The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor

by David S. Landes

  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 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 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 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.

  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 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 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 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 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.