.

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

Reviewed by Yitzhak Klein

The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David Landes
W.W. Norton, 1998, 650 pages.

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David Landes, Harvard’s preeminent economic historian, has dedicated much of his career to forwarding the unfashionable idea that Western civilization has brought about a dramatic, unambiguously positive change to the entire world. In so doing, Landes has made himself the bane of cultural relativists, who for the past generation have asserted that anything the West achieved was Not Important, or, if it was important, that other civilizations Did It First, or Just As Well. Landes’ latest volley, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor, is as ambitious as its title implies. It builds upon much of his previous work in an effort to settle the debate once and for all by developing a comprehensive historical account of the political, social and cultural factors that came together to destine Europe for supremacy. Were it not for the lack of a compelling theory behind his extensive historical narrative, he might well have succeeded.
 
This is not a new battle for Landes. His campaign on behalf of the merits of Western capitalism dates back to 1964, when he published in the Cambridge Economic History of Europe a three-hundred-page essay on the history of European industry and technology. This work, which told the story only up to the threshold of World War I, set the stage for a more complete treatment in his 1968 book The Unbound Prometheus. This title alone reveals how deeply Landes’ view of Western economic development differed from that of Marx, Engels, and most of his colleagues on the faculty of Harvard (except perhaps the economics department). In these works, Landes argued not only that industrial development enormously increased the productive powers of Western civilization, but that this development meant a revolutionary improvement in the quality of life of hundreds of millions of ordinary people. To show this, Landes told a riveting story, drawn from a staggering wealth of sources. This was economic history at its best: A sweeping thesis, not popular with academic bien-pensants, meticulously constructed on extensive and painstaking research.
In his Revolution in Time (1983), Landes made a similar point, this time employing a brilliant methodological innovation: Ostensibly a history of timekeeping and the development of timepieces in Europe, Revolution in Time went beyond a mere descriptive account to inquire into social causes. Where did the demand for ever more accurate clocks and watches come from? What kind of people wanted them badly enough that ordinary folk would draw lots for the privilege of buying the clockmaker’s next product as it came off the bench? Well, people seeking to use their time more efficiently, or to coordinate complex activities, for one thing; for another, scientists, whose experiments required precise measurements of time; and explorers, who needed chronometers in order to fix longitude (what kind of people explored?). Landes’ history of clocks became a history of entrepreneurship, discovery, invention, the scientific mode of thought and, not least, the Protestant work ethic—in short, the cultural profile of a unique civilization.
Yet while Landes’ earlier works broke important ground, they were by no means the coup de grâce that The Wealth and Poverty of Nations presumes to be. Here Landes makes explicit the argument that Western culture is unique. The purpose of the book, as its title implies, is to explain differences in national economic achievement, but the reasons for difference lie, according to Landes, not at the level of nation-states, but of culture and civilization. He argues that the achievements of Western nations are rooted in culture, rather than mere technology, and that therefore they could have taken place nowhere else; technology itself is but a product of culture. The values that produced scientific and industrial progress also produced the entire culture of modernity. Because of these values, Landes argues, Western civilization provided better for its people than any other: More wealth, more comfort, better health and nutrition, more enlightenment, and ultimately more liberty, for the overwhelming majority of people, than anywhere else in the world. The rest of the world did not embark on the modernist revolution until taught, or dominated, by the West.
 
The best third of the book covers ground that Landes knows well, the complex and compelling tale of how Europe became the world leader in technology and economic production. A thousand years ago Europe was still impoverished, benighted, and politically impotent, beset by invaders north, east and south. “The probability at that point… of Europe’s dominance,” writes Landes, “was somewhere around zero. Five hundred years later, it was getting close to one.” At mid-millennium, Europe was already the wealthiest and most technically advanced civilization on the face of the globe, especially in the crucial fields of naval and military technology. International networks of trade and finance had been founded. The towns had taken off, establishing the nexus of trade, industry, innovation and entrepreneurship that would propel technical modernization for the next five centuries. A plurality of polities led to competition and, therefore, progress. In Britain these trends would accelerate into the industrial revolution, and other nations soon followed her lead. In Germany, universities were placed at the service of industry, and scientists brought into industries such as chemicals and pharmaceuticals, establishing a pattern that would drive technological innovation in the twentieth century. Landes maintains that this rivalry among the region’s nation-states was an ingredient essential to Europe’s progress toward modernity. Follies pursued by one government could be avoided by other states; scientists and thinkers, not to mention religious groups, who fled persecution in their country of origin found welcome in neighboring lands. Eventually—which might mean after decades or even centuries had passed—the best practice, whether in law, education, science, technology, or policy, would diffuse throughout the continent. One consequence was the spread of intellectual liberalism and principles of scientific inquiry.
Landes’ point here is that the patterns of civilization that produced European superiority were in place long before that superiority was realized. He devotes much of the remainder of the book to showing that similar cultural patterns existed nowhere else, that the rest of the world did not and could not embark on the modernist revolution until the West showed it the way. No other civilization possessed even the rudiments of a scientific culture during the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries, when it was becoming a core component of Western culture: Not the Arab world, which had enjoyed a fruitful period of scientific inquiry and intellectual development while Europe was enduring the Dark Ages; not the Chinese, who boasted significant scientific discoveries and technical preeminence from the fifth to the fifteenth centuries. In these civilizations, science was neither a product of nor an important continuing influence on mainstream culture. Unlike the Europeans, these cultures did not value material progress, rigorous logic, self-improvement, scientific discovery and exploration for their own sake. As a result, they forgot many of their discoveries, while the Western scientific community endeavored to preserve its achievements and build upon them. Only in the West did science—could science—lead to a sustained revolution in people’s welfare and attitudes toward their world and each other.
Or so Landes says. While making a strong case for how Europe got as far as it did, Wealth and Poverty is weakest when treating non-Western civilizations, those condemned to poverty because they did not or could not emulate the West. That they did not is easy to show: India, once the world’s largest cotton manufacturer, failed to develop a mechanized textile industry; China failed to transform its philosophical tradition into a true scientific culture; Latin American culture borrowed much from the West, but failed to develop competitive economic policies. But that these cultures could not have emulated the West is a different proposition altogether, one not sustained by the evidence Landes presents. He does offer an array of explanations for other civilizations’ backwardness: India had a tradition of relying on hand labor; Latin America had an insufficiently entrepreneurial culture; non-Western cultures oppressed women. In some regions, extremes in religion, or climate, or both, frustrated any initiative toward sustained development. But these explanations do not amount to a coherent theory about the cultural determinants of economic development. Economic forces tend to move people out of traditional patterns of behavior into more productive ones; why did India’s predilection for hand labor not give way before the obviously superior methods of Western manufacture? Japanese women were treated as badly as women anywhere prior to modernization; why did Japan modernize while Africa did not? Why has Middle Eastern oil failed to become the basis of development? Too often, in lieu of explanations, the book offers generalizations of the following sort:
Failure hardens the heart and dims the eye. Up to now, Middle Eastern losers have sought compensation in religious fundamentalism and military aggression. On the popular level, prayer and faith console the impotent and promise retribution.
Whatever else one may say about this explanation, it is hard to see how it relates to economics. In fact, nations with natural resources, especially oil, have trouble developing industry; this has been true in the past of wealthy nations such as Britain, Holland and Australia.
How could The Wealth and Poverty of Nations have proved its case? Perhaps if Landes had offered a taxonomy of Western cultural characteristics and how they are related to successful economic development, and then tested other cultures against these criteria. His association of timetelling with entrepreneurial, scientific and exploratory culture is one example of how this might be done. Another is the concept of “machine-readiness”—a society’s ability to integrate machinery into production—which Landes uses to explain why certain Western nations found it easier or harder to follow Britain’s lead in the industrial revolution. To illustrate, the seeming contrast in machine-readiness between Belgium and, say, Poland at the start of the nineteenth century might be confirmed with data on the numbers and types of skilled craftsmen in these countries’ cities, and the influences giving rise to the disparity. A deliberate treatment of the subject along these lines would identify in what ways specific cultural elements are useful to economic development, and serve as a tool for assessing the presence or absence of these elements in various cultures and societies. The resulting book would be more structured and theoretical; it would be drier and include more statistics. It would, however, be an intellectual tour de force,something of the knockout blow that Landes had hoped for.

Dr. Yitzhak Klein is a public policy analyst.

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