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

by David S. Landes

  * Last words of Francisco Solano Lopez, marshal-president of the republic of Paraguay, killed in the final action of the War of the Triple Alliance, 1864-70.

  * The three dictatorial rulers and their dates were Gaspar Rodriguez Francia (1814-40); Carlos Antonio Lopez (1840-62); and the latter’s son, Francisco Solano Lopez (1862-70).

  * One must not exaggerate: one witness says that under a third of the cannon were operative; and one or two guns went back to the seventeenth century—Meyer, The River and the People, pp. 65-67. Meyer relies here on the publications of contemporary observers, among them Richard F. Burton (him of The Arabian Nights), Letters from the Battlefields of Paraguay (London, 1870); and on the novel Humaita, the second of a “historical trilogy, written in novelistic fashion” by Manuel Galvez, entitled Escenas de la guerra del Paraguay.

  * Lest one think the Chinese strange, compare the rule in early modern Spain that all kneel when the wafer and wine of the Eucharist passed in procession.

  * Latest move: the English CD-ROM, pronounced say-day-rom in French, will now be cédérom, pronounced say-day-rom in French.

  * The Jurchen Tartars (Manchus) who overthrew the Ming dynasty, replacing it with their own Qing line, opposed Chinese musketry with bows and arrows. Yet so ineffective were these muskets, presumably because they took so long to load and were hard to move about, that they were more handicap than advantage. See Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, I, 68.

  † Students of Chinese technology and science, most notably Joseph Needham and his team, have made much of Chinese priority in discovery and invention, pushing the origins of important techniques and devices far back, well before their appearance in Europe. They see this quite properly as a sign of exceptional creativity and precocity, but they might better ask why the subsequent retreat and loss.

  * The pressure actually came from Cantonese merchants, who feared losing the monopoly of foreign trade to such useful foreigners and bribed ministers at court to cancel the project—Wakeman, The Great Enterprise, I, 77, and n. 148.

  * And this in spite of considerable effort to collect knowledge in encyclopedias. One such project, really an anthology, may well have been the biggest of its kind ever attempted: 800,000 pages—Spence, Search for Modern China, chapter 6. But a plethora of encyclopedias is a bad sign: like still photographs, they aim to fix knowledge at a point of time. They are useful as reference works, especially for historians, but they can impede free inquiry.

  * From a poem, early nineteenth century, by the son of the prime minister, himself a high state dignitary, quoted in Taton, ed., General History, II, 593. Of course, when the time came, one could find support in Confucianism for other positions. One can quote sacred writ to one’s purpose. Which does not stop people from using it to bad purpose.

  * The picture is as given in Marco Polo’s Travels, Book III, ch. 2. Polo himself never visited Japan.

  * Toyotomi Hideyoshi, “chancellor” (dajo daijin) and effective ruler of Japan from 1586 to 1598, thought it reasonable to envisage the conquest not only of Korea and China but also India. The Japanese clearly had no accurate idea of the size and population of these places. But who knows? Centuries later, some Japanese still saw all of this as a legitimate field of conquest. Writing of the Philippines in the sixteenth century, Yosoburo Takekoshi, author of Economic Aspects of the History of the Civilization of Japan (1930), expressed disappointment (1,482): “Originally the Japanese occupied the Islands before Spain, and as they had thus the right of previous residence the sovereignty should have been theirs, whereas Spain acquired them.” No wonder the Europeans liked the Japanese: they thought alike.

  † Many of the Japanese ideographs have dual readings, one in the native Japanese, the other in a Chinese derivative; thus hara-kiri and seppuku. Others have only the “Chinese” reading. The adoption of these signs and meanings added enormously to Japanese vocabulary, particularly in abstract concepts.

  * As reported by Father Martinez, then bishop of lapan. In a letter of 1602, Martinez lamented the bellicose penchant and intentions of the Spanish: their “religious preaching is merely an instrument of conquest…. All the calamities that the Church is now exposed to have their beginning in the arrival of these clerics from Luzon’”—Flisseeff, Hideyoshi, chapter 15.

  * The more prudent ones became teachers of swordsmanship and martial arts or of Confucianism. Others became warrior-farmers (goshi). Still others joined their masters in death—so many that the practice was forbidden in 1663.

  † Oishi, “The Bakuhan System,” chapter 2. These ronin, always ready to avenge wrongs done their masters, were like a time bomb, threatening revenge from beyond the grave. The most famous such case is that of the “Forty-seven Ronin,” whose cunning and bloody revenge (1702) is still remembered. They were ordered by the government to commit mass hara-kiri for having disturbed the peace and broken the law; but they remain heroes. Their grave in Tokyo is a much-visited shrine, and the Japanese have made literally hundreds of films singing their deeds.

  * In some instances, these expenses consumed over half the revenues of the han. An additional expense was the cost of rebuilding after fires—a perennial threat in a city of wood and paper houses. One domain had to rebuild its compound sixteen times. In the absence of insurance, it should have learned from experience and built differently. Cf. Nakamura and Shimbo, “Wfiy Was Economic Achievement…?”, chapter 1.

  † A few were kept in public arsenals, under seal, just as a few cannon were mounted in seaports to fend off unwanted arrivals. On this story, see Perrin, Giving Up the Gun.

  * These loans often began as advances on anticipated rice revenues, converted into long-term loans at 10 to 20 percent per year—Miyamoto, “Emergence of National Market,” pp. 300-01.

  † In the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the shogun Yoshimune issued a number of decrees freeing samurai of their debts secured by their rice stipends if the price of rice fell and barring lawsuits over debt. Merchants began dunning their debtors personally, picketing their residences and stopping their litters and horses in the street. Some posted a paper protest flag in front of the house or on the gate—a practice that the decree of 1729 found “most outrageous” and inadmissible—Takekoshi, Economic Aspects, II, 362-66.

  * The inventor of the term, now commonly found in Japanese academic discourse, is Professor Akira Hayami.

  * The Tokugawa had confiscated gold and silver mines previously controlled by the domains.

  * They had apparently been so called at one time, and some adherents of rangaku were now happy to recall this by way of discrediting Confucian learning. The aim now was not simply to say that the Chinese were not better than others; they were worse. That is the way of debate.

  * Bringing equal hours and the Gregorian calendar. Even so, it remained customary to number years by the dates of the emperor’s reign, a practice that has not been entirely abandoned over a century later. For foreigners, it makes for a crash course in Japanese political history.

  † Minimum four years at first, six years from 1907. Given the difficulties of Japanese script, three or four years were needed to impart literacy.

  ** Exceptions were made initially for married men and only sons. One effect was to encourage early marriage.

  * These symbols held immense importance to a society that had systematically cultivated its particularities as virtues. Cf. the petition to the emperor in 1875 of Shimazu Hisamitsu, member of a powerful Satsuma clan, asking him to ban the wearing of Western clothes, among other things. The memorial was rejected, and Hisamitsu left Tokyo to sulk and plot. Cf. Brown, “Okubo Toshimichi,” chapter 13, n. 21.

  † The Home Ministry was concerned not only with police and public order but also with economic development, working through its Bureau for the Promotion of Industry.

  * And yet exquisitely ingenious. The Japanese had to cope with special constraints on water use, in particular the inviolable rights of riparian cultivators to water for irrigation. The
answer was found in anchoring boats in midstream, with water wheels that turned spinning machinery aboard—in effect, small floating factories—Minami, Power Revolution.

  † And yet hand spinning survived in Japan far longer than elsewhere. One reason was the industriousness and patience of Japanese women (more on this later). Another was the invention of tube (gara) spinning in 1876 by a Shinto priest, Tatsuchi Gaun. This technique consisted of packing raw cotton into tinplate tubes, one inch in diameter and about six inches long, then rotating the tube while winding the cotton on to a spindle and thereby imparting twist. It was in effect a poor man’s throstle or flyer and testified to Japanese ingenuity under capital scarcity. The gara technique increased the daily output of a woman spinner from 40-50 to 650 monme—some fifteen times. Even so, hand spinning could not compete once water wheels were installed, many of them on spinning boats. Output of this primitive branch continued to grow into the 1930s, partly owing to low capital costs and low wages, partly by making coarse yarns for use in carpets, blankets, flannel, soles for tabi (Japanese socks, for use with geta sandals), and the like.

  * One exception: chemical manufacture, not yet perceived as crucial to national power. But one should not expect Japanese economic policy to be complete and consistent. On the typically overoptimistic judgment of Japanese policy, see Okimoto, Between MITI and the Market.

  * The Marxist term is one of the most misleading and abused words in the vocabulary of social science. It refers to a universal and inescapable condition of wage labor, whether in capitalist or socialist economies, hence has no meaning as a distinctive phenomenon; and in its attempt (pretension) to quantify a rate of exploitation by dividing wages by product (wage hours by total hours), it anomalously makes progressive, innovative capitalists—those who enhance labor productivity by investment in equipment and plant—the more exploitative for their enterprise.

  * The story comes to us in semifictional form: the prose poem Fuki no to (Bog Rhubarb Shoots) by Yamashiro Tomoe, a left-wing militant for agrarian reform, married to a Marxist labor organizer and imprisoned from 1940 to 1945 for “harboring dangerous thoughts.” It was in prison that she apparently learned the story of the woman recounted above, which I take from the version of Hane, in Peasants, Rebels, and Outcasts, pp. 85 ff. This last is a very important book, which deserves more attention from students of Japanese economic history.

  † Again, the Keian edict: “Peasants must rise early and cut grass before cultivating the fields. In the evening they are to make straw rope or straw bags…. The husband must work in the fields, the wife must work at the loom. Both must do night work”—Leupp, Servants, Shophands, chapter 1.

  * On the importance of cleanliness for the Japanese and the urgent need for European visitors to learn these habits (“one will accept no failing in this regard”), see the strictures of the Jesuit Alessandro Valignano in his advice of 1583 to his brother missionaries—Valignano, Les Jesuites au Japon, chapter 14.

  * Since the burakumin are indistinguishable from other Japanese, they have tended over time to pass into the larger society, although many continue to live in slum and crime neighborhoods. To this day, Japanese will employ detective agencies and genealogists to check on the possible burakumin ancestry of a prospective spouse. To counter this, authorities have closed certain official records. See N. D. Kristof, “Japan’s Invisible Minority,” N.T. Times, 30 November 1995, p. A-18.

  * Reading, Japan, chapter 4. Japan does not have the oil, but has the money to buy it. Russia does have the oil, but it does not have the money to install oil burners; or to pay the coal miners for that matter. As of December 1996, wages were seven months in arrears.

  * Some readers will recall as counterevidence the French reluctance to leave Vietnam and then Algeria. True enough, but the French had (and have) a higher pride quotient than other Europeans. And once the issue was settled, the French and other European colons cleared out of Algeria as fast as they could.

  * Cf. Charnay, Traumatismes musulmans, chapter 20. The Christian campaign in the Gulf was seen as a reprise of the crusader hatred for the Islamic spiritual heritage.

  † I exclude from this comparison the phenomenon of forced conversion, which obviously makes no demands on faith or preparation.

  * Quoted in N. Chaudhuri, Thy Hand, pp. 674-76, who notes that much of this counterpride was encouraged by romantic orientalists. But no such encouragement was necessary: this was a not uncommon response where European arrogance encountered older civilizations brought low by history. Cf. the lessons of Prince Tewfik, son of the Egyptian Khedive Ismail, which taught him in the 1860s that everything in Western science and technology—steam engine, railroad, etc.—came in the first place from Islam and the Arabs—Landes, Bankers and Pashas, chapter 20.

  * The expression has since been reduced to metaphor; a tête de Turc is now a butt of mockery and jest.

  * Not everyone would agree with this comparison. Eric Jones, European Miracle, for example, thinks Moghul India was easier, largely on the basis of population (survival) records. But these are incomplete, and it may well be that Ottoman subjects were less docile and squeezable. In any event, it is not easy to distinguish between oppressions. I think the Moghuls were worse; it may well have been the Ottomans.

  * The word is Jones’s, European Miracle, chapter 12. That was the Christian perspective. For the Muslims, conversion to Islam was a sign of sincerity.

  † Very different, then, from open recruitment of talent from different German states into the Prussian bureaucracy. At the origin of German national identity was a common culture and the pride that went with it. The political frontiers were accidental. The Ottoman empire brought together a diversity of cultures, and the divisions were anything but superficial or accidental.

  * The janissaries were originally conscripted by the devshirme and raised as Muslims; they also included young war captives. Later on, Turks were admitted to the corps; in between campaigns they were allowed to work at trades or serve as police.

  † The Turkish version of Stamboul. The Turkish language does not like to begin a word with two successive consonants; so Stamboul becomes Istanbul and Smyrna becomes Izmir.

  ** The Bey of Algiers used a similar trap to eliminate his rivals. Ditto for Saddam Hussein of Iraq. It is precisely the force of obligations of hospitality that render such tactics effective.

  * In the earlier discussion of China, I expressed surprise and skepticism that the Chinese had managed to forget earlier superior technologies. But such retrogression is clearly possible. The question is, how and why.

  * At the time, the only finer cotton came from a few islands off the coast of Georgia and the Carolinas, the so-called sea island cotton. Little enough of this was ever grown (by 1835 the Egyptian crop was three times as large), and the crop has shrunk over time almost to nothing, as hotels, summer homes, and tourism have taken over these sandbars. Egyptian cotton today is to all intents and purposes the best in the world. On the early history of Jumel, see Levy-Leboyer, Les banques europeennes, chapter 13.

  † Issawi, “Economic Development,” chapter 22 f., says both, though he describes the economic objective as perhaps unwitting and possibly deliberate.

  * But Lévy-Leboyer, Les banques européennes, chapter 13 and n. 31, based on reports to the British Foreign Office, says that Egyptian cottons could sell only in Egypt, and in Syria after the Egyptian conquest.

  * “At first no persons were employed in the factories but black slaves from Darfour and Kordofan, who displayed great intelligence, and quickly acquired a competent knowledge of the business; but so great a change of life, co-operating with the peculiar unhealthiness of the occupation, gradually thinned their ranks, so that the Pasha was shortly compelled to have recourse to the Fellahs”—Saint-John, Egypt of Mohammed Ali, pp. 410-11.

  † Others fled the country, in spite of efforts to close the frontiers. Issawi, “Economic Development,” chapter 22, attributes the flight to hard times and military conscri
ption. But labor conscription may well have been worse.

  ** “Of the twenty-three or twenty-four cotton-mills existing in Egypt, there is not one which has not, at various periods, been accidentally or designedly set on fire”—Saint-John, Egypt, chapter 24.

  * Saint-John, ibid., chapter 24, speaks of “the peculiar nature of dust, consisting of fine silicious atoms, which the most compact building, and the best glazed windows could never prevent from collecting in great quantities.”

  * European and American university towns are a chosen mecca for student high flyers from the Middle East. In theory, they are going to school; what better? In fact, they support the local clubs, dens, dives, casinos. See Michele McPhee, “The Euro-Brats of Boston,” Boston Globe, 20 September 1995, chapter.5. To judge from the contents, the title is a misnomer; but it is “politically correct.”