253 The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes ...

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TheSMhoarere Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David
S. Landes

08.01.98 - 12:00 AM | David Gress

ShParrient
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The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some are So Rich and Some So Poor
by David S. Landes
Norton. 650 pp. $30.00

Why is the West not like the rest? That is the old question raised by Adam Smith, Max Weber, and other
titans of modern social thought. Now the Harvard historian David S. Landes has tackled it anew in a work
of deep historical scholarship and charmingly lucid prose.

The very terms of Landes’s inquiry represent a departure from much historical writing today. For over two
decades, the postmodernists, relativists, and multiculturalists who dominate the history departments
have denigrated the big, interesting, and important questions about human social evolution. Either these
questions are said to be unanswerable, or they are deemed irrelevant to such “vital” contemporary
concerns as gender and identity. Thankfully, at the same time the horizons of many academic historians
have narrowed, a few unconventional scholars, Landes among them, have resolutely begun to widen
theirs. What they have found is both more significant and more impressive than anything uncovered by

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« The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes Commentary Ma... http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-n...

world historians of an earlier era like Arnold Toynbee.

The astonishing fact about world history today is that the big questions—how societies came to be as
they are, what causes them to change—can actually be answered on a far more solid basis of evidence
than ever before. Although, as Landes writes, “no one has a simple answer” to the question of why some
nations are rich and some poor, some democratic and others not, we do know that sustained
development had a beginning in a particular time and place: namely, Europe, or to be more precise,
England, in the 18th century. Without assuming that because the West became both rich and free it was
fated to become so, or that the path to wealth and liberty is an easy one to follow, Landes enables us to
separate out the elements that make for success.

He does so by setting the career of the West in a fruitful comparative context. By exploring the paths
taken by China, India, Islamic societies, Africa, and Latin America—paths that led to poverty and
stagnation—he highlights and isolates the peculiar symbiosis of elements that characterizes the rise and
fall of nations. He also puts to rest—once and for all, one hopes—the notion that Western modernization
was achieved at the expense of the East and South.

To this notion—that European prosperity was built on the backs of Chinese inventors, black African
slaves, or Asian traders—Landes makes the obvious reply: if, as some historians assert, the Asians were
civilizationally far ahead before being despoiled by rapacious Europeans, why was it the latter who
showed up in the Indian Ocean to trade and conquer, and not the former in the North Sea? As for the
inventions—gunpowder, paper, and printing—often touted by those who assert Chinese primacy in
particular, these, Landes demonstrates, existed for centuries in China without spurring economic
progress. By contrast, no sooner had they arrived in Europe than they were deployed to multiply power,
skills, and mobility and to spark a wave of innovation that in next to no time surpassed anything to be
found in Asia.

_____________

What, then, did enable Europe to take off as it did? Fundamental to its breakout, in Landes’s view, was
its favorable geography: a temperate climate of mild winters and wet summers that permitted hard work
and, crucially, farming without the necessity of large-scale irrigation. In stressing this last point, Landes
rehabilitates the work of Karl Wittfogel, who, in Oriental Despotism (1957), held that societies like China
with a resource base of large rivers and irrigated fields could only survive on the basis of forced labor
and the expropriation of power and energy by a ruthless central authority.

As Wittfogel also pointed out, the Soviet Union under Communism resurrected this crippling and
tyrannical system of government. But Landes is no geographical determinist. Fair weather and the like
are not enough; it takes people and incentives to bring about change. To geography, therefore, one must
add politics, culture, and values. The politics, in Europe’s case, were those of a fragmented continent
where rulers had to temper power with justice; if they did not, their most productive subjects would find a
way to emigrate. This again provides a contrast to the equally skilled but less fortunate Chinese, who, no

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« The Wealth and Poverty of Nations by David S. Landes Commentary Ma... http://www.commentarymagazine.com/article/the-wealth-and-poverty-of-n...

matter what kind of regime was imposed on them, had nowhere to turn.

As for culture and values, the Europeans were a people who married late, spaced the births of their
children, and maintained just enough population pressure to encourage efficient use of resources
without swamping fragile economies. Of course, before economic growth took off in the 18th century,
these habits and values were not always decisive: famines and plagues culled the European population
as they culled others. The point is that Europe’s cultural attributes were already in place, and had been
in place from deep within the medieval past.

In arguing for the role of culture, Landes in effect carries out another rehabilitation—in this instance of
Max Weber, whose notion that Calvinist Protestantism peculiarly promoted habits of investment and
innovation has not been popular with historians in recent years. But why not? Weber, writes Landes, was
clearly right, both theoretically and empirically: “The heart of the matter lay indeed in the making of a
new kind of man,” at once “rational, ordered, diligent, productive,” and aware of time. Concerning this
last capacity, Landes, building here on his previous book, Revolution in Time: Clocks and the Making of
the Modern World (1983), shows just how significant to economic development have been the desire and
the ability to measure time independently of sun, weather, and stars.

_____________

Landes’s wide-ranging excursion makes it clear, then, that Europe achieved its position of predominance
by an ever-shifting mix of geopolitics, culture, values, and opportunities seized. Unfortunately, when it
comes to declaring which among these elements was decisive, or even preeminent, he draws back and
turns frustratingly coy. Thrusting before us a whole variety of determinants, and rightfully scorning
single-cause theories, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations ends up explaining too much and, therefore,
too little.

Still, there are hints, and the hints point to the absolutely indispensable role of cultural attitudes. In the
final analysis, what seems to count most in Landes’s view are “work, thrift, honesty, patience, tenacity.”
And therein lies a moral. As The Wealth and Poverty of Nations indisputably demonstrates, there are no
free lunches in the continuing global competition, and front-line societies, like those of the West, can fall
behind. For this sobering and necessary reminder, too, we are in David Landes’s debt.

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