World Development Throughout History
There is one more point to consider about the GDP map shown earlier: It only shows one point in time. The map tells us something about development around the world today, but it doesn’t explain how we got here. Even the Rosling video, which shows an animation over time, doesn’t offer much in the way of explanation. This leaves out the important question: Why is it that some countries are more developed – or at least have more money – than others?
Understanding the patterns of development we see today requires understanding the history of development around the world. Historical geography is the study of the historical dimensions of our world and is very important here. It turns out that certain aspects of the environment have played important roles in the history of development on Earth. This is a very old story, and it’s worth starting at the beginning: at the origin of agriculture. Agriculture is an important starting point for development because the increased food supplies enable larger populations and enable some people to devote their time to tasks other than producing food. This labor specialization is necessary for the diverse other human activities required for development.
Agriculture originated independently in several regions around the world. In the map below, the green areas are regions where agriculture originated and the arrows show directions that agriculture spread from its areas of origin.
But all agriculture is not equal. Some agriculture is more productive than others. Likewise, some of these regions where agriculture originated are likely to develop more successfully than others. Key factors include the region’s growing conditions (including temperature, precipitation, latitude, and soils) and the types of plants and animals available for planting and domestication. Many regions had good growing conditions, but of all the regions in the world, one had especially rich plants and animals to use. That region is the Fertile Crescent, which is located in the Middle East as seen on the map above.
Consider This: The Fertile Crescent’s “Geographic Luck”: Guns, Germs, and Steel
Guns, Germs, and Steel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book written by geographer and physiologist Jared Diamond. In the book, Diamond seeks to answer a question posed to him by a man in Papua New Guinea: Why does Diamond have so much more “cargo” than the Papua New Guineans? “Cargo” here essentially means “stuff,” including advanced stuff like helicopters. Note that Papua New Guinea has had agriculture for a long time – it is the green space located just north of eastern Australia on the map above. Why didn’t Papua New Guinea’s agriculture lead to advanced civilization as it did elsewhere? The explanation that Diamond comes up with is that Papua New Guinea had less “geographic luck:” It had less in the way of resources conducive to successful agriculture, in particular, plants and animals. In contrast, the Fertile Crescent had better resources.
In order to learn more about Diamond’s ideas, please watch part of the National Geographic video made based on Guns, Germs, and Steel. Please begin at Episode 5, at time 4:30. Then watch Episode 6 from the beginning through time 8:25. As you watch the videos, consider this: What are the major parts of Diamond’s arguments? What are critiques that others have made? How does Diamond respond? Is his response successful?
Video: Guns, Germs, and Steel Part 5 of 18 (4:30-9:18, 4 minutes and 48 seconds)
Presenter (4:30): The big four livestock animals—cows, pigs, sheep, and goats—were native to the Middle East, the very same area that was home to some of the best crops in the world. It was also home to some of the best animals. Little wonder that this area became known as the Fertile Crescent. The people of the Fertile Crescent were geographically blessed with access to some of the best crops and farm animals in the ancient world, giving them a huge advantage. What had begun with the sowing of wheat and the penning of goats was leading toward the first human civilization.
The archaeological site of Göbekli Tepe in southern Jordan is 9,000 years old, but it has all the hallmarks of a town. A few hundred people lived there in rows of houses that were a wonder of technology. Every time I visit, I am amazed by what those people were doing. Some of the houses had a kind of air conditioning—this window here is for controlling the air coming from the street inside the house. The walls and the floors of the houses were covered with plaster from the inside, at least. People were starting to move toward the concept of homes—not just places to sleep, but proper homes. They began decorating the houses from the inside. People started investing in their homes, as plaster was time-consuming, effort-consuming, and expensive to apply.
As villages grew bigger, there were more people to work the land. More people could produce more food more efficiently, enough to support specialists within the community. Freed from the burden of farming, some people were able to develop new skills and technologies. Making plaster from limestone was a major technological breakthrough. The stones had to be heated for days at a time at a temperature of 1,000°. While it may seem insignificant today, understanding how to work with fire was the first step toward forging steel, a technology that would transform the world.
By contrast, places like New Guinea never developed advanced technology. Even today, some people in the highlands are working in ways that have barely changed for centuries. When I first came to New Guinea in the 1960s, people were still using stone tools like axes in parts of the island. Before European arrival, people were using stone tools everywhere in New Guinea. So, why didn’t New Guinea develop metal tools on its own? Eventually, I realized that in order to have metal-working specialists who could figure out how to smelt copper and iron, the rest of society, the farmers, would need to generate enough food surpluses to feed them. But New Guinea’s agriculture was not productive enough to generate those food surpluses, and the result was no specialists, no metalworkers, and no metal tools.
Video: Guns, Germs, and Steel Part 5 of 18 (0:00-8:25, 8 minutes and 25 seconds)
Presenter: The way of life in New Guinea was perfectly viable; it had survived intact for thousands of years. But according to Diamond, people didn't advance technologically because they spent too much time and energy feeding themselves. Then Westerners arrived and used their technology to colonize the country.
Yet for all its advantages, the Fertile Crescent is not the powerhouse of the modern world, nor is it the breadbasket it once was. How did it lose its head start? Within a thousand years of their emergence, most of the new villages of the Fertile Crescent were abandoned. Ironically, the region had a fundamental weakness. Despite having some of the most nutritious crops on the planet, its climate was too dry and its ecology too fragile to support continuous, intensive farming. People were destroying the environment. The waters had been over-exploited, the trees had been cut, and this is what happened when you face a dilemma. You are facing the wall. You will end with a landscape like that—few trees, no grass, and less water. So what we are looking at today is the outcome of exploiting the environment. Unable to farm their land, entire communities were forced to move on. The advantages they had accrued from centuries of domestication might have been lost, but again, geography was on their side.
The Fertile Crescent is in the middle of a huge landmass—Eurasia. There were plenty of places for farming to spread, and crucially, many of those places were to the east and west of the Fertile Crescent, at roughly the same line of latitude. Why is that so important? Because any two points of the globe that share the same latitude automatically share the same length of day, and they often share a similar climate and vegetation. Crops and animals domesticated in the Fertile Crescent were able to prosper at other places along the east-west axis of Eurasia. Wheat and barley, sheep and goats, cows and pigs all spread from the Fertile Crescent east toward India and west toward North Africa and Europe. Wherever they went, they transformed human societies. Once the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent reached Egypt, they caused an explosion of civilization.
Suddenly there was enough food to feed the pharaohs and generals, the engineers and scribes, and the armies of people required to build the pyramids. The same is true of European civilization. From ancient times until the Renaissance, the crops and animals of the Fertile Crescent fed the artists, inventors, and soldiers of Europe. In the 16th century, the same crops and animals were taken by Europeans to the New World. At the time, there was not a single cow or ear of wheat in all the Americas. Now, there are 100 million cattle in the U.S. alone, and Americans consume 20 million tons of wheat a year. Modern industrialized America would be unthinkable without the spread of farming from the Fertile Crescent.
There are some who think Jared Diamond's argument is too neat and easy. Can the distribution of wealth and power really be reduced to cattle and wheat? What about culture, politics, and religion? Surely they've been just as important. Diamond's been criticized for being too deterministic, for ignoring the part people have played in shaping their own destiny. My years in New Guinea have convinced me that people around the world are fundamentally similar. Wherever you go, you can find people who are smart, resourceful, and dynamic. No society has a monopoly on those traits. Of course, there are huge cultural differences, but they’re mainly the result of inequality, not its root cause. Ultimately, what's far more important is the hand that people have been dealt—the raw materials they've had at their disposal. New Guineans acquired pigs from Eurasia, but not cows, sheep, goats, horses, wheat, or barley. They didn’t develop in the same way as Europeans and Americans because they didn’t have the same raw materials.
I'm not saying that those divisions of the world are set in stone and can’t be changed. It’s quite the opposite. The towns of Papua New Guinea are becoming bigger and more developed, populated by modern New Guineans trying to catch up with the rest of the world. Unfortunately for them, there's still a big gap to overcome. “Why do white men have so much cargo and we New Guineans have so little?” Yali caught me by surprise 30 years ago. I had no idea what to say to him then, but now I think I know the answer. It wasn’t for lack of ingenuity that your people didn’t end up with modern technology. They had the ingenuity to master the difficult New Guinea environments. Instead, the whole answer to your question was geography. If your people had enjoyed the same geographic advantages as my people, your people would have been the ones to invent helicopters.
[Required transcript end at 8:25]
Environmental Determinism
The idea that the outcomes of civilization were determined entirely by environmental factors is known as environmental determinism. This idea has been heavily critiqued. Even though environmental factors like plants and animals for agriculture can help explain some major patterns in development, such as why advanced civilization developed in Eurasia but not in Papua New Guinea, it cannot explain everything. For example, it cannot explain the major differences in development found today between adjacent countries such as the Dominican Republic (richer) and Haiti (poorer) or South Korea (richer) and North Korea (poorer). The distinction between the Dominican Republic and Haiti is even visible from space. Environmental determinism assumes that the environment determines all development and difference, but some patterns, like what we observe between the Dominican Republic and Haiti, are not explainable by environmental factors alone.
In this image, Haiti is on the left and the Dominican Republic is on the right. This part of Haiti is almost completely deforested, as is much of the rest of the country, but the deforestation ends abruptly at the political border. From our systems perspective, this is clearly humanity impacting the environment, not the environment impacting humanity. What is important to understand is that the patterns of development that we see have both environmental and social causes. The environment can explain some of why advanced civilization emerged on Eurasia instead of elsewhere, but only social factors can explain why, for example, the Dominican Republic is richer than Haiti or South Korea is richer than North Korea. In other words, environmental resources can contribute to development trajectories, just like many other geographic factors such as culture, climate, topography, proximity to major waterways, etc. But no single one of those components is ever the determining factor.
Environmental determinism came to prominence in the early twentieth century, but its popularity declined over time. This is partly due to its shortcomings, and also a recognition that it was often used as a justification for colonial conquest and slavery. In contrast to the unidirectional conceptualization of human-environment relationships, environmental possibilism arose as a concept in which environmental constraints are still recognized but the freedom and capability of humans to change and structure the environment are highlighted. Environmental determinism and possibilism represented geographers’ first attempts at generalizing what accounts for the pattern of human occupation of the Earth’s surface in modern times.