CHAPTER 1
1. One thing for the French school: they were very sure of themselves. Thus Edmond Demolins, back around the turn of the century: “If the history of mankind were to begin over, without any change in the world’s surface, it would broadly repeat itself—Comment la route crée le type social (Paris, n.d.), I, ix. For a skeptical view of this European interest in geography—decried as training for colonialism—see Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model, p. 45, n. 3.
2. See Andrew Kamarck, The Tropics and Economic Development.
3. Cf. Arnold Guyot, The Earth and Man (1849; reprinted 1897), p. 251. Also Livingstone, “The Moral Discourse of Climate,” p. 414.
4. On this story, see Smith, “Academic War,” pp. 155, 162; also S. B. Cohen, “Reflections on the Elimination of Geography,” p. 148.
5. So it is easier, and no doubt more practical (though not for what I am trying to do), to confine discussions of African agriculture to what can and cannot be done in circumstances such as they are. Cf. R. P. Moss, “Environmental Constraints.” For a more or less unconditionally egalitarian view of geography (no one is better off than anyone else, because no one should be), see Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model.
6. David Smith, “Climate, Agriculture, History: An Introduction,” pp. 1-2. Further to the point, Smith tells us that scholarship in this field demands “a willingness to accept much badinage or even rejection from colleagues.”
7. “Conditions for Economic Change in Underdeveloped Countries,” Journal of Farm Economics, 33 (November 1951), 693. Cited in Andrew Kamarack’s valuable and undeservedly neglected book, The Tropics and Economic Development, p. 4.
8. “How Poor Are the Poor Countries?” in Seers and Joy, eds., Development in a Divided World, p. 78. Cf. Rati Ram’s regressions of income, life expectancy, etc., on distance from the equator, “highly significant and quantitatively substantial”—“Tropics and Economic Development,” p. 10.
9. L. Don Lambert, “The Role of Climate,” p. 339 and n. 1, compares the economist’s one-sided approach to that of a doctor who focused only on well people and treated the ill by prescribing the “good life” of the well. “…the relevant questions,” he writes, “are not only: What causes development? but also: What causes stagnation?”
10. “The Deadly Hitch-hikers,” The Economist, 31 October 1992, p. 87.
11. Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 186, notes a Chinese text of 1264 describing schistosomiasis and other worm infestations. Cited in Jones, The European Miracle, p. 6.
12. The Economist, 27 July 1991, pp. 74-75. Cf. Giblin, “Trypanosomiasis Control.”
13. Morbidity data from the military hospital in Bône—Curtin, Death by Migration, pp. 65-66.
14. These data from World Bank, World Development Report 1994, Table 1, pp. 162-63.
15. World Bank, World Development Report 1991, Table 28, pp. 258-59, and 1994, Table 27, pp. 214-15. Richard Easterlin calls these gains a “mortality revolution”—one that is still under way.
16. The price remains high in spite of modern laboratory techniques and security precautions. On the battle against deadly, newly discovered viruses, most of them of tropical origin, see Altman, “Researcher’s Infection.”
17. Sattaur, “WHO to Speed Up Work on Drugs for Tropical Diseases,” p. 17. Once again, some would disagree. Blaut, The Colonizer’s Model, pp. 77-78, contends that until very recently, “midlatitude” climes (he prefers to avoid the word “temperate”) have been just as disease-ridden as tropical; and that inhabitants of the tropics develop appropriate immunities to pathogens and parasites. Other things equal, “is there, then, a remainder that can be called ‘the innate [intrinsic?] unhealthiness of the tropics’? Probably the answer is no.”
18. N.Y. Times, 16 February 1997, p. 1.
19. On the conflict between the Western, scientific school and indigenous medicine, see Verma, “Western Medicine,” who feels that the Europeans have kept their own secrets. The Westerners came with methods and printed books; the native practitioners had no books, only practice and secrets. The Westerners wanted help, especially for such mass procedures as vaccination. But they taught the natives less than they taught their own countrymen, for equal education would have undermined authority (p. 134).
20. Cf. Gwyn Prins, who tells us, “Hygæa was for many Africans seen as the colonialist’s whore”—“But What Was the Disease?”, p. 164. This is an unhappy article, alert to the failings and wrongs of colonial medicine, sympathetic to traditional therapies without being credulous, almost angry. The author is torn between science and a different kind of “knowledge”: “why should those explanations which are found to be widely applicable be assumed to be universally pre-eminent” (p. 178)? But are Africans biologically different?
21. See Paul Harrison, “The Curse of the Tropics,” p. 602. These variations make a difference. Cf. Sah, “Priorities,” pp. 339—40, on the great British peanut (groundnut) fiasco of the late 1940s, killed, among other things, by the failure to reckon with fluctuations in rainfall (discussed below, chapter xxviii).
22. Wade, “Sahelian Drought,” 234-37.
23. Kamarck, Tropics and Economic Development, p. 16.
24. This passage draws on Raaj Sah, “Priorities of Developing Countries,” p. 337.
25. Bandyopadhyaya, Climate and World Order, p. vi.
CHAPTER 2
1. Tortella, “Patterns of Economic Retardation and Recovery in South-western Europe.”
2. “Speech on Mr. Fox’s East India Bill,” 1 December 1783.
3. Charlene L. Fu, “China Paper Details Risk of Hepatitis in Transfusions,” Boston Globe, 30 June 1993, p. 2.
4. On the implications of disease and malnutrition for economic performance, see Alan Berg, “Malnutrition and National Development,” pp. 126-29.
5. Oshima, Economic Growth, p. 21.
6. Lattimore, Inner Asian Frontiers, p. 23.
7. Leeming, Changing Geography, pp. 11-12. Some 65 percent of China is mountain, hill, and plateau.
8. Cited in Elvin, The Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 37.
9. From the Chin History, cited by Elvin, ibid., p. 39.
10. The Wei History (compiled in the sixth century by Wei Shou), cited by Elvin, op. cit., p. 45.
11. Jones, European Miracle.
12. Chang, “Agricultural Potential,” p. 338. On the other hand, Debeir, et al., In the Servitude of Power, p. 47, give paddy (unhusked rice) as superior to wheat and corn “because of the quality of its proteins and its richness in essential amino acids.”
13. Karl A. Wittfogel, Oriental Despotism: A Comparative Study of Total Power.
14. Thus Chi Ch’ao-ting, Key Economic Areas in Chinese History, who tells a story of food and politics: he who controlled the big granaries held the key to the kingdom.
15. March, The Idea of China, pp. 94-95.
16. Cf. Stevens, “The High Risks of Denying Rivers Their Flood Plains.”
17. Debeir, et al, In the Servitude of Power, p. 50.
CHAPTER 3
1. Cf. Kautsky, Politics of Aristocratic Empires; Richard Landes, “While God Tarried” (forthcoming).
2. Tract on the Popery Laws.
3. Michael Cook, “Islam: A Comment,” in Baechler et al., eds., Europe and the Rise of Capitalism, p. 134.
4. Cf. Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, pp. 161-62, who stresses the plurality of the barbarian strike forces that brought down the Western empire and the consequent plurality of political and, I would add, cultural and linguistic units. The one unified entity was the Church, with its more or less common language, and the pope, Crone points out, had no interest in promoting a secular rival.
5. As cited in Lévi, Le grand empereur, p. 187. This is a novel, but it draws heavily and often verbatim from contemporary documents.
6. Balazs, La bureaucratie céleste, pp. 22-23. Cf. John Fairbank, who speaks of “Oriental” societies, “organized under centralized monolithic governments in which the bureaucracy was domin
ant in almost all aspects of large-scale activity—administrative, military, religious, and economic—so that no sanction for private enterprise ever became established…” The United States and China, p. 47. Note the use of the word “Oriental,” not then frowned upon.
7. On the significance of law and justice for medieval political rule, see Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, pp. 157-58, who stresses the contribution of this function to royal revenues. But perverse consequence: he who gets his living by the law must live by the law.
8. Cited in Edmonds, Northern Frontiers, p. 55.
9. Some have argued that this is not so; thus Rowe, Hankow: Commerce and Society in a Chinese City, and Perdue, Exhausting the Earth, p. 263, n. 6. Such arguments miss the explicit political autonomies and status privileges of European communes.
10. Robert Lopez, cited by Pounds, Economic History, p. 104.
11. On rural privileges and their link to projects of land reclamation and extension of cultivation, going back to the eleventh century, see the important article of Bryce Lyon, “Medieval Real Estate Developments and Freedom,” Amer. Hist. Rev., 63 (1957), 47-61.
12. Cf. Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change.
13. “Far from being stultified by imperial government, Europe was to be propelled forward by constant competition between its component parts.” And, stressing the paradox of redemption in the loss of imperial paradise: “Europe failed: had it succeeded, it would have remained a pre-industrial society”—Crone, Pre-Industrial Societies, pp. 161, 172.
14. Hippocrates, Air Waters Places, cited in March, Idea of China, p. 29. For March, the very idea of Asia is a myth—an opposing “they” that defines Europe in terms of what it is not or does not want to be. This, he feels, reflects ideological and class interests: “Our modern ‘Asia’ is perpetuated not for science but on behalf of those strata whose care is to maintain the ideal of western civilisation and who benefit from its sacred myths of individualism, private property, and aggressive defence of liberty” (p. 35). None of which necessarily invalidates these contrasts.
15. On the “Peace of God” movement of the late tenth, early eleventh century, which took the form of mass public encounters of clergy, nobility, and populace and produced a series of social compacts, cf. Head and Landes, eds., The Peace of God: Social Violence and Religious Response. These compacts were not always honored, but principle matters, and again, such evidences of popular initiative and expression were distinctively European.
CHAPTER 4
1. The key piece is the seminal article of Lynn White, Jr., “Technology and Invention in the Middle Ages,” Speculum, 15 (1940): 141-59.
2. Jean Gimpel, The Medieval Machine, p. 14. Cf. White, Medieval Religion and Technology, pp. 226-27. White also points out that whereas paper from Muslim lands (not mechanically produced) never shows watermarks, such trademarks appear in Italian paper by the 1280s, a sign of commercial enterprise.
3. On these glasses before eyeglasses, see the work of Zecchin, Vetro e vetrai di Murano (Venice, 1989), cited by Ilardi, “Renaissance Florence,” p. 510.
4. The speaker is the Dominican Fra Giordano of Pisa, in a sermon at Santa Maria Novella in Florence in 1306. Quoted in White, “Cultural Climates,” p. 174; also in reprint, 1978, p. 221. White cites the Italian original. I have made small stylistic changes in the translation. See also Rosen, “Invention of Eyeglasses” and Ilardi, Occhiali and “Renaissance Florence.”
5. Moses Abramovitz argues that a longer life span encourages investment in human capital and makes people readier to move to new places and occupations. How much more when the extra years can be the best—“Manpower, Capital, and Technology,” p. 55.
6. “The clock is not merely a means of keeping track of the hours, but of synchronizing the actions of men. The clock, not the steam-engine, is the key-machine of the modern industrial age…at the very beginning of modern technics appeared prophetically the accurate automatic machine…. In its relationship to determinable quantities of energy, to standardization, to automatic action, and finally to its own special product, accurate timing, the clock has been the foremost machine in modern technics; and at each period it has remained in the lead; it marks a perfection toward which other machines aspire”—Mumford, Technics and Civilization, pp. 14-15.
7. Cited in Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, p. 233.
8. Sivin, “Science and Medicine,” p. 165, says that printing with movable type did not replace the older method until the twentieth century.
9. Cf. Hall, Powers and Liberties, p. 49.
10. Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 180.
11. Needham, “The Guns of Khaifeng-fu,” p. 40.
12. Levathes, When China Ruled the Seas, p. 102.
13. On this point, note the development, as early as the sixteenth century, of a formal claim by victorious armies to all bells, or to the best bell, in and around a conquered place: “the right to the bells.” Cipolla, Guns, Sails, and Empires, p. 30, n. 1.
14. In 885, all professional copyists in Baghdad were required to swear an oath not to copy books of philosophy. On the conflicts of Muslim science and Islamic doctrine, see Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science, especially chs. 9 and 10.
15. Ibn Khaldn, The Muqaddima: An Introduction to History (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978), p. 373, cited in Hoodbhoy, Islam and Science, pp. 103-04. We have an analogous example of arrant cynicism and zealotry in Christian annals: when the French “crusader” army sent to repress the Cathar heresy broke into Béziers and was permitted (ordered) to put its inhabitants to the sword, the commander was asked how they might distinguish the good Christians from the heretics; to which he replied: “God will know his own.”
16. White, Medieval Religion and Technology, p. 227.
17. Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Past, p. 184.
18. Ibid., p. 85. Elvin gives the figure as “between 35,000 to 40,000 tons and 125,000 tons,” but says he prefers the higher estimate. He relies here on Yoshida Mitsukuni, a Japanese specialist writing in 1967. Subsequent work by Robert Hartwell, “Markets, Technology, and the Structure of Enterprise,” p. 34, also advances the higher figure. In Hall, Powers and Liberties, p. 46, this becomes “at least 125,000 tons.” That’s the way of historical numbers—they grow.
19. Elvin, Pattern of the Chinese Part, pp. 297-98.
20. Cf. Goldstone, “Gender, Work, and Culture.”
21. Balazs, La bureaucratie céleste, pp. 22-23.
22. Cited in White, Medieval Religion and Technology, pp. 245-46.
CHAPTER 5
1. Schama, “They All Laughed,” p. 30, says that even in 1892, protestors objected to the celebration and delayed it by a year.
2. Cf. “The Invasion of the Nina, the Pinta, and the Santa Maria,” New York Times, 2 June 1991; and the indignant rebuttal of Teresa de Balmaseda Milam, ibid., 4, July 1991.
3. James Barron, “He’s the Explorer/Exploiter You Just Have to Love/Hate,” New York Times, 12 October 1992, p. B7. See also Sam Dillon, “Schools Grow Harsher in Scrutiny of Columbus,” ibid., p. Al. Although “Native American” is now the accepted and acceptable name for people descended from the original (first) inhabitants of the western hemisphere, some have objected that “American” is a European, and hence inappropriate, designation. One should speak of “natives” instead. But what of all the other people born in the hemisphere? Are they not natives? Apparently some natives are more native than others.
4. See Joel Sable, “Mexico Hails Aztecs with Multiple Issues,” Boston Globe, 3 April 1994, p. B34.
5. Cf. Schama, “They All Laughed.” The superbly illustrated catalogue: Levenson, ed., Circa 1492: Art in the Age of Exploration.
6. Vitorino Magalhaes Godinho rightly speaks of the absurdity of this no-discovery thesis, which he describes as an “infantile trap.” “Rôle du Portugal,” p. 58.
7. On these issues, see King, Art of Mathematics, pp. 41—46.
8. Ibn Khaldn, The Muqadd
imah, cited in Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus, p. 50.
9. Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus, p. 49.
10. See the discussion ibid., pp. 84-85.
11. Ibid., p. 12.
12. For the Portuguese, the first encounter with the Madeiras seems to date from 1419. Huygue, Coureurs d’épices, p. 119, gives it as accidental.
13. Bennassar and Bennassar, 1492, p. 252.
14. Axtell, After Columbus, p. 168.
15. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Brief Relation of the Destruction of the Indies, cited in Josephy, Indian Heritage, p. 287.
16. These reports are from a letter of 1516 from a group of Dominican friars to the minister of Charles I (later Charles V) in Spain, cited in Todorov, La conquête de l’Amérique, p. 146. The letter cites among other atrocities the case of a poor mother with nursing child who had the misfortune to pass before a group of Spaniards whose dog was hungry. Exaggerated? We have corroborative evidence from other witnesses.
17. Most of what follows is drawn from the vivid presentation of Fernandez-Armesto, Before Columbus, pp. 143-47.
18. Bruckner, The Tears of the White Man, p. 10, suggests that Columbus was prepared to believe by reading in Pierre d’Ailly’s Imago mundi (written 1410, published 1480) that the Garden of Eden had to be in a warm land somewhere on the other side of the equator. To be sure, this new land, though warm, was not on the other side of the equator. But what really mattered to Columbus in my opinion was the nakedness and innocence of these beautiful people. How could Ailly know which side of the equator the Garden was on?
19. The above quotations come from Bruckner, ibid., who has them from a French translation of Columbus’s journals: Christophe Colomb, La découverte de l’Amérique, 2 vols. (Paris: Maspero, 1979).
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