Geographical influences on economic development

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The following is from Thomas Sowell. Race and Culture. pp. 235 - 242

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Geographical Influences

While the influence of the geographical settings in which peoples evolve has been widely recognized to one degree or another, there is a great difference between saying that natural resources affect economic development and saying that navigable waterways affect the size of the cultural universe. The difference is between focussing on the external opportunities available to a given people and focussing on what cultural resources those people have within themselves as a result of the setting in which they have evolved.

Geographical influences do not mean geographical determinism, for however much the contours of the land, its mineral wealth, the availability of navigable waterways, and the climatic and epidemiological environment may limit the options of people developing in a given geographical region, these people make choices within those limits, and the intrusions of the ideas, technologies, emigrants, or armies from other regions add to the complexity of the process and the uncertainty of the ultimate outcome. Nevertheless, geographical factors are among many other factors which virtually preclude equal economic and technological progress among peoples from the many and varied regions of the world, for the various continents and regions are by no means equally supplied with the factors that make for either economic progress or cultural integration.

It is relatively easy to understand the historic implications of the vast deposits of petroleum in the Middle East, the iron ore deposits of Western Europe, the tin in Malaysia, or the gold in South Africa. What may not be so obvious, but of equal or greater importance, is the crucial importance of navigable waterways to transport these and other natural resources, and the products resulting from them, to different regions of the Earth—creating wider cultural interactions in the process.

The enormous importance of rivers and harbors to economic and cultural development is indicated by the fact that nearly all the world's great cities have developed on rivers or harbors. This reflects in part the vast differences in costs between transporting goods by water and transporting them by land. For example, in mid-nineteenth-century America, before the transcontinental railroad was built, San Francisco could be reached both faster and cheaper from a port in China than it could be reached over land from the banks of the Missouri. In the city of Tiflis in the Caucasus, it was cheaper to import kerosene from Texas, across 8,000 miles of water, than to get it over land from Baku, less than 400 miles away. In Africa, even in the twentieth century, the cost of shipping an automobile from Djibouti to Addis Ababa (342 miles) has been estimated as being the same as the cost of shipping it from Detroit to Djibouti (7,386 miles). Similarly, in nineteenth-century Japan, before roads were improved and railroads built, it was said to cost as much to transport goods 50 miles over land within Japan as to transport them from Europe to Japan. Huge transportation costs shrink the economic universe, severely limiting how far given goods can be carried, and severely limiting which goods have sufficient value condensed into a small size and weight (gold or diamonds, for example) to be feasible to transport over land for substantial distances. These same high transportation costs shrink the cultural universe as well.

The various continents and regions of the world are by no means equally supplied with rivers and harbors. Although Africa is more than twice the size of Europe, the African coastline is shorter than the European coastline, whose twists and turns produce harbors and inlets all around the continent, while the relatively smooth coastline of Africa offers far fewer places where ships can anchor in a harbor, sheltered from the rough waters of the open sea. Moreover, there are entire nations in Africa—Libya and South Africa, for example—without a single navigable river. This reflects in part the low and irregular rainfall over many parts of the continent, filling rivers and streams to a navigable depth only intermittently. Moreover, just as rainfall patterns limit the navigability of rivers with respect to time, so the many rapids and waterfalls of Africa limit the distances over which rivers can be navigated, even when they have sufficient water. Because many of Africa's rapids and waterfalls occur not far inland, even large rivers may provide no practicable access for large-scale commerce from the sea. The Zaire River, for example, is 2,900 miles long and has a volume of water second only to that of the Amazon, but it has rapids and waterfalls near the sea, thus preventing oceangoing ships from reaching one of the largest networks of navigable rivers in the world. Thus, the Zaire River and its tributaries are prevented from being the kinds of navigable waterways which have played so important a role in the development of other lands.

Across Europe and Asia—and, later, the Western Hemisphere and Australia—man's dependence on waterways has been demonstrated again and again in the sites of leading cities, from London to Bombay and from Sydney to Rio de Janeiro. These ports became not only economic centers but also cultural centers and centers of progress in general, as cities have led the progress of civilization. Africa's most famous civilization likewise arose, thousands of years ago, within a few miles on either side of its longest navigable river, the Nile. The two largest cities on the continent today—Cairo and Alexandria—are both on the Nile. However, a general lack of navigable waterways to facilitate economic and cultural interchanges has in Africa been reflected in a general dearth of large cities, on what remains the world's least urbanized continent. Except for the Nile, Africa's rivers that are even seasonally navigable tend to be concentrated in equatorial West Africa. Here too, larger, more advanced, and more enduring polities were established than in many other regions of the continent. The general importance of waterways may be suggested by the fact that, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, four-fifths of the world's population lived in coastlands. The modern development of artificially powered, non-waterborne transportation—motor vehicles, railroads, and airplanes—reduced that coastal concentration but, as late as 1975, two-thirds of the world's population still lived in coastal regions. In Africa, the coastal plain averages only 20 miles in width and is often backed by steep upsweeps of land which make road and rail construction difficult, as well as making Africa's rivers plunge over plateau edges.

Geography is not all-determining, but it can set the limits of human possibilities narrowly or widely. For much of sub-Saharan Africa, it has set those limits narrowly. Not only were economic activities restricted by the high cost of transportation; more fundamentally, human interactions in general were narrowly circumscribed, resulting in such cultural barriers as numerous language differences and tribalism. Although Africans are less than 10 percent of the human race, their many languages are one-third of all the languages in the world, one index of their cultural fragmentation. The great number of languages and dialects in Africa, besides being a symptom of this cultural fragmentation, constitute as well a severe handicap in themselves, inhibiting effective economic or political consolidation of numerous separate peoples. Waterways extend the boundaries of cultural interchange, but in much of Africa they did not extend those cultural boundaries very far. For the peoples of sub-Saharan Africa, the most formidable barrier to cultural interchanges with the other peoples and cultures of the world was the Sahara Desert itself, which is larger than the continental United States. It was not until the second millennium of the Christian era that the central rain forest of Africa and the land south of it were much influenced by the civilizations which had arisen in other parts of the wor1d—and, until the sixteenth century, the influence of these civilizations was conveyed only through Islamic intermediaries.

While the geographical influences that affect the cultural development of a people may attract less attention than such direct influences on economic development as mineral resources, land fertility, and the like, these latter are by no means always as decisive as they might seem. For example, an eighteenth-century observer in Chile made an assessment that would apply to many other countries in other parts of the world:

. . here it never thunders nor hails. The country is laden with mines of all the known metals, the climate is benign, the fields fertile and irrigated. There are good ports and excellent fishing, all the plants and animals of Europe flourish, none have degenerated and some have improved. There are no beasts, no insects, no poisonous snakes ... nor many of the plagues of other countries. . . . In this privileged land beneath a benign and limpid sky, there should be a numerous population, a vast commerce, flourishing industry, and important arts. But instead, this most fertile kingdom in America is the most miserable.

Conversely, Japan, virtually destitute of all natural resources, nevertheless became one of the leading industrial nations of the world and its expatriates in Brazil dominated the growing of various agricultural produce in the southern region of that country. In Europe likewise, Switzerland has become one of the most prosperous countries of the continent and the world, despite lacking almost all natural resources. If, as these and other examples might suggest, it is the skills and cultural patterns of a people which are crucial, then it becomes more understandable why a global redistribution of peoples, whether through emigration or conquest, should produce such dramatic economic changes as those following the Europeanization of the Western Hemisphere.

Geographical settings which seem very favorable in presenting a spontaneous abundance of food, or lands and streams easily farmed and fished, may prove to be less favorable in the long run than natural settings in which people must develop in themselves discipline, work habits, and frugality merely in order to survive. Peoples whose cultures were shaped under the severe discipline of exacting geographical and climatic conditions have often been able to flourish when transplanted into more favorable settings, and to surpass indigenous peoples whose cultures evolved under these favorable circumstances. People used to a struggle for survival in the less favored parts of southern China rose from poverty-stricken beginnings as coolie laborers in colonial Malaya to surpass the Malays, whose geographical lot in life was much more favorable in the sense of their ease of producing a livelihood. Much the same story could be told of the immigrants to Fiji from India, as well as other immigrant groups in other parts of the world. Something similar has happened when peoples from geographically less favored regions of the same country—Ibos from southern Nigeria or Tamils from northern Ceylon—flourished when artificially more favorable opportunities were presented by a new culture brought by conquerors and colonizers, cultural opportunities which their geographically more favored compatriots were not as quick to exploit.

On a national scale, those European countries facing the turbulent and stormy north Atlantic—notably Britain, France, Spain, and Portugal—ultimately developed the technological skills and seagoing experience to become the world's leading naval powers in the modern age of exploration and imperialism. But those nations and empires whose naval forces developed earlier in the much calmer waters of the Mediterranean—where most sailing was in sight of land—never became naval powers able to challenge the upstarts of Western Europe on the high seas of the world. In short, neither on land or at sea are short-run advantages necessarily long-run advantages.

Europe, Asia, and Africa have been the sources of the major cultural features of the modern world's population, not only because they contain such a large proportion of that population, but also because the cultures of much of the rest of the world, and especially of the Western Hemisphere, derive from cultures which first developed on these three continents. While geography has not by itself determined European, Asian, or African cultures, it has set limits within which each continent and region has worked out its own destiny, and those limits and these destinies have varied substantially between and within continents.

On the great Eurasian land mass, where a majority of the human race has lived for most of recorded history, some of the geographical contrasts between the European and the Asian portions of this super-continent have been as large as the racial or historical contrasts within these two regions. For example, Asia has suffered far more from floods, droughts, earthquakes, and famines than Europe has. Many of the great epidemic diseases which have struck sporadically in Europe have been endemic in Asia, which has been called an "epicentre of viral outbreaks." Its diseases have spread through both animal and human populations, and crop diseases have likewise originated in Asia, where agriculture itself originated. Worm infestations have sapped the energy of humans in parts of China, India, and the Middle East.

On the other hand, the soil of much of Asia has, on the whole, been more fertile than that of Europe, and has historically supported much larger population densities. The monsoons of East Asia and the hot summers accompanying them are favorable for producing rice, which supports more people on given land than does wheat, the principal cereal grown in Europe. Because the main population centers of Asia are farther south than those of Europe—even a relatively northern capital in Asia like Tokyo is farther south than Rome or Madrid, much less London and Paris—the Asian climates, combined with the ample rainfall, often permit two crops a year to be grown in much of the continent, compared to one crop per year in most of Europe.

It is both unnecessary and impossible to determine the net advantages of the two regions of Eurasia. What is clear—and important—is that particular features of the natural environment vary enormously as between Europe and Asia, as they do within each continent as well. It would take an almost miraculous coincidence for all these factors to balance out in such a way as to cause the peoples of these two regions of the world to achieve similar technological, organizational, or economic levels continuously throughout history. Insofar as cultural development is influenced at all by the natural environment within which it takes place, nature becomes one of many influences tending to make societies and groups within societies unequal in their achievements as of any given time.

The geography of Europe is such that no place on the continent, outside of Russia, is more than 500 miles from the sea. By contrast, much of tropical Africa is farther than that from the nearest sea, and parts of it are more than a thousand miles from the sea. Moreover, many African communities located closer to the sea, as the crow flies, are in reality less accessible to it than are European communities located a like distance from open waters. To be located a hundred miles from the Mediterranean across the sands of the Sahara is not the same as being located a hundred miles from the open sea in a river port on the Rhine or the Seine. In Africa there are very few analogues to the Rhine or the Seine—or many other European rivers. Unlike much of South America or some other Third World regions, much of sub-Saharan Africa lacks both objective geographical opportunities (such as fertile land and ample rainfall) and the geographical conditions favorable to developing the cultural patterns enabling people to make the most of whatever economic opportunities exist. To the difficulties of water transport in much of Africa must be added the devastating effects of the tsetse fly on animals and humans alike, making the use of animals in transportation or farming virtually impossible in many parts of the continent below the Sahara.

While Europe's many navigable waterways made possible its long-distance transportation of common, bulky, and low-valued commodities such as grain, to a greater extent than in Asia, so in sub-Saharan Africa the unavailability of water or animal transport over substantial regions limited both the distance of trade and the range of commodities which were high enough in value to repay the expensive use of human carriers.

Geographical features interact. Mountains affect the flow of rivers. Where there are large mountain ranges which collect vast amounts of snow, the melting of that snow feeds water into the streams and rivers, maintaining their flow even during periods of low rainfall. Put differently, in a vast region without mountain ranges, such as sub-Saharan Africa, river flow is entirely dependent on rainfall and varies drastically between wet and dry seasons. Land features affect water flow in yet another important way. A region of vast high plateaus, such as tropical Africa or Tibet, has streams and rivers that must descend large vertical distances on their way to the sea. This means that they must have steeper gradients en route than rivers which flow across coastal plains, and are therefore less navigable, or not navigable at all, because of rapids and waterfalls.

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27 July 2024