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

by David S. Landes

  The concept of property rights went back to biblical times and was transmitted and transformed by Christian teaching. The Hebrew hostility to avitocracy, 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 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.

  All of this made Europe very different from civilizations around.

  In China, even when the state did not take, it oversaw, regulated, and repressed. Authority should not have to depend on goodwill, the right attitude, personal virtue. Three hundred years before the Common Era, a Chinese moralist was telling a prince how to rule, not by winning the affection of his subjects but by ensuring their obedience. A prince cannot see and hear everything, so he must turn the entire empire into his eyes and ears. “Though he may live in the deepest retreat of his palace, at the end of tortuous corridors, nothing escapes him, nothing is hidden from him, nothing can escape his vigilant watch.”5 Such a system depends on the honesty and capacity of the living eyes and ears. The ruler is at the mercy of ambitious subordinates, whose capacity for deception and hypocrisy is unbounded. The weakness of autocracy is in the human raw material. Fortunately.

  One scholar, impervious to euphemisms, terms the system “totalitarian”:

  No private undertaking nor any aspect of public life could escape official regulation. In the first place there was a whole series of state monopolies…. But the tentacles of the Moloch state, the omnipotence of the bureaucracy, extended far beyond that…. This welfare state superintended, to the minutest detail, every step its subjects took from the cradle to the grave.6

  Despotisms abounded in Europe, too, but they were mitigated by law, by territorial partition, and within states, by the division of power between the center (the crown) and local seigneurial authority.7 Fragmentation gave rise to competition, and competition favored good care of good subjects. Treat them badly, and they might go elsewhere.

  Ecumenical empires did not fear flight, especially when, like China, they defined themselves as the center of the universe, the hearth and home of civilization, and everything outside as barbarian darkness. There was no other place to go, so that symbolic boundaries were enough, like the “willow palisade,” a low wall that ran from the Great Wall to the sea and separated China from the Mongol-Tartar lands to the north. In a poem on the subject, the Qian Long emperor makes this point: “In our erection of boundaries and regulation of people, ancient ways are preserved, / As it is enough simply to tie a rope to indicate prohibition…. Building it is the same as not having built it: / Insofar as the idea exists and the framework is there, there is no need to elaborate.”8

  The contest for power in European societies (note the plural) also gave rise to the specifically European phenomenon of the semi-autonomous city, organized and known as commune. Cities of course were to be found around the world—wherever agriculture produced sufficient surplus to sustain a population of rulers, soldiers, craftsmen, and other nonfood producers. Many of these urban nodes came to acquire great importance as markets, to say nothing of their role as administrative centers. But nothing like the commune appeared outside western Europe.9

  The essence of the commune lay, first, in its economic function: these units were “governments of the merchants, by the merchants, and for the merchants”10 and second, in its exceptional civil power: its ability to confer social status and political rights on its residents—rights crucial to the conduct of business and to freedom from outside interference. This meant everything in a hierarchical, agrarian society that held most of the population in thrall, either by personal dependence on local lords or ties to place. It made the cities gateways to freedom, holes in the tissue of bondage that covered the countryside. Stadtluft macht frei ran the medieval dictum—city air makes one free. Literally: when the count of Flanders tried to reclaim a runaway serf whom he ran across in the market of Bruges, the bourgeois simply drove him and his bully boys out of the city.

  The consequences were felt throughout the society. Under this special dispensation, cities became poles of attraction, places of refuge, nodes of exchange with the countryside. Migration to cities improved the income and status not only of the migrants but of those left behind. (But not their health. The cities were dirty, crowded, and lent themselves to easy contagion, so that it was only in-migration that sustained their numbers and enabled them to grow.) Serf emancipation in western Europe was directly linked to the rash of franchised villages and urban communes, and to the density and proximity of these gateways. Where cities and towns were few and unfree, as in eastern Europe, serfdom persisted and worsened.

  Why did rulers grant such rights to rustics and townsmen, in effect abandoning (transferring) some of their own powers? Two reasons above all. First, new land, new crops, trade, and markets brought revenue, and revenue brought power.11 (Also pleasure.) Second, paradoxically, rulers wanted to enhance their power within their own kingdom: free farmers (note that I do not say “peasants”) and townsmen (bourgeois) were the natural enemies of the landed aristocracy and would support the crown and other great lords in their struggles with local seigneurs.

  Note further that European rulers and enterprising lords who sought to grow revenues in this manner had to attract participants by the grant of franchises, freedoms, and privileges—in short, by making deals. They had to persuade them to come.12 (That was not the way in China, where rulers moved thousands and tens of thousands of human cattle and planted them on the soil, the better to grow things.) These exemptions from material burdens and grants of economic privilege, moreover,
often led to political concessions and self-government. Here the initiative came from below, and this too was an essentially European pattern. Implicit in it was a sense of rights and contract—the right to negotiate as well as petition—with gains to the freedom and security of economic activity.

  Ironically, then, Europe’s great good fortune lay in the fall of Rome and the weakness and division that ensued. (So much for the lamentations of generations of classicists and Latin teachers.) The Roman dream of unity, authority, and order (the pax Romana) remained, indeed has persisted to the present. After all, one has usually seen fragmentation as a great misfortune, as a recipe for conflict; it is no accident that European union is seen today as the cure for the wars of yesterday. And yet, in those middle years between ancient and modern, fragmentation was the strongest brake on wilful, oppressive behavior. Political rivalry and the right of exit made all the difference.13

  One other fissure helped: the split between secular and religious. Unlike Islamic societies, where religion was in principle supreme and the ideal government that of the holy men, Christianity, craving imperial tolerance, early made the distinction between God and Caesar. To each his own. This did not preclude misunderstandings and conflicts: nothing is so unstable as a dual supremacy; something’s got to give. In the end, it was the Church, and this meant yielding to Caesar what was Caesar’s and then a good part of what was God’s. Among the things that gave, homogeneous orthodoxy: where authority is divided, dissent flourishes. This may be bad for certainty and conformity, but it is surely good for the spirit and popular initiatives.

  Here, too, fragmentation made all the difference. The Church succeeded in asserting itself politically in some countries, notably those of southern Europe, not in others; so that there developed within Europe areas of potentially free thought. This freedom found expression later on in the Protestant Reformation, but even before, Europe was spared the thought control that proved a curse in Islam.

  As for China, which had no established faith and where indeed an extraordinary religious tolerance prevailed, the mandarinate and imperial court served as custodians of a higher, perfected lay morality and in that capacity defined doctrine, judged thought and behavior, and stifled dissent and innovation, even technological innovation. This was a culturally and intellectually homeostatic society: that is, it could live with a little change (indeed, could not possibly stifle all change); but as soon as this change threatened the status quo, the state would step in and restore order. It was precisely the wholeness and maturity of this inherited canon and ethic, the sense of completeness and superiority, that made China so hostile to outside knowledge and ways, even where useful.

  One final advantage of fragmentation: by decentralizing authority, it made Europe safe from single-stroke conquest. The history of empire is dotted with such coups—one or two defeats and the whole ecumenical autocracy comes tumbling down. Thus Persia after Issus (333 B.C.E.) and Gaugamela (331 B.C.E.); Rome after the sack by Alaric (410); and the Sassanian empire after Qadisiya (637) and Nehawand (642). Also Aztec Mexico and Inca Peru.

  Europe, in contrast, did not have all its eggs in one basket.* In the thirteenth century the Mongol invaders from the Asian steppe made short work of the Slavic and Khazar kingdoms of what is now Russia and Ukraine, but they still had to cut their way through an array of central European states, including the new kingdoms of their predecessors in invasion—the Poles, Lithuanians, Germans, Hungarians, and Bulgars—before they could even begin to confront the successor states of the Roman empire. This they might well have done had they not been distracted by troubles back home; but they would have paid dearly for further gains, especially in forested areas. Shortly thereafter the Turks, who had established themselves in Anatolia, began to expand into Europe, conquering the Balkans, then the lower Danube Valley, and getting twice to the walls of Vienna, capital of Germany’s eastern march. In the course of these advances, they subdued the Serbs, the Bulgars, the Croats, the Slovenes, the Albanians, the Hungarians, and sundry other peoples of that confused and quarrelsome palimpsest. But that was it; by the time they got to Vienna, they had reached the limit of their resources.†

  Part of the brittleness of these empires, of course, derived from their exploitative, surplus-sucking character and the indifference of subjects to the identity of their rulers: one despot was the same as the next; one foreign clan as arrogant and predatory as another. Why should the inhabitants of Persia care what happened to Darius at the hands of Alexander? Or what happened nine hundred years later to the Sassanian monarchy at the hands of the Arabs? Why should the tired, oppressed Roman “citizens” of the last days of empire care whether Rome fell? Or the subject tribes of Mexico, for that matter, care what happened to Moctezuma? The classical Greeks (-5th century), who saw themselves as the defenders of freedom against Asian tyranny, perceived this indifference as their secret weapon:

  Where there are kings, there must be the greatest cowards. For men’s souls are enslaved and refuse to run risks readily and recklessly to increase the power of somebody else. But independent people, taking risks on their own behalf and not on behalf of others, are willing and eager to go into danger, for they themselves enjoy the prize of victory.14

  Once the Europeans found themselves reasonably secure from outside aggression (eleventh century on), they were able, as never before and as nowhere else, to pursue their own advantage. Not that internal violence ceased from the land. The tenth and eleventh centuries were filled with baronial brigandage, eventually mitigated by popular, Church-supported revulsion and outrage that found expression in mass “peace” assemblies; and, from the top down, subdued by stronger central government allied with urban interests.15 Time and money were on the side of order. So was the diversion of brawlers to external frontiers (cf. the Crusades). The economist would say that once the exogenous shocks ended, the system could take care of its endogenous troublemakers.

  There ensued a long period of population increase and economic growth, up to the middle of the fourteenth century, when Europeans were smitten by the plague (the “Black Death”) in its bubonic and pneumonic forms and a third or more of the people died; a half when you count the losses inflicted by sequellae. That was a jolt, but not a full stop. The one hundred fifty years that followed were a period of rebuilding, further technological advance, and continued development. In particular, these centuries saw the further expansion of a civilization that now found itself stronger than its neighbors, and the beginnings of exploration and conquest overseas.

  This long multicentennial maturation (1000-1500) rested on an economic revolution, a transformation of the entire process of making, getting, and spending such as the world had not seen since the so-called Neolithic revolution. That one (c. -8000 to -3000) had taken thousands of years to work itself out. Its focus had been the invention of agriculture and the domestication of livestock, both of which had enormously augmented the energy available for work. (All economic [industrial] revolutions have at their core an enhancement of the supply of energy, because this feeds and changes all aspects of human activity.) This shift away from hunting and gathering, bringing a leap in the supply of nourishment, permitted a substantial growth of population and a new pattern of concentrated settlement. It was the Neolithic revolution that made possible towns and cities, with all that they yielded in cultural and technical exchange and enrichmentment.

  The medieval economic revolution also built on gains in the production and application of energy and concomitant increases in work. First, food supply: this was a period of innovation in the techniques of cultivation. I say innovation rather than invention because these new techniques went back earlier. Thus the wheeled plow, with deep-cutting iron share, had come in with the German invaders; but it had seen limited use in a world of limited animal power and low population density. Now it spread across Europe north of the Loire, opened up the rich river valleys, turned land reclaimed from forest and sea into fertile fields, in short did wonders wherever the
heavy, clayey soil resisted the older Roman wooden scratch plow, which had worked well enough on the gravelly soils of the Mediterranean basin.

  The wheeled plow turning heavy soil called for animals to match. We have already had occasion to speak of these big, stall-fed oxen such as were found nowhere else, and these large dray horses, more powerful if not stronger than the ox. These living, mobile engines offered a great advantage in a land-rich, labor-scarce economy. For time too was scarce: agricultural work has peaks of activity at sowing and harvest when one must seize good weather and get the seed in or crops out. Especially was this true of European communal agriculture, where scattered and intermingled holdings and open fields made for much to-and-fro and one peasant’s haste was the haste of all his neighbors. Strong, quick animals could make all the difference, and cultivators pooled resources to get the right livestock.

  Along with these superior techniques went, as both cause and effect, a more intensive cultivation, in particular, a shift from a two-field (one half left fallow every year) to a three-field system of crop rotation (winter grain, spring grain, and one third fallow). This yielded a gain of one third in land productivity (one sixth of total cultivable land, but one third of the half previously under cultivation), which further contributed to the ability to support livestock, which increased the supply of fertilizer, which nourished yields, and so on in ascending cycle. Given the character of land distribution and the collective use of draft animals, this critical change called for strong communal leadership and cooperation, made easier by example and results.

  How much of this was response to population pressure and how much a stimulus to increase is hard to say. No doubt both. But it would seem that over time, population began to outstrip the means of sustenance, because these centuries also saw a great effort to increase arable, whether by forest clearing (assarts) or reclamation of land from water, by diking, drainage, and pumping. All these call for enormous energy and capital, and their success testifies not only to private and collective initiative but to the ingenuity of a society that was learning to substitute machines for animal and human power. In particular, the windmill, tireless and faithful, was the key to the successful pumping of fens and polders. It was the windmill that made Holland.