Political Order and Political Decay (38 page)

The economists Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson modify this argument in an often-cited paper, arguing that the variation in early institutions was due not to factor endowments so much as early settler mortality, which was driven in turn by the diseases to which they were subject. Where Europeans found it safe to settle, they demanded rights for themselves and institutions that would limit the ability of the state to take away their property arbitrarily. Where disease made it too costly to settle, the colonial powers set up what they labeled “extractive” economic institutions enforced by “absolutist” political structures. These early institutional structures proved very durable because existing power holders were able to continue to restrict access to both the economic and political systems over subsequent centuries.
7

Any simple geographical determinism of the Sachs or Diamond variety that links wealth to temperate northern climates and poverty to southern tropical ones is belied by the “reversal of fortune” that occurred between 1500 and the present, as a number of economic historians have pointed out. For much of human history, the wealthiest and most productive regions tended to be southern. This was true first and foremost in Europe: the Roman Empire was centered around the Mediterranean, with North Africa being a major grain-producing region, while Britain and Scandinavia were impoverished peripheries inhabited by tribal barbarians. The Chinese Empire started in the northerly Yellow River valley and then expanded south and southwest rather than north; colder areas—Manchuria, Korea, and Japan—were significantly less developed. And in the Americas, the Aztecs and Incas, the richest civilizations, developed in tropical/subtropical Mexico and Peru. The temperate zones of both North and South America were sparsely inhabited by relatively impoverished hunter-gatherer or pastoral societies. This pattern continued after the European conquest of the western hemisphere. The Spanish located their empire in the seats of the former indigenous civilizations, while a rich slave-based planter economy grew up in the Caribbean and northeastern (that is, subtropical) Brazil. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, it is estimated that the sugar island of Barbados was two-thirds richer than the thirteen North American colonies in per capita terms; Cuba was far richer than Massachusetts at the time of the American Revolution.
8

The pattern noted by Sachs and other writers wherein the richest parts of the world were temperate northern climates is thus a modern pattern that came about only after the Industrial Revolution. Normally, economic theory would predict that those tropical and subtropical regions that hosted wealthy agrarian communities should have an advantage with regard to industrialization, since they had the largest stocks of labor and capital. Acemoglu, Robinson, and Johnson argue that the reason this did not happen was due again to institutions: older wealthy regions with dense populations attracted European colonists, who enslaved those populations and created extractive institutions. Those institutions then served to block the development of more open, competitive market economies that were necessary for industrial development. By contrast, poor, sparsely settled regions were not burdened with the legacy of bad institutions and permitted more inclusive ones to appear.

What all of these arguments have in common is that they trace the origins of political institutions to factors that are broadly economic, which include but are not limited to climate and physical geography. While Acemoglu and Robinson criticize what they characterize as the geographical determinism of writers like Sachs and Diamond, and point to good institutions as the cause of development, they nonetheless trace the origin of institutions in turn to conditions of climate and geography. Geography and factor endowments remain determinative insofar as they shape political institutions, which then persist. The impact of climate and geography can obviously change over time as a result of technology; thus the Caribbean sugar trade could not have happened absent transatlantic shipping, and it became far less competitive with the development of alternatives to sugarcane like beet sugar. Nonetheless, all the writers in this tradition agree that economic factors such as geography, climate, diseases, the availability of resources like labor, precious metals, rainfall levels, and the feasibility of plantation agriculture are the final determinants of the nature of institutions. They explicitly argue that nonmaterial factors—ideas or ideology, culture, or the particular traditions of individual colonizing societies—were much less important in explaining contemporary political and economic development outcomes.

ONE, TWO, THREE, MANY DETERMINISMS

This broad line of argument by economists met with substantial criticism, precisely because of its apparent determinism. Writers such as Jeffrey Sachs seemed to be saying that unalterable factors like location in the tropics or the absence of access to waterways condemned certain countries to poverty and backwardness. Critics pointed to economically successful Singapore and Malaysia, both located in the tropics with a history of extractive colonial institutions, to show that the past didn't necessarily predict the future. In general, people don't like these types of arguments because they seem to deny the possibility of human agency and the ability of human beings to take control of the conditions of their existence.

But before we dismiss the importance of climate and geography to the shaping of institutions, we should consider a number of broad historical facts that suggest they are indeed very important. Geography and climate were critical to early state formation. As noted in Volume 1 of this book, the first states to appear anywhere in the world arose under very specific geographical conditions. Most appeared in alluvial valleys including those of the Nile, the Tigris and Euphrates, the Yellow River in China, and the Valley of Mexico, where high soil fertility allowed productive agriculture and high population densities. Further, these valleys needed to be neither too small nor too large. If they were too small, like many of those in Papua New Guinea and the highlands of Southeast Asia, they could not support sufficiently large populations that were capable of dominating their regions and taking advantage of economies of scale in creating state-level institutions. On the other hand, if they were too large and open, they could not prevent slaves and other subservient people from running away from state authority. Tribal societies are egalitarian and can subsist over very large ranges of territory. States by contrast are coercive and typically need to compel the obedience of their citizens. Anthropologist Robert Carneiro argues that some degree of geographical circumscription was necessary to permit the creation of the earliest states. Archaeologist Ian Morris has noted the rise of civilizations in widely separated places sharing common environmental conditions (what he labels the “lucky latitudes”), such as those prevailing in Europe and China.
9

These geographical conditions go quite far to explain the distribution of levels of political organization around the world. There are today a number of surviving tribal and/or band-level societies that have resisted incorporation into states. But they exist only under very specific environmental conditions: either mountains (Afghanistan or highland Southeast Asia), deserts (the Bedouin in the Arabian peninsula, the nomads of the Sahara, the!Kung San in the Kalahari), jungles (tribal groups in India and parts of Africa), or extreme Arctic conditions (Eskimos, Inuits in the far north of Canada). They have survived simply because it is difficult for states to project military force into such regions. The failure of an indigenous state to emerge in Papua New Guinea despite the fact that it has been inhabited by modern humans for some forty thousand years would seem to be related to the fact that there is no large open alluvial valley there that would support a correspondingly large civilization, only a seemingly endless series of small mountain valleys. Afghanistan has been a settled crossroads for thousands of years but to this day has never consolidated into a strong centralized state, despite the efforts of a long series of invaders from the Greeks to the Persians to the British, Soviets, and NATO. Mountainous terrain and Afghanistan's being landlocked and surrounded by powerful Iran, Russia, India, and Pakistan would seem to explain this outcome.
10

Physical geography also played a role in the presence or absence of absolutism and democracy. The mechanism through which this operated, however, was not any of those discussed by the economists. Rather, it was the factor pointed to by Montesquieu, which had to do with the suitability of certain terrains for military conquest or defense. Economists tend to believe that political power derives from economic power and serves economic interests. But political power often rests on superior military organization which, in turn, is the product of leadership, morale, motivation, strategy, logistics and, of course, technology. Resources are naturally an important component of military power, but there is no simple translation of economic power into military power. For nearly two thousand years, tribally organized horsemen riding out of Central Asia were able to conquer settled agrarian civilizations that were far wealthier and more complex in their organization. The most famous of these groups were the Mongols who, breaking out of their home territories in inner Asia early in the thirteenth century, conquered present-day Russia and Ukraine, Hungary, Persia, the whole of Song China, the Levant, and parts of northern India.

These conquests were made possible by two material factors: first, the domestication of the horse which, as Jared Diamond notes, was unknown in the New World until its introduction by the Spanish; and second, the fact that much of Eurasia is relatively flat and open plain. The Mongols' extraordinary mobility was due to the fact that they were unencumbered by heavy logistics trains, living largely as predators off the richer civilizations they attacked. The ability of nomadic invaders to overwhelm agrarian cultures led to the repeated cycle, noted by the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, of civilizational flowering and decay that characterized the Middle East, China, and other regions bordering on Central Asia.

The limits of the power of these and other horse-mounted tribal groups were also set by physical conditions. In Europe, the Mongols eventually ran into a series of mountain ranges and, more important, thick forests that prevented the rapid movement of their horses. In India, their bows started to delaminate in the heat and humidity of the Gangetic plain. The limits of conquest by horse- and camel-mounted Arabs in West Africa were set by the tsetse fly, which in forest zones killed their horses. This explains the line that divides the Muslim north of the West African countries Nigeria, Benin, Togo, Ghana, and Cote d'Ivoire from the Christian/animist South.
11
The entire period of barbarian conquests out of Central Asia came to an end only with the European adoption of gunpowder and artillery, which allowed soldiers in defensive positions to decimate cavalry at a distance.

The political impact of these geographical and technological conditions can be seen in the differing political paths taken by Russia and the Baltic and Eastern European polities just to its west. Russia itself was conquered by Mongol commanders Batu Khan and Subutai in the 1230s, and the so-called Mongol yoke continued for the next 250 years. The Mongols had no particular interest in the well-being of their Russian subjects and set up a predatory state that extracted tribute through a series of local Russian agents. The Mongols destroyed the nascent state formed around the Kievan Rus', cut Russia off from trade and intellectual exchange with Byzantium, the Middle East, and Europe, and undermined Russia's Byzantine-Roman legal traditions. The clock of Russian political development was set back during the so-called appanage period that followed on the Mongol invasion, when power was decentralized into hundreds of tiny principalities. There was, consequently, no development of a deeply rooted feudalism that provided strong local government as in Western Europe; indeed, no time to build the fortified castles that were critical to the protection of feudal power.

Geography continued to play a critical role in the consolidation of a strong absolutist Russian state, one whose authority and power over society came to be far greater than anything experienced under the absolutisms of Western Europe. Power was centralized under the Rurik dynasty in Moscow under Ivan III (1440–1505), which under subsequent tsars underwent a huge territorial expansion. The openness of the Russian steppe, combined with the relative weakness of the aristocratic boyar class, gave the Muscovites a huge first-mover advantage. Organizing a middle service class as a Mongol-style light cavalry, the Muscovite tsars ran into few natural defensive obstacles until they encountered the better-organized communities in Poland and Lithuania, and the Turks to the south. Independent commercial cities like Novgorod, that were so important to the development of political freedom in Western Europe, were militarily overwhelmed and subordinated to Moscow's centralized control.

Montesquieu was thus deeply insightful about the impact of geography in the development of political freedom in Europe when he said that “the natural division forms many nations of a moderate extent.” Europe's geography, unlike that of Africa, promoted the formation of strong states. Political competition among its nations required the construction of strong states with good laws; without this, “the state would fall into decay, and become a prey to its neighbors.” On the other hand, Europe's great rivers, mountain ranges, and forests made it very difficult for any one state to achieve predominance. As a result, no one conqueror has ever been able to subdue the whole of Europe and subject it to a single political authority, in the manner of Chinese emperors or Russian tsars. Another fortuitous feature of European geography that contributed to its freedom was the existence of a large, hard to conquer island just off the continent, which was able to accumulate substantial wealth and maritime power and act as a balancer against those that sought to dominate the rest of the region. This happened when England resisted the Spanish armada at the end of the fifteenth century, the expansionist plans of Louis XIV in the seventeenth century, Napoleon in the early nineteenth century, and Hitler in the twentieth.