The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
Page 14
In a penetrating analysis, the biologist-historian Jared Diamond asks why the Incas behaved so naively—by our standards, stupidly. His explanation: the difference in cunning and experience between a literate people and an illiterate. The Spanish were “heirs to a huge body of knowledge about human behavior and history” the Incas had “no personal experience of any other invaders from overseas…had not even heard (or read) of similar threats to anyone else, anywhere else, anytime previously in history.”11
But the Incas should have known themselves.
The peoples of Peru resisted longer and better than the Mexicans; indeed, some would say that this insurgency is not yet ended. Pizarro seized Atahualpa in 1532, but not until 1539, when the Inca army of Charcas surrendered and Manco Inca took refuge at Vilcabamba, was Spanish control reasonably secure. Even then, the Inca government-in-exile promoted rebellion from the mountains, and not until 1572 could Viceroy Francisco de Toledo put an end to this resistance. Inca tenacity reflected in part the lesser effect of European diseases on the Peruvian population. The reason is not clear, but where Mexican population fell by over 90 percent in the century after arrival of the Spanish, from about 25 million to between 1 and 2 million, Peruvian numbers shrank by about one fifth.12
In spite of occasional successes, these efforts to throw out the invader were unavailing. The Spanish had technology, discipline, and organization on their side, an experience of war that made the natives look like amateurs. They had the help of collaborators, among them numerous converts to a Christianity elastic in its tolerance for nonsanguinary pagan practices but uncompromising in its commitment to Spanish rule.13 They were backed by the resources of a distant but powerful empire and by a seemingly endless flow of soldiers of fortune. And they wisely turned older structures of authority to their service. The heirs of the Inca became a hereditary, idle noble caste, increasingly intermarried with Spanish dignitaries. Their descendants, some of them active in business and government, constitute today the high society of Lima and Quito. The former tribal headmen (caciques) continued to administer locally. They were given special status and exemptions from labor burdens and taxes; from 1619, their children were educated in special Jesuit schools. Some of these children would become nostalgic annalists of an old regime seen through tears of regret and sympathy; some became eloquent spokesmen for a grossly exploited population. (Such memorials for a lost world found more resonance among Europeans than with the largely illiterate native population.) Any lingering protest usually took the form of petitions, duly submitted within the rules and hierarchy of Spanish ascendancy. The Inca empire was history.14
“He Who Sees All”: The Incas before Pizarro
The Incas left no written records—they did not know writing. We must rely, then, on archeological remains, substantially reduced by a Spanish fury for gold and silver that spared little, and on the romanticized accounts collected from the conquered, or written by their descendants, or by some of the early Spanish visitors to the area.15 On the whole, these sources agree on the essentials.
The Inca empire was the biggest ever established in the New World. It stretched from what is now Colombia in the north (2N.) to the area around today’s Santiago in the south (35S.), over 4,000 kilometers; and from the coast to the eastern side of the Andean watershed and what is now the Bolivian plateau. Its limits, as for the Aztecs in Mexico, were set partly by nature—the Incas were never comfortable in heavy forest—and partly by the opposition of such recalcitrant tribes as the Araucanians. These last long made humiliating resistance to the Spanish and yielded only to repeating weapons in the nineteenth century.16
The size of the Inca empire astonishes for the barriers to land travel and communication. South American valleys and hills run from the mountains down to the ocean, cutting the routes from north to south; and these natural obstacles were aggravated by the absence of the wheel (all porterage was by llamas or humans) and a failure to develop coastal shipping.* The secret lay in communication by runners and porters. All along the routes of the empire, about 1.5 Spanish leagues (about 4.5 miles) apart, were pairs of small hutments, shelters for couriers, one on each side of the road. Each runner looked only one way, waiting to relay to the next stage the messages and packages that might come at any moment. The couriers were trained from early age to do this work, and by running around the clock, managed to average about 50 leagues a day (some 150 miles!). The chronicler Bernabe Cobo tells us that from Lima to Cuzco, some 140 leagues of bad road, took three days.17 About a century later, the horse-drawn Spanish mail took twelve to thirteen days.† In the eighteenth century, coach service New York to Boston, over two hundred miles of flat terrain, took a week. (Of course wagons carry far more than pack animals and porters.)
The Inca emperor, then, could remain in close and rapid touch with the farthest reaches of the kingdom and impose his absolute, uniform rule over a highly diverse society. He was seen as divine. All land was in principle his, and he in turn graciously lent it to communal groups in return for tribute in kind and, above all, labor, the so-called mita. This forced labor did road and water work, served in the army and in the courier post, hauled goods and built official structures (palaces to storehouses), collected and gave out the things owed and bestowed. All garments were Inca issue. The ordinary commoner, on the occasion of his marriage, would draw one garment for everyday wear, another for holidays, and a working cape for inclement weather. When these became worn, he could go back for more. Aside from corvee labor, people had their own tasks. Inca society was something like an anthill: everyone worked, even the little children, from the age of five on. The women spun thread while walking, and the story has it that the roads were built smooth to keep them from tripping; they were too busy to watch their feet. Except for local barter, trade was reserved to the authorities.
Some scholars have called the system socialist, in that so much of the social product was delivered to the center for ultimate redistribution, and that may be a reasonable appellation; but the system was in form and effect not different from those prevailing in other aristocratic despotisms, with their “prime divider” separating a small elite from the large, relatively undifferentiated mass. Like these, Inca society had its leveling, homogenizing aspects: rough and humble in subsistence and appearance, just about everyone learned to eat and wait by squatting on haunches. The rulers were set apart by dress and furniture and diet—among other things, the right to “turn on” by chewing coca. Common folk, to be sure, managed to get hold of this reserved substance; they could not have performed their toilsome tasks without it. But pure pleasure was something else again, and informers and inspectors swarmed, ready to follow their noses into houses and pots at any hour of day or night and enforce the exclusivity of these privileges. What is a privilege after all, if everyone can enjoy it?
The eyes of the Inca were everywhere. The word for governor was tukrikuk, he who sees all.
In the short century of its existence, the Inca empire did much to unify the peoples under its rule and to establish a common language, quechua, still spoken by the Andean population—as Che Guevara learned when he tried to mobilize them in Spanish for the revolutionary cause. Under this Inca “peace,” however, all was not order and harmony. The Indians seem to have been patient and obedient, but recourse to alcoholic beverages and drugs is always a bad sign. Some of this may be blamed on what we would see as loveless child rearing: the baby was never held, even for nursing. In any event, the culture deprived the ordinary person of initiative, autonomy, and personality.
8
Bittersweet Isles
Once the Spanish conquistadors found the mainland empires with their treasures and people, they lost interest in the Caribbean. They stayed long enough in those islands to sweep up what gold they could, whether accumulated ornaments or placer tailings, and wiped out most of the natives in the process. They needed food and found the local starch staple, manioc, noxious and inedible.* Grain cultivation never entered their mind: the
Indians were wanted for mining, and the Spanish had not come to be farmers. So they imported food from Europe—very expensive—and brought in cattle to pasture where men had once hunted and fished. In those early years, the conquistadors went hungry; “on the edge of famine,” says Pierre Chaunu. In the next stage they became the biggest meat eaters in history.†
The Spanish posted small garrisons and maintained naval stations to protect the treasure that moved through these islands from the continent to Europe. But aside from a few administrators in Cuba, Santo Domingo (Hispaniola), Jamaica, and Puerto Rico (the Greater Antilles), they went on to settle the mainland, to live like dons and hidalgos of Castile. Thereafter they gave little thought to the economic possibilities of these sun-drenched pieces of paradise. To quote Chaunu again: “Spanish colonization is premised on the Indian.” With the Arawaks wiped out and the Caribs unwilling, que d’îles inutiles! What useless islands!1
In retrospect, the Spanish passion for gold was a big mistake. The islands were there for the using, and Spain’s failure was Europe’s opportunity. Columbus had understood. When he did not find the gold he had hoped for, he wrote his sovereigns that these islands were made for sugar. At the time, he was trying to hold their interest, to justify his voyage. And he was right. Columbus had learned about sugar cane in the Madeiras and Canaries. He was in effect recommending the continuation of a plant migration, and the agriculture that went with it, that had begun centuries before in South Asia and was as much driven by soil exhaustion as drawn by consumer demand.
The sugar leap from the African-Atlantic islands to the New World came not with the Spanish but with the Portuguese, who early on planted cane in Brazil, and the Dutch, who served as merchants, refiners,2 and financiers of the Brazilian crop. The Dutch seized the northeast coast (Pernambuco) for some years (1630-43) during the period of Luso-Hispanic union, and learned about soil and cane; even before they were expelled, they were looking for fresh cane fields. This search turned them north to the nearest weak point in the enemy armor, the Lesser Antilles. There they seized a few islands (Aruba, St. Martin, Curacao, Santa Lucia), “mere crumbs of land.” They also planted themselves on the South American mainland (Surinam), where they established a few plantations on virgin soil. These did poorly. The Dutch proved better at moving sugar and slaves than growing the one and working the other.
Meanwhile the English were already jostling them, occupying St. Christopher (St. Kitts) in 1624, Nevis in 1628, and other tiny isles. The best of these early prizes was Barbados (1627), because it was essentially uninhabited—theirs for taking and making. Upwind and well to the east of the other Antilles, it was rarely visited by either Caribs or Spanish. Jamaica, far bigger than any of these, came later (1655). It had been turned over by the Spanish crown to eight noble families, who were unwilling to share it and unable to develop it; so that when the English took the island, whites and blacks together counted no more than 3,000.3 In fact, Jamaica was a hellhole of sandflies, gnats, cockroaches, and malarial mosquitoes; but then, bugs were everywhere in the Caribbean, either too big to be believed or too small to be seen. Even the smallest were maddeningly audible and excruciatingly venomous. Gentlefolk put the legs of their tables and beds in bowls of water to keep the crawlers grounded.4
The English initially saw these Caribbean islands as settler colonies, like the east coast of North America. Homesteaders came in number, attracted by cheap and fertile land, and grew tobacco, indigo, cotton. (The tobacco, singularly poor, made the lowest prices on the London market.) Indentured servants came with them, ready to work a few years for someone else until they could farm on their own. By 1640, little more than a decade after first occupation, the population of Barbados was said to be over 30,000, equal to that of Massachusetts and Virginia combined, 200 to the square mile.5
After them, however, came the sugar planters, inspired by Dutch example and even financed in part by Hollanders; and sugar swallowed all the rest. No commercial crop paid more. And no commercial crop cost more: heavy capital expenditure for crushing mills, boilers, tanks, and stills (for rum), and a large estate to match. The biggest items of expenditure were livestock, which might multiply, and slave labor, which typically did not. The slave population of the Caribbean could be maintained only by continuing imports.
The success of the sugar plantations was the ruin of the small and middling tobacco and cotton farms. The resulting concentration of landholding made indenture less attractive: what was the point of laboring for years if one could not count on a homestead at expiration of contract? Besides, sugar work was uniquely demanding and disagreeable, and too often the planters treated their servants like curs, beating them until the blood ran. Many jumped their indenture and ran away, to try their luck on other islands or join the buccaneers. Many “died of hunger and hardship in this pitiful dispersal.”6
The French followed close behind the English. They concentrated at first on Guadeloupe and Martinique (1635), which had not attracted the English because they were full of those nasty Caribs, who sprang ambushes and used poisoned arrows. Unlike the Aztecs, the Caribs tried to kill their adversaries. The French paid dearly for their temerity, but in the end they got two of the largest islands in the Lesser Antilles, with fertile soil and good harbors, and these are still French today, départements d’outre-mer. (Sometimes these tiny islands were shared, as is St. Martin to this day. Make room for me too. Even those traditional enemies the English and French lived at times side by side, joining forces to defend against the common Spanish foe.)
The big French prize, however, like Jamaica for the English, was the western end of Hispaniola (Saint-Domingue for the French, now Haiti). The eastern half remained Spanish. The island lends itself to this division: the two ends are separated by a high mountain barrier. Over the years Saint-Domingue had become a favorite hideout of flibustiers (freebooters) and maroons (runaway slaves). Their very presence was a bad example and their predatory habits—Chaunu calls them “an international crime association of French origin”—had drawn several Spanish punitive expeditions, to no avail.7 (These people could shoot back.) The French made allies of these troublemakers and with them simply took over that part of the island. The Spanish stayed far away.
Saint-Domingue was the last of the great sugar isles to come into production, and being last, was the most fertile and profitable. Sugar spawned enormous fortunes, in France and on the island; paid for high living, beautiful estates, handsome coaches, and gaudily liveried (though generally barefoot) black servants. (The French peasantry also went around barefoot.) So profitable was this plantation enterprise that Adam Smith, who knew the English Indies better than the French, took it to be evidence of French superiority: “…the genius of their government,” he wrote, “naturally introduces a better management of their negro slaves.”8 He could not have been more wrong. In 1790 the slaves of Saint-Domingue, encouraged by revolutionary doctrines from France, rose in revolt and established the second new nation of the New World. The French tried to return and failed, defeated more by disease than by bullets. By the time the guns were laid down and the steel sheathed, every white person in Haiti was dead, from the old in bed to the suckling babe. Exception was made for a handful of doctors.
It took a lot of work to grow sugar cane, cut it, crush it, and refine the juice: gang labor under a hot sky; dangerous, hurried round-the-clock pressing, boiling, and skimming before the crop spoiled. In the fields, men and women did the work of animals. No plows, few tools, everything by hand. The idea was to make work and keep the hands busy, because idleness invited trouble. In the sugar mill, the workers fed the stalks into rollers; the smallest inattention, catch a hand, a finger, and the rest would follow. The boilers had their own small hell. Stir carefully: a splash of syrup, and the pain was excruciating. “If a Boyler get any part into the scalding sugar, it sticks like Glew, or Birdlime, and ’tis hard to save either Limb or Life.”9
The sugar planters wanted to hire white men, but white men, that i
s, free men, would not do such work—at least not at wages that the planter could afford to pay. The Spanish would have compelled Indians to the task, but in the Caribbean the Indians were gone. In Mexico and Peru, Indians were bound to encomenderos; they were not for hire on the open market. Insofar as they were forced to labor, they were wanted above all in the mines. Even so, some Indians were pressed into service on the sugar plantations of Vera Cruz. They did not do well. Their masters worked them to death—when they did not die of disease.
The answer to labor needs, in the islands as on the mainland, was to bring in African slaves, by the tens of thousands. Even Bartolomé de Las Casas, that paragon of clerical humanism, distinguished between Indians and Africans in this regard. He wanted to encourage white immigration while protecting the natives, who were already dying in large numbers and whom he saw as a special responsibility: he wanted to save their souls, because they had souls. He was apparently not sure that blacks did. Each settler, he proposed, should be allowed to bring in a dozen black slaves, that the Indians might be spared.10 Needless to say, such a modest proposal soon proved grossly inadequate. For one thing, Africans also died of disease and mistreatment.
How many Africans were imported into the New World? Estimates have grown over the years by way of aggravating the crime, but it is not unreasonable to speak of some 10 million over the course of three centuries. And these are just the survivors of a deadly traffic. The track from point of capture or sale in the interior to port of embarkation was marked by the bones and shackles of those who died along the way—up to half, guesses a leading student of the subject.11 That was just the beginning. On the coast, the captives were kept under conditions that would undermine the strongest constitution. Then, because it took time for slavers to select a full cargo of apparently healthy bodies, large numbers were held on board and died before the ship even set sail. The so-called middle passage, a transoceanic swim in tight-packed filth, mucous, vomit, and diarrheic excrement, was a killer. Yet the trader was afraid to allow his cargo to leave their fetid quarters and come above deck—they might jump overboard. To lose one in seven was considered normal; one in three or four, excessive but pardonable.