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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