Geography as Destiny: A Brief History of Economic Growth

In the 1970s Harvard undergraduates used to be offered what was called the Sherwin-Williams course. In lieu of a single coherent economic history, a galaxy of faculty stars would "paint the globe." One after another they would describe to their audience, seated in the university's vast Memorial Hall, different facets of world economic history-first the experience of Europe, then America, then Asia, and finally, time permitting, other parts of the world. What the course offered in variety, it lacked in coherence. But no one felt capable, or at least inclined, to describe a whole that was more than the sum of these parts.

Few scholars, in other words, have the courage to pose the questions addressed by David Landes in his new book. Consciously echoing the title of Adam Smith's classic, the author sets out to explain nothing less than the wealth of nations-why some are rich while others are poor. Even fewer scholars aspiring to answer such questions would be taken seriously in an age when economists specialize in technical treatments of narrow topics and historians indulge in postmodern analyses of gender and identity. But Landes has exceptional credentials. Having moved across departments at Harvard, from history to economics, disciplinary boundaries do not deter him. His 1969 book, The Unbound Prometheus, may be the single most widely read history of Western technology. The present book, a lineal descendant of that predecessor, shows every sign of having been carefully crafted over many years. In it Landes enlarges his canvas to cover not just technology but other aspects of economic growth, and not just Western Europe but the world.

To be sure, there have been previous attempts to pull this off, starting with Smith himself, who saw economic growth as a single coherent process driven by the expansion of the market. But Smith focused on the growth of trade and did not appreciate the industrial and technological revolutions going on around him. Landes is a powerful advocate of capitalism, but the writer in whose footsteps he follows most closely is, ironically, Karl Marx. Marx, like Landes, saw technological change and capital accumulation as powerful engines of economic growth sweeping aside all in their paths. Of course, Marx reached a different verdict than Landes on the long-run viability of capitalism and offered a rather mechanistic rendition of the growth process, positing that the less-advanced economy sees in the more-advanced economy an image of its future (in other words, that all countries follow the same development trajectory).

Alexander Gerschenkron, for many years Landes' colleague, offered an improved model of development. According to Gerschenkron in his 1970 book, Europe in the Russian Mirror, some countries, of which Russia was prototypical, initially lacked the economic and social preconditions for capitalist development. The more backward the economy in this sense, the later its industrialization. But the longer industrialization was delayed, the faster it went once started, since the latecomer could import the most advanced technology. It followed that economic structure differed between early and late industrializers: the economies of the latecomers were more capital intensive, and the state, heavy industry, and large banks played more important roles in surmounting the obstacles to industrialization. Germany was a classic late industrializer, Britain the early bird.

But Gerschenkron's geographic competence was limited, his account stretching no further east than European Russia. His emphasis on the ability of bankers, managers, and government officials to find substitutes for growth's missing requirements only heightened the mystery of why substantial parts of the world were so resistant to change.

WEATHER IS DESTINY

If one approach to the historical study of economic growth can be said to be the most influential, it is that which takes technology as the fundamental force for growth. This was the focus of Landes' teacher, Abbott Payson Usher, as it has been for generations of historians of Western technology. Their agenda has been to model technological change as an endogenous process. They look not simply at the consequences of technological change, but also its causes. Technical progress, in this view, accelerated in the West following the Renaissance and Reformation, which cultivated a culture of rationality and fostered systematic curiosity. It responded to the expansion of trade in Smith's century, since increased economic mobility facilitated the flow of information and expanding commerce held out the lure of greater profits. It encouraged and was encouraged by the limited state, which provided inducements for industry but allowed markets to operate and limited interference by foreign marauders and the tax man.

Recently, this tradition, emphasizing the singularity of Western technological achievement, has fallen out of favor in the academy. In the now-fashionable multiculturalist view, Europe's knowledge and know-how did not surpass those of other civilizations until the beginning of the nineteenth century. Gunpowder, paper and printing, and the first long-distance explorers all came from the East, after all. Europe was just luckier, or at best more systematic in exploiting the discoveries and resources of other regions.