans saw children as a potential burden in time of need. Recall the stories of Hansel and Gretel and Tom Thumb—the children left in the forest to die far from the eyes of their parents. The riverine civilizations maximized population; the Europeans focused on small households and strategies of undivided inheritance and interfamilial alliance.

So, numbers alone do not tell the story, and some would say that when health and animal support are factored in, Europe may have brought more energy to agriculture (per area of cultivation) than the much more numerous populations of Asia. Such peasant throngs, moreover, tempted Asian rulers to undertake ostentatious projects based on forced labor. These would one day be the wonder and scandal of European visitors— great tourist attractions—astonishing by the contrast between overweening wealth and grinding poverty. “The splendours of Asian courts, the religious and funerary monuments and hydraulic engineering works, the luxury goods and skilled craftsmanship seemed merely to testify that political organisation could squeeze blood out of stones if the stones were numerous enough.”†

The Europeans did not have to build pyramids.** Europe, particularly western Europe, was very lucky. Now look at China, where “agriculture teems…and mankind swarms.”6

Anyone who wants to understand world economic history must study China, the most precocious and long the most successful developer of all. Here is a country with some 7 percent of the earth’s land area that supports some 21 percent of the world’s population. The old Chinese slogan puts it succinctly: “The land is scarce and the people are many.”7

Some two thousand years ago, perhaps 60 million people crowded what was to become the northern edge of China—a huge number for a small territory. This number more or less held over the next millennium, but then, from about the tenth to the beginning of the thirteenth century, almost doubled, to around 120 million. At that point came a setback, due largely to the pandemics also scourging Europe and the Middle East; and then, from a trough of 65-80 million around 1400, the number of Chinese rose to 100-150 million in 1650, 200-250 million in 1750, over 300 million by the end of the eighteenth century, around 400 million in 1850, 650 million in 1950, and today 1.2 billion, or more than one fifth of the world

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total. This extraordinary increase is the result of a long-standing (up to now) reproductive strategy: early, universal marriage and lots of children. That takes food, and the food in turn takes people. Treadmill.

This strategy went back thousands of years, to when some peoples at the eastern end of the Asian steppe exchanged nomadic pastoralism for the higher yields of sedentary agriculture. From the beginning, their chiefs saw the link between numbers, food, and power. Their political wisdom may be inferred from (1) their mobilization of potential cultivators, assigned to (planted in) potentially arable soil; (2) their storage of grain to feed future armies; (3) their focus on food supply to fixed administrative centers (as against camps). On these points, we have “The Record of the Three Kingdoms,” which tells of state warfare around the year 200 of our era:

Ts’ao Ts’ao said: “It is by strong soldiers and a sufficiency of food that a state is established. The men of Ch’in took possession of the empire by giving urgent attention to farming. Hsiao-wu made use of military colonies to bring order to the western regions. This is a good method used by former generations.” In this year he recruited commoners to farm state colonies around Hsu [in central Honan] and obtained a million measures of grain. Then he… marched out on campaign in every direction. There was now the wealth and poverty of nations need to expend effort on the transport of grain. In consequence he destroyed the swarms of bandits [the forces of rival political chiefs] and brought peace to the empire.

A half century later, according to the same source, “it was desired to extend the area under cultivation and to amass a supply of grain that would make it possible to destroy the ‘bandits.’” To do this, “it would also be necessary to excavate canals to provide water for irrigation, to make possible the accumulation of large supplies of grain for the troops, and to serve as routes for the transport of the government grain….” Some calculations follow: “Within six or seven years thirty million measures of grain would be stockpiled on the Huai. This would be enough to feed 100,000 men for five years. Wu would thus be conquered and [Wei] arms prevail everywhere.”8 And so it was.

This erratic seesaw of labor-hungry soil and food-hungry labor inevitably brought times and places of want, even famine. No room for animals. Around 300 C.E. a memorialist named Shu Hsi complained:

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The situation is especially bad in the San-Wei, and yet grazing lands for pigs, sheep, and horses are spread throughout this region. All of these should be done away with, so that provision may be made for those with no or little land…. All the pasturages should be removed, so that horses, cattle, pigs, and sheep feed on the grass of the empty plains, while the men who roam about in search of a living may receive land from the bounty of the state.9

Clearly, Chinese agriculture could not run fast enough. State and the society were always striving for new land and higher yields, making and using people in order to feed people. Under the emperor T’ai-wu (reigned 424-52, so, over a century later), the government was not going to leave anything to chance. Peasants without oxen were forced to sell their labor for the loan of oxen. Families were listed, numbers were counted, labor duties and performance clearly recorded. “Their names were written up at the place where they worked, so that it was possible to distinguish between their varying degrees of success. They were also forbidden to drink wine, to attend theatrical entertainments, or to abandon agriculture for wine- making or trade.”10

No time, then, for fun or money. Only for growing food and making children.

Viewed over time, the treadmill process shows a number of stages: 1. The Chinese, or Han people, as they came to call themselves, started

in the north, in the forests edging the barren inner Asian steppe. They cleared the land (by fire?) and worked it as hard as they could; but what with irregular rainfall and no trees to hold the soil, severe erosion soon killed the yield. They then moved, not into the open dry lands to the west, which could not support an already dense population, but south, on to the loess soils along the upper Yellow River.*

2. Loess agriculture was a school for water control and irrigation technology. It prepared the way for the next move, into the wetter, more fertile, but also more precarious river basin environment of the lower Yellow River and its branches.† There the Han came to know rice, a crop that yielded many more calories per area, although the traditional cereals —millet, sorghum, barley—remained important. Wheat came later.

By about 500 B.C.E. the Chinese had learned to improve the supply and use of water by means of artificial devices and arrangements; were making use of draft animals (above all, the water buffalo) for plowing; were weeding intensively; and were putting down animal waste, including night soil, as fertilizer. All of this required prodigious labor, but the work

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paid off. Yields shot to a high of 1,100 liters of grain per hectare, which would have left a substantial surplus for the maintenance of nonfood producers. The Chinese energy system was in place.

3. Between the eighth and thirteenth centuries of our era came a second agricultural revolution. The Han people kept moving south, into the Yangtze basin and beyond, pushing slash-and-burn, itinerant aboriginals aside or before. Most of these eventually found shelter in the mountains and other areas unsuited to intensive cultivation. They still live there— China’s largest minority.

In this wetter, warmer clime, mild winters and long summers permitted full double cropping: winter wheat, for example, harvested in May, and summer rice planted in June and harvested in October or November. Where conditions permitted, the Chinese went beyond this, over to rice gardening in submerged paddies. Taking quicker-growing varieties, they got three or more crops per year. To do this, they saved and applied every drop of dung and feces; weeded incessantly; and maximized land use by raising seedlings in nurseries (high density) and then transplanting the mature shoots (needing more space) to the rice fields. In economic terms, they substituted labor for land, using sixty and eighty persons per hectare where an American wheat farmer would use one, and obtaining yields double and triple the already good results achieved in dry farming—as much as 2,700 liters per hectare. At the maximum, a thousand people could live on the food produced by a square kilometer. “By the thirteenth century China thus had what was probably the most sophisticated agriculture in the world, India being the only conceivable rival.”11

All of this left little room for animals, except those needed for plowing and hauling and as mounts for the army. The pig was another exception— China’s great scavenger and primary source of meat for the rich man’s table. But few cattle or sheep: the Chinese diet knew little of dairy products or animal protein, and wool clothing was largely unknown. When the British tried to sell their woolens to the Chinese, they were told their cloths were too scratchy for people used to cotton and silk. They surely were.

4. Later innovations added marginally to the Chinese granary. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, new plants were taken from distant lands—peanuts, potatoes, sweet potatoes, yams. These grew well in dryer uplands, but in the last analysis, they were only a supplement to a rice complex that could no longer keep up with demand.*

5. The overwhelming concentration on rice yielded a mix of good and bad. The appetite of rice for nutrients (particularly phosphate and potash) is lower than that of other food staples; its labor requirements greater. Its

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caloric yield per acre exceeds that of temperate zone grains such as wheat, rye, and oats; its protein content, however, is only about half as high.12 Rice is a tough grain: it grows in diverse habitats and is the only cereal that will give good yields on poor soil year after year so long as it gets enough water. On the other hand, the wading in water paddies and the use of human feces as fertilizer has meant high exposure to schistosomes and other nasty parasites, with loss to productivity and hence higher labor requirements.

This labor-intensive, water-intensive energy model had important consequences for Chinese history. For one thing, reliance on the indigenous population meant that the Chinese never sought to incorporate foreign slaves into their workforce. (To be sure, many of their own population lived in bondage, though they were not chattel slaves.) For another, they did expand by sheer force of numbers. It was very hard for sparsely distributed, less organized, and technically less advanced groups to keep the Chinese out.

At the same time, the management of water called for supralocal power and promoted imperial authority. This link between water and power was early noted by European observers, going back to Montesquieu and reappearing in Hegel, later copied by Marx. The most detailed analysis, though, is the more recent one of Karl Wittfogel, who gave to water-based rule the name of Oriental despotism, with all the dominance and servitude that that implies.13 (Others have offered analogous arguments, prudently shorn of portentous social and cultural implications.)14

The hydraulic thesis has been roundly criticized by a generation of Western sinologists zealous in their political correctness (Maoism and its later avatars are good) and quick to defend China’s commitment to democracy. Wittfogel is the preferred target. One scholar sees in his thesis a lightly disguised program for neo-imperialism: “Clearly the action message of this theory is to recommend and justify intervention.”15 Presumably these protestations of loyalty aim to convince Chinese, if not Western, readers, for almost all these critics of the water connection are courting the favor of an umbrageous regime, dispenser of invitations and access.

The facts gainsay them. The anti-hydraulics point to evidence that the early centers of Chinese population did not rely much on irrigation; that then and later, much water was drawn from wells rather than brought in; and that some aspects of water management were always locally conceived and financed—as though such activity somehow contradicted the ultimate responsibility of the higher authorities in this domain, especially in

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conscripting and assigning labor for the larger tasks: the big dikes, dams, and canals, flood control, repair and relief. Such interventions went far beyond local possibilities. The stakes were huge. For one thing, the more daring the alteration of nature, the greater the scope and cost of failure or catastrophe.16 For another, it was food surpluses that sustained the machinery of government.

This was the reality. As one team of scholars put it, repudiating Wittfogel the while, “There must be irrigable land available, adequate social hegemony and state control, and so on.”17 Yes indeed.

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3 European Exceptionalism: A Different Path

Europe was lucky, but luck is only a beginning. Anyone who looked at the world, say a thousand years ago, would never have predicted great things for this protrusion at the western end of the Eurasian landmass that we call the continent of Europe. In terms popular among today’s new economic historians, the probability at that point of European global dominance was somewhere around zero. Five hundred years later, it was getting close to one.

In the tenth century, Europe was just coming out of a long torment of invasion, plunder, and rapine, by enemies from all sides. From what we now know as Scandinavia, the Norsemen or Vikings, marine bandits whose light boats could handle the roughest seas and yet sail up shallow rivers to raid and pillage far inland, struck along the Atlantic coasts and into the Mediterranean as far as Italy and Sicily. Others went east into Slavic lands, establishing themselves as a new ruling class (the Rus, who gave their name to Russia and ruled that somber land for some seven hundred years), and eventually penetrating almost to the walls of Constantinople.

So terrifying were these marauders, so ruthless their tactics (taking pleasure in tossing babes in the air and catching them on their lances, or smashing their heads against the wall), that the very rumor of their arrival loosened the limbs and loins of the population and sent their leaders, including their spiritual guides, in headlong flight, carrying their movable wealth with them. The clerics did leave their parishioners some newly composed prayers for protection by the Almighty, but the altar was not a good refuge, for the Vikings knew where the plunder lay and headed straight for churches and castles.

Also coming from the sea, across the Mediterranean, were Saracens (Moors), who set up mountain bases in the Alps and on the Côte d’Azur, and went out from these to raid the trade routes between northern and southern Europe. These fastnesses, hard of access and yet linked to

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Muslim lands by the sea, were inexpugnable, and folk legend has it that to this day some villagers in the high Alps carry the color and appearance of their Maghrebin origins.

Finally, from the east overland, but highly mobile for all that, rode the Magyars or Hungarians, one more wave of invaders from Asia, pagans speaking a Ural-Altaic language (a distant cousin of Turkish), sweeping in year after year, choosing their targets by news of European dissensions and dynastic troubles, swift enough to move in a single campaign from their Danubian bases into eastern France or the foot of Italy. Unlike the Norsemen, who were ready to settle into base camps for a period of years, the better to hunt and find, or who even established themselves quasi- permanently as rulers in part of England, in Normandy (which took their name), and in Sicily, the Hungarians went out and back, hauling their booty and slaves along with them in wagons or on pack animals.

No one will submit to that kind of abuse indefinitely. The Europeans learned to counter these thrusts, with or without the help of their leaders, who were only too quick to make their own deals with the invaders on the backs of their peasants. Instead of trying to keep the Norsemen out, the villagers let them in, trapped them, fell on them from all sides.* The Hungarians, too swift to deal with when they came in, were slow going out; a few ambushes of the overproud, overloaded trains convinced them that there must be better ways to make a living. As for the Saracens, the solution lay, as in Muslim lands, in military escorts for mule and wagon trains (caravans). In short, the Europeans raised the price of aggression. In all these instances, ironically, the Europeans were assisted by enemy headquarters. Over the years, the northern tribes and the Hungarian invaders settled down and became domesticated. Kingdoms replaced nomadic war camps, and their rulers looked with disfavor on these swaggering “captains,” with their private armies and tales of derring-do, returning from their raids with booty and brags, and threatening the peace. Kings do not need career troublemakers. A mix of threat and reward succeeded in persuading rogues and pirates that more was to be gained by being landlords and shearing sheep at home than by being warlords and killing sheep abroad.

It has been suggested that this end to danger from without launched Europe on the path of growth and development. This is the classical economists’ view: increase is natural and will occur wherever opportunity and security exist. Remove the obstacles, and growth will take care of itself. Others would argue that freedom from aggression is a necessary but not sufficient condition. Growth and development call for enterprise, and

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enterprise is not to be taken for granted. Besides, medieval Europe did not lack for impediments to such initiatives.

To get an idea of the larger character of this process, one has to see the Middle Ages as the bridge between an ancient world set in the Mediterranean—Greece and then Rome—and a modern Europe north of the Alps and Pyrenees. In those middle years a new society was born, very different from what had gone before, and took a path that set it decisively apart from other civilizations.

To be sure, Europe had always thought of itself as different from the societies to the east. The great battles between Greeks and Persians— Salamis, Thermopylae—have come down in folk memory and in the classes of yesteryear as symbolic of the combat between West and East, between the free city (the polis, which gives us our word “politics”) and aristocratic empires,1 between popular sovereignty (at least for free men) and oriental despotism (servitude for all). In those days one was taught that the Greeks invented democracy, the word and the idea. This is still the conventional wisdom, though substantially modified by an awareness of Greek slavery and of their exclusion of women from the political process (though not from public space).

Linked to the opposition between Greek democracy and oriental despotism was that between private property and ruler-owns-all. Indeed, that was the salient characteristic of despotism, that the ruler, who was viewed as a god or as partaking of the divine, thus different from and far above his subjects, could do as he pleased with their lives and things, which they held at his pleasure. And what was true for the ruler was true for his henchmen. The martial aristocracy typically had a monopoly of weapons, and ordinary folk were careful not to offend them, arouse their cupidity, or even attract their attention; to look them in the eye was an act of impudence that invited severest punishment.

Today, of course, we recognize that such contingency of ownership stifles enterprise and stunts development; for why should anyone invest capital or labor in the creation or acquisition of wealth that he may not be allowed to keep? In the words of Edmund Burke, “a law against property is a law against industry.”2 In Asian despotisms, however, such arrangements were seen as the very raison d’être of human society: what did ordinary people exist for, except to enhance the pleasure of their rulers?

Certainly not to indulge a will of their own. The experience of the people of Balkh (central Asia) is emblematic. It so happened their ruler was away making war on the Indians, and a nomadic people nearby took advantage of his absence to seize the city. The inhabitants put up a good

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fight, defending not only their own houses and families but those of the absent ruler; but they lost. When the ruler returned, he retook the city; and when he learned of his subjects’ valor, he scolded them. War, he lectured, was not their affair; their duty was to pay and obey whoever ruled them. The leaders of the common folk duly apologized and promised not to repeat their lèse-majesté3

In these circumstances, the very notion of economic development was a Western invention. Aristocratic (despotic) empires were characteristically squeeze operations: when the elites wanted more, they did not think in terms of gains in productivity. Where would these have come from? They simply pressed (and oppressed) harder, and usually found some hidden juice. Sometimes they miscalculated and squeezed too hard, and that could mean flight, riot, and opportunities for rebellion. These autocracies, though defined as divine, were not immortal. Meanwhile only societies with room for multiple initiatives, from below more than from above, could think in terms of a growing pie.

The ancient Greeks distinguished between free and unfree, not so much in terms of material benefits (they were not particularly keen on economic enterprise, which they associated with metics and other crass people), or even in terms of the advantages of their own system, as of the wrongness of the other, which they saw as tyranny. And yet the Greeks succumbed to despotism, most spectacularly in the empire created by Alexander and ruled by his Asian and Egyptian successors; and later the Romans went the same way, sliding all too easily into tyrannical autocracy. In final form, the classical Mediterranean world came to resemble politically the civilizations to the east—a powerful and small elite surrounded by clients, servants, and slaves, and headed by an autocrat. But only resembled. Dissenters knew this was wrong, spoke up and wrote, and suffered for their presumption. The republican ideal died hard.

Meanwhile property rights had to be rediscovered and reasserted after the fall of Rome. This world, which we know as medieval—the time between—was a transitional society, an amalgam of classical legacy, Germanic tribal laws and customs, and what we now call the Judaic- Christian tradition. All of these provided support for institutions of private property. The Germanic custom was that of a nomadic community, with each warrior master of his modest possessions—kept modest by constant movement. Nothing was so special and valuable as to give rise to issues of ownership or to the ambitions of power.*

Which is not to say that there were not other incentives to power; or that the condition of these nomadic peoples was immutable. In the course

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of their wanderings and conquests, such issues did arise. Every French grammar school student used to learn the story of the vase of Soissons, a beautiful object robbed from a church by the Franks in war against the Gauls. The chief Clovis wanted to return it, by way of giving pleasure to a Christian woman who had won his fancy, but the soldier who had taken it (or had been awarded it in the division of the booty) refused. It was his by right, and he broke it in front of Clovis to make his point. In effect, he told his chief, what’s yours is yours and what’s mine is mine. The next time the troops were drawn up in array, Clovis stopped before the vase-breaker and asked him what was wrong with his sandal; and when the man bent down to look, Clovis shattered his skull with a battle-ax. In effect, what’s yours is yours, but you are mine.†

Tensions and ambiguities, then. But what mattered in the long run were the constraints imposed by political fragmentation and general insecurity. In the centuries that followed the end of empire, the arm of authority was short. Power derived in principle from the freely consented allegiance of the group or an elite within it and was correspondingly limited. To be sure, the tradition of election gave way to hereditary rule (the Germans were much influenced by Roman example, or rather principle). But old customs and appearances died hard: the ruler, even when designated by birth, was nominally elected. So he was earthly, human rather than divine, and his power the same.

Some did seek to restore the empire that had been. The dream of Rome reborn never died.4 Had they succeeded, one might have expected a revival of arbitrary despotism. But such efforts broke down in the face of poor communication, inadequate transport, challenges to legitimacy, the contrary power of local rulers, the triumph of reality over fantasy. In this context, private property was what could be held and defended. Sometimes it was seized by force, just as today someone might be mugged and robbed. But the principle never died: property was a right, and confiscation, no more than plunder, could not change that.

The concept of property rights went back to biblical times and was transmitted and transformed by Christian teaching. The Hebrew hostility to autocracy, even their own, was formed in Egypt and the desert: was there ever a more stiff-necked people? Let me cite two examples, where the response to popular initiative is directly linked to the sanctity of possessions. When the priest Korach leads a revolt against Moses in the desert, Moses defends himself against charges of usurpation by saying, “I have not taken one ass from them, nor have I wronged any one of them” (Numbers 16:15). Similarly, when the Israelites, now established in the Land, call for a king, the prophet Samuel grants their wish but warns them

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of the consequences: a king, he tells them, will not be like him. “Whose ox have I taken, or whose ass have I taken?” (I Samuel 12:3).

This tradition, which set the Israelites apart from any of the kingdoms around and surely did much to earn them the hostility of nearby rulers— who needs such troublemakers?—tended to get lost in Christianity when that community of faith became a church, especially once that Church became the official, privileged religion of an autocratic empire. One cannot well bite the hand that funds. Besides, the word was not getting out, for the Church early decided that only qualified people, certain clerics for example, should know the Bible. The Good Book, with its egalitarian laws and morals, its prophetic rebukes of power and exaltation of the humble, invited indiscipline among the faithful and misunderstanding with the secular authorities. Only after censorship and edulcoration could it be communicated to the laity. So that it was not until the appearance of such heretical sects as the Waldensians (Waldo, c. 1175), the Lollards (Wiclif, c. 1376), Lutherans (1519 on), and Calvinists (mid-sixteenth), with their emphasis on personal religion and the translation of the Bible into the vernacular, that this Judaic-Christian tradition entered explicitly into the European political consciousness, by way of reminding rulers that they held their wealth and power of God, and then on condition of good behavior. An inconvenient doctrine.

Yet Western medieval Christianity did come to condemn the pretensions of earthly rulers—lesser monarchs, to be sure, than the emperors of Rome. (The Eastern Church never talked back to the Caesars of Byzantium.)* It thereby implicitly gave protection to private property. As the Church’s own claims to power increased, it could not but emphasize the older Judaic principle that the real owner of everything was the Lord above, and the newer Christian principle that the pope was his vicar here below. Earthly rulers were not free to do as they pleased, and even the Church, God’s surrogate on earth, could not flout rights and take at will. The elaborate paperwork that accompanied the transfer of gifts of the faithful bore witness to this duty of good practice and proper procedure.