Why are all (or at least most) or the developed, rich, first world countries all north of the poor, undeveloped, third world countries?
Am I seeing things, is this just a coincidence, or is there a real force behind this?
Because of the influence of Europe, and technology. And also diffusion of the species. Some peoples somewhere would have to develop organized society and sophisticated technology first. It just so happened that this happened in Europe, with first the Greeks, and then the Roman Empire. Take a look at Map 2. Outside of the European countries, and Russia which while it extends into Asia was controlled from the European countries, the only advanced countries are the USA, Canada, Australia and New Zealand. Those last 4 are advanced because they were dominated by European immigrants.
As for the rest of the Americas, they never had a chance to become advanced because before the Europeans arrived, there were too few people living there, and they were too widely scattered.
What I don’t have a good explanation for is exactly why Africa and China never were able to get things together like the Europeans. Since humanity evolved in Africa, they certainly had a head start. And China has had an organized culture since as far back, and even further back, than the Europeans did. It would seem to me that both had at least the potential for early technological advancement.
My favorite bit of pseudo science is attached to this topic. The theory goes that people living in northern climates had more impetus to develop technology and society because they had to survive the cold weather. Those in Africa, the South Pacific, and other warm places had life relatively good and didn’t need all the fanciness of efficient farming. Since life was good, they didn’t fight amongst themselves and so didn’t have to develop warfare technology or band together quite as strongly and make advanced society. Seems to me that, since life was so good, there should have been more oppertunity to develop society since they wouldn’t have to be worrying about food 24/7. Also, since when is it cold only in the north? The Andes are damn cold. And if this theory holds, then the Inuit peoples of Alaska and Canada have clearly been holding back the cure for cancer from the rest of us.
</rant about stupid pseudo science>
There is no factual answer to this question, but you might want to check out Guns, Germs and Steel by Jared Diamond.
I already explained the second part. There never were enough people in the Andes or Inuits they could have evolved a technologically advanced society.
"Pre-Columbian population
“Estimates of how many people were living in the Americas when Columbus arrived have varied tremendously; in the 20th century scholarly estimates ranged from a low of 8.4 million to a high of 112.5 million persons. Given the fragmentary nature of the evidence, precise pre-Columbian population figures are impossible to obtain; estimates are often produced by extrapolation from comparatively small bits of data. Most scholars now favor the middle or higher end of that range; geographer William Denevan used various estimates to derive a “consensus count” of about 54 million people.”
If we assume the upper estimate of 112.5 million Native Americans before Columbus, that isn’t a lot considering that they were scattered over 2 largish continents.
As for your first part, I think you have a good theory. The Europeans may have had more of a need to develop structured societies and technology to survive adequately. This would explain Africa. In Africa, it is much easier to survive as a hunter/gatherer.
Except that they were not scattered over two largish continents any more than the Asians or Africans or people of the Fertile Crescent were. They were clumped in areas that allowed for agriculture, just as the peoples of all the continents were. When De Soto stomped through what would become the U.S. South in the 1540s, he encountered several hundreds of towns filled with people. The Aztecs and Incas whom the Spanish conquered lived in relatively densely populated agricultural areas. Meanwhile, the great plains, the deserts, and the dense rain forests of the Americas were no more heavily populated then than now.
As for any European “need” for structured societies, Europeans tended to inherit their societies from a general movement of agriculture originating in the Middle East and Northern Africa.
Diamond’s work, to which John Mace referred, points out that the impetus toward larger, more complex societies tended to be driven by the good (or bad) fortune to have an ample supply of easily domesticated plants and the presence of domesticable animals. Europe got lucky in that it was geographically close enough to other areas where those items were produced that it could “inherit” them through simple diffusion, enhanced to a certain extent by trade.
This does not quite explain the European dominance of China, (where a lot of “European” technology actually developed), but he puts forth a second hypothesis that the fractured geography of Europe, with mountains and seas establishing natural barriers behind which small nations could establish a limited amount of periodic independence was the key. Whereas China could be dominated by a single (army backed) bureaucracy for hundreds of years at a time, stiffling development of “radical” ideas or techniques, European empires were constantly being challenged by groups who could break away from the empire long enough to engage in heretical thinking or technological development, so that Europe became a fertile location in which to develop technology races.
(In the century preceding the European explosion across the world, China developed a fleet of ships that could have overwhelmed anything that Europe could have sent their way for several hundred more years. China actually did send fleets of exploration around the Indian Ocean.* An internal dispute of palace politics in which xenophobes gained the upper hand resulted in the dismantling of the fleet and the destruction of their shipyards barely a generation before the Europeans showed up to challenge the Chinese on their own soil. No equivalent authority had the power to issue any similar command in Europe.)
- There have been recent claims that have greatly exaggerated what the Chinese actually did and could have accomplished, but there is no question that their maritime forces were much greater than anything that Europe had at a comparable period.
And besides, the civilizations that started it all in the Northern Hemisphere were all in the warm/temperate zones. The idea that cold climates spur civilization isn’t supported by the facts.
I think that north vs south is a somewhat misleading way of looking at the split. The climate related theory actually stands up better if you consider that the band between the tropics is hostile to development. Compare tropical Africa to non-tropical Africa. The presence of marked seasons is probably a better predictor of whether a region develops agriculture/technology.
The colonial influence argument has some validity, but in itself it fails to explain why New Zealand (non-tropical) is wealthier than Jamaica (tropical), for example. I’m also not sure that such LA countries as Argentina and Uruguay should be classed as “undeveloped”. It’s also worth noting that the (habitable) landmass in the northern hemisphere is simply much larger than the landmass in the southern hemisphere.
Two massive problems.
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Civilisation and efficient farming developed at least once independently in and around Mesopotamia. These are not exactly cold regions. Egypt was the world superpower for over a century and is not cold and is actually primarily in Africa. Moreover Egypt was one of the primary food providers that enabled the existence of the Greek and Roman empires so it’s hardly plausible to suggest that its farming practices were ever inefficient.
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I can’t think of any way to measure the efficiency of a farming practice beyond the amount of food produced. The highest population densities ever maintained by pre-industrial farming were in the highlands of New Guinea. That’s not exactly a cold region so the idea that temperature somehow precludes efficient farming is clearly untrue.
The trouble is that there is just as much if not more warfare in tropical societies than there is in temperate societies. I don’t quite know where anyone gets the idea that tropical people don’t practice warfare but many of them have been in a state of constant war for centuries.
It explains it quite well, actually. Jamaica was developed as a colony in the classic sense of producing wealth for the homeland, with the additional burden of relying extensively on slave labor. New Zealand was developed as a land that was settled rather than colonized. (In both cases, the indigenous people were killed off or marginalized fairly quickly.)
For a clearer counter-example to a hot=torpid/cool=industrious thesis, Southern India is currently much more “productive” than Northern India. (And, of course, it was the warm-climate Romans who brought industry to Northern Europe, initially, in the form of roads, aqueducts, stonemasonry, organized farming, etc., and Roman civilization, itself, fell in the West only after being overwhelmed by the northern barbarians.)
To the extent that temperature actually played a role in development, I would suggest that the Europeans from their cool climate tended to settle in areas more nearly like their own temperate lands (North America above Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina, Chile, South Africa, Zimbabwe/Rhodesia while only exploiting through colonialism lands that were hotter. Thus, the Europeans invested infrastructure in lands in which they would settle while tending to send only colonial administrators (and armies) into hotter lands and establishing only marginal political and economic infrastructures there.
Not sure what the thrust of your argument is here. The continuing presence of native peoples is a factor in the present lack of economic development ? In the case of Jamaica this would be what, Arawaks ? Or were you thinking more in terms of the imported Africans having a lack of political/economic sophistication ?
I tend to think of the differences more in terms of a fundamentally development hostile environment in the tropics rather than a matter of intrinsic characteristics of peoples.
Of course, Jamaica vs New-Zealand may simply be a bad example of that.
A good point in regard to the choice of location for European settlements, but doesn’t really address the question of the lack of economic development in the tropics before the colonial period.
One argument I’ve seen somewhere on these boards (I think) is that the temperate zones have a more predictable climate for agricultural production. Many portions of Africa, for example, are subject to long term drought, causing famine. It’s not only plenty that is necessary for development (so the argument goes) - it’s regular plenty.
THere was a column about this issue: How come Europeans dominated the rest of the world and not vice versa?
and a thread: How Did Europe Come to Dominate The World
Both relevant, since, as rfgdxm pointed out in the first response, obviously the technological advancement of North America, Australia, and New Zealand are direct results of their primary settlement by Europeans.
I definitely remember a real scientific hypothesis recently about this. Damn, wish I had time to find it.
As was alluded to in earlier posts, the weather had something to do with it… or more correctly fertile soil.
Colder climes don’t allow rapid decomposition of organic matter in soil, so it accumulates and the soils become richer.
In warmer climes all of the nutrients are rapidly broken down and rapidly sucked up by any native vegetation. The nutrients are in the trees…the soils are crap. Therefore it was more difficult to establish decent agriculture, which was the vital link to eventual economic wealth.
Where Civilization develops is largely irrelavant to the OP.
Where Industrialization, Banking & modern Economics developed, is the crux of the matter.
The first thing I would take into consideration is the fact that the land masses are more dominant in the northern hemisphere compared to the southern hemisphere. More to the point, you might ask why the tropical regions fare so poorly today compared to the more temperate regions both north and south. That would account for rthe prosperity of the more southern populations of New Zealand and Australia.
I dug into some per capita income facts from the CIA several years ago and not only confirmed the fact that the tropical countries were behind the more climatically temperate countries, but that everywhere around the both the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, a prosperity gradient is evident as one examines an equatorial country relative to ints neighbours both north and south.
In short, I would suggest that among many other considerations already pointed out in this thread, politics, soil fertility, natural resources, etc, the overwhelmingly consistant data would tell us that climate is a major background factor towards how well a society achieves prosperity by modern standards.
Here’s the thread where I presented the facts to back up my point of view.
There is a pretty large difference between the style of agriculture practised in more temparate climes, and that commonly found in the tropics, like New Guinea.
In more temperate areas, the seasons (or yearly flooding of the Nile, in Egypts case) pretty much force everyone to harvest the bulk of the food supply at the same time - this makes it much easier for the tax collectors of the local thug to collect a surplus, which then goes into funding public infrastructure.
More tropical areas like New Guinea tended to have a more “garden” agriculture system - since everyone would be harvesting their crops at different times, and basically harvesting smaller fields for a couple weeks worth at a time, with another field ready that will mature in a couple weeks, collecting taxes is quite difficult. Thus, the funding needed to start a civilzation is harder to get.
I also agree, the presence of warfare is tropical countries is amazingly ignored by most people. It is amazing how many people don’t have the slightiest clue that almost 4 million people died just a couple of years ago
in the Second Congo War.
Actually, my parenthetical remark was, literally, a parenthetical remark indicating one similarity between the two nations so that it would be noted that any expanision of the topic might require further discussion. For example, the removal of indingenous peoples and the importation of slaves would not apply to European colonization of the West Coast of Africa, the Indian sub-continent, or Southeast Asia.
I doubt that imported Africans were any less capable of acquiring political or economic sophistication than the European colonizers/settlers. However, their status in a slave economy would tend to indicate that they were not provided the education or experience that would lead to economic and political traditions.
Note that among economies in formerly colonized nations in which the Europeans simply imposed their rule over an existing structure–India, Pakistan, Malaysia, Indonesia, Philipines, and similar lands–they have fared somewhat better than those nations–Nigeria, Congo (either), Ghana, Angola, etc–where the local society was disrupted by arbitrary European-imposed boundaries.
Obviously, even among those countries that are doing “better,” few are doing “well.” On the other hand, we still see a general trend in which less European disruption (as opposed to wholesale imigration) leads to better recovery regardless of climate.
Natural resources will also play a part in the development of current wealth. In this case, where it can be demonstrated that a lack of minerals or poor soil for cultivation is a direct result of a tropical location, then I would guess that the “tropical” argument may have some basis. For example, there tend to be far more harvestable fish in the colder climes of the oceans, so that inhospitable Iceland (no arable land) can still provide a manageable economy that is roughly twice that of Barbados (37% arable land) with similar populations.
I think the short answer to the OP is: While geography is closely tied to the history of nations, its exact influences and impacts are still a matter of great debate.
But trying to camouflage the White Man’s Burden with contrived meteorology is just dumb.
Hey, thanks everyone! This clears up a lot.
There’s two big problems with that.
The first is, as I already noted, Mesopotamia, Egypt and PNG all have incredibly high rates of soil fertility and incredibly efficienient ‘decent’ agriculture. None of those regions is even vaguely cold.
The second problem is that decomposition and soil nutrients aren’t linked in that way to temperature. It’s not as simple as saying that higher temperatures = less fertile soil. A greta many cold climates have severaly impoverished soils and a great many tropical climes have incredibly fertile soil.
As science goes this hypotheis is pretty easy to falsify.