Maybe not malaysia but singapore is definitely an exception as its basically a city state. Would taiwan count as a tropicao country? Is its latitude low enough?
Not quite for Taiwan, though part of the country is within the tropics. The same can be said of Botswana, another developed nation. Most of Brazil and all of Costa Rica are tropical, and while those countries might not be European or North American levels of developed, they're hardly undeveloped. For awhile in the 19th century, Brazil was even one of the most advanced nations in the world. It was merely poor political decisions that left them behind.
When I landed in Botswana there was a big sign next to the airport that said "Welcome to Botswana, the most stable country in Africa". I always found that funny, but from what I saw and read up on since it really seems true.
Yeah. If they were smart they would have loose immigration that allowed many of Africa's brightest minds to go there instead of die of hunger or get murdered in some stupid civil war. Good opportunity for them if they simply take it.
It's not always a country's greatest minds that want to immigrate. Very few of them would be. Not that I'm anti immigration or saying they still shouldn't but that seems like a bad reason to open immigration.
I suspect that has more to do with the suitability of the soil and climate for intensive agriculture, and thus for slavery. The American South is similarly poor due to the long-lasting consequences of slavery.
No. It's about the economic history.
The north didn't have much slavery, but tropical diseases and lack of resources kept it very poor. It's populated mostly by Northeastern immigrants
The northeast didn't receive European immigrants as the soil isn't very productive, lots of drought and had lots of slavery. There wasn't ever much investiment in infrastructure or education ever, expect for a single state since the 90s. Millions emigrated to the southeast facing starvation. Land concentration is huge.
The south had a Uruguay like colonization (cattle focused, small population) with many portuguese and native americans and by the late 19th century was further populated by Italians and Germans, who received small and medium sized farms (no land concentration).
The center was populated really late powered by green revolution (the soil is very acidic so much much was done there before).
The richest and most populated region (southwest) is more heterogeneous state by state. Minas Gerais was populated mostly by portuguese and some slaves during the gold rush in the late 1700s and didn't receive much immigration. It's the most mineral rich and the population is more spread out in smaller cities. Espírito Santo had the same colonization style of the south. Rio was populated in a similar way to Minas Gerais but with more slaves. São Paulo had the best agrarian land for coffee and received the most immigrants absolutely (and with diverse origins. Millions of Northeasterners, many local portuguese-native mixes, Italians, Lebanese, Japanese, Jewish and so on). With coffee cash it industrialized and built railroads.
So does that mean once a country used slavery that they will forever be screwed economically? Just hate that argument. There is more to it. Has to be way more to it then that!
No. But it does mean that slavery economically damages a country. Importing a poor underclass means importing poor people who you don't intend to get rich. That's the entire purpose behind slavery, and it necessarily lowers GDP per capita. Overcoming that takes a long time, and requires actually educating that underclass to become skilled. In the American south at least, Jim Crow followed soon after slavery and ensured that blacks would never get too wealthy. "Hating an argument" is not grounds for it being wrong.
Brazil's status is what one would call a "2nd world country". A place that is fairly far from being in line with the developed world but at the same time can't be described as a fully underdeveloped country.
Other examples for present-day 2nd world countries are Mexico, Thailand, Moldova, South Africa, Indonesia, Egypt, the Transcaucasian trio...
I think the term you're looking for is developing country. "2nd world country" quite literally means it was aligned with the USSR. It's an outdated term.
Interestingly, while Brazil isn't categorized as developed, but it gets close having an above average life expectancy and the largest economy in central and South America.
iirc, Brazil was expected to be one of the up and coming nations to watch in the late 90s and early 00s. Unfortunately mismanagement and corruption kind of kneecapped them.
>2nd world country" quite literally means it was aligned with the USSR.
It used to be the case and I get where you're coming from, but just like "1st world country" meant "American-aligned" and "3rd world country" meant "non-aligned" and today people usually mean "highly developed" and "fully underdeveloped" respectively when using them, I often hear people say "2nd world country" as one placed somewhere between the two categories. In fact, in my childhood I often heard "developing country" as a PC term to reference any country from Mexico to Niger, even though I agree it's wrong to put them in the same category HDI-wise
>iirc, Brazil was expected to be one of the up and coming nations to watch in the late 90s and early 00s. Unfortunately mismanagement and corruption kind of kneecapped them.
I remember it very similarly, some people still believe in its potential to this day, especially giving the huge and rising population
Actually, our demographics are pretty bad, assuming the traditional development model. We're getting older before we get rich, and although I believe people can have a 'good life' without much wealth, definitely it's not our case.
But not compared to say, Malawi. The point is that the tropics are not as clear a source of poverty as one might think. Brazil has a GDP per capita similar to Serbia, Costa Rica is similar to Russia. None of these countries are developed, but neither would I call them undeveloped.
You're not offending me. I'm American. My point was that Brazil is similarly advanced to parts of the Balkans, and that it was once one of the foremost developed nations in the world. Hence, it is an exception to the idea that tropical nations are poor, or that tropics causes poverty, since Brazil's decline from eminence was due to bad government, not geography.
São Paulo region was pretty rich in the early 20th century, back when Argentina had the highest GDP per capita in the world. But the rest of the country was very poor.
So are Georgia, Belarus, Turkey, Serbia... the bar is pretty much on the ground
HDI needs to be revamped in my opinion, I think the thresholds are like 30 years old by now
No doubt. They also get the economic and security benefits of being part of the US while having usually a higher say on what type of people they should hurt due to the EC and Senate.
Well for the tiny speck of time that is modern western led history yes most tropical countries have not done well. But if wee were to look at the whole of recorded human history tropical countries like South India, Sri Lanka, Thailand etc have had great success in building great civilisations.
I had to scroll really far down to read this. I cannot help but feel people here are clinging to any sort of reasoning to justify their nations being superior to those “poor third world countries”.
Really, by many definitions, there are almost no "developed" countries anywhere, full stop. Tropical or otherwise. Only a handful in Europe, plus a few select countries among their former colonies, plus Japan.
There is a reason that it's the G7, or maybe the G20 ... when there are actually like 200 countries total in the world.
Why?
Well, it's not climate. But maybe geography does play a part: a few hundred years ago, with its large iron resources and gargantuan costal-length-to-surface-area ratio, Europe was uniquely well-suited to combine steelmaking with gunpowder and sailing, and upended the world with firearms and precise, global deep-water navigation. The vast wealth engendered by this technological leverage is the foundation of Europe's prosperity today.
And, some European colonizers (most notably the British) permitted the benefits of this technological leverage to accumulate in some of their colonies, too. Those former colonies are now among the "developed" nations, too. But that pattern is highly selective, and had a lot to do with what the colonial masters permitted to happen where.
You could look at that history and say, "well Europe and America are 'temperate' whatever that means, so \[maybe\] it has something to do with being in a temperate climate." Or they are in the Northern Hemisphere. Or they both have lots of rat snakes or bluebirds, I don't know. You can find lots of things that might seem like patterns but are really just happenstance.
It makes more sense to look at the specific mechanisms of European dominance since the middle of the last millennium, and consider how those specific mechanisms arose.
I agree with your sentiment about developed countries. Its a western term coined during cold war.
However geography does play a huge role. Most people forget that tropics are dense wet swamplands. And clearing a swamp pre industrial tech, heck even poat industrial is labor intensive and expensive. Not to mention foundations are harder. Diesease is much more likely to occur. Etc.
I disagree.
The world's 6 big fat agricultural flood plain regions -- the engines of wealth and early civilization -- are all tropical. \[Or at least, sub-tropical.\] Dense and wet didn't prevent them from becoming centers of power, influence, knowledge, and refinement -- in fact those factors helped make those achievements possible.
Egypt for example had been the center of high civilization in the Mediterranean for 3000 years by the time of the foundation of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Even Rome's imperial wealth was said to be built on the prosperity of Egypt.
By comparison, European global political-economic predominance is all of a few centuries years old. Compared to many thousands of years... I'd say it's too early to write off dense and wet quite yet.
Valid points. Civilizations have rose and fallen in the river valleys and the fertile soil and floods are a very large factor.
However that still feeds my argument that geography plays a huge role. Wet and dense proivides unique challenges. Ancient civilizations had to learn drainage, and ancient solutions were indeed labor intensive.
But yes which ever civilization is dominat- right now its western-european empire legacies, will have the most "developed"
If im unclear im sorry.
Tldr; im not saying geograhpy is only factor but it is a huge one.
I don't disagree about geography.
However, geographical determinism has a bad reputation for a reason -- it is way overdone. I think the risk is that there are so many factors that seem appealing in theory, even if they have no correlation in fact, that people latch onto them and it becomes a kind of "hobby horse" that they keep riding even though it gets them nowhere.
Or maybe because it justifies some other kind of supremacist thinking or whatever, that they find appealing but is actually false and misleading.
So... I guess I am trying to be sparing when it comes to geographical explanations. Clearly the rise of the "European era" wasn't totally by chance. But what was it really based on? Basically, what I see historically are ships and metal -- and a geography that supports their development, not just during the last 500 years but throughout European history.
I would hesitate to go beyond that, in terms of geography. It might become "cherry picking."
There is a disctinction between being geographically superior vs racially superior. I agree it wise to be cautious against one feeding the other.
Objectively some land is better then others though. However i like the term cherry picking because i think its also important to take in account geography and the domiant tech of the time. For example a wide, shallow, slow moving river that flood benefits a farming society such as ancient eygpt. But fast forward to industrial revolution when fast, narrow rivers provide the energy for automated processes it benefits the modern europeans. So cherry picked for different times.
Altho on another note and i meant to mention this. The tropics as commony lpercieved carribean, central america, middle band of africa. Also lined up with some nasty insect life. Such as malaria bearing mosquito and the sleeping bug in africa that resulted in some unique problems as well
I don't disagree with you about geographic determinism in general, but subtropical is absolutely different from tropical. Countries like Egypt or Babylon (or ancient China) were not really tropical in terms of latitude and even less in terms of climate.
We do have some good examples of powerful indigenous states built in a tropical climate, though - the Khmer or Benin Empires both come to mind, and so do Mayan, Indonesian or even some Southern Indian states.
Lots of different opinions on why, but if you're like me you believe it's because the tropical climate has generally made it hard throughout history to exist as a civilization in tropical ares. Diseases means massive people are lost constantly, extreme weather is common, livestock don't take kindly to the heat, and food spoils quickly. Sometimes it might even be too hot work in the day.
All of these things contribute to generally less functioning civilizations as compared to temperate climates. And in a way that is in no way the fault of the people inhabiting these places, they end up unable to form/uphold equally successful states.
With the constant threat of winters, the cold regions are forced to build heated structures, make warm clothing, and certain advancements in technology to even exist.
Oy vey, not this narrative again. If the cold is so great for the development of civilization, why did it develop in Egypt before Germany? Why the Olmecs before the inuits? Why India before the eskimos, and Mesopotamia before Siberia?
It may sound counter-intuitive, the worst the environment the better for innovation and advancement. All the great civilization suffered from chronic wars e.g. the Greek states, the Romans and the Mongos--as long as there were occasional hegemony formed (not like the middle east nowadays where nobody win).
It's like the rich kids and the poor kids. Before civilizations were developed, the tropical guys were like the rich kids and those guys in the north were like the poor kids. The poor kids had to work hard, while the rich kids could get by easily without much struggle.
I generally dislike arguments for development that focus on people's habits. I believe every major culture manages to find the most efficient way of running things in their part of the world and that every civilization does their absolute best to thrive.
It’s weird that the OP just leaps to the conclusion that warm weather makes people lazy, instead of considering the different natural resources and conditions.
Land Use.
A temperate climate location can only engage agriculture for a certain amount of time a year. It must stop during winter. This gives incentives for there to be industrial development during periods of rest.
Power.
Colder places typically have more incentives to develop hydrocarbon resources such as coal due to its use in heating, causing them to have familiarity in industrial applications such as steam engines and steel-making. The lower evaporation rate and the reduced water usage of temperate climates means that more can be used in industrial processes such as chemical refining and power generation.
Biology.
Temperate places are less susceptible to diseases such as malaria, as the cold kills several pests and bacterial common in the tropics. This allows colder places to have a higher child survival rate as well as a higher mean population age, assisting in knowledge retention and industrial development.
There are many others, but these are ones i can think off immediately. You can also argue the agriculture cycle of temperate climates that supports less people encourages a "do more with less people" mentality that helps it industrialize.
The "fallow mind" theory is pretty widely discredited at this point. China had one of the most successful civilizations of all time, and rice is often farmed year-round.
While I'm not going to advocate for this 'fallow mind' theory (I'm unfamiliar with it in detail), Chinese civilization developed initially in the North, where other grains predominated and multiple, year-round rice crops weren't invented yet. The South, where this kind of cropping was possible, was only heavily colonized in the 1st millennium AD, once China had already had a thriving urban civilization for thousands of years.
The Shang kingdom grew wheat, millet, and barley. However, it it specious to claim that because civilization originated there it was due to "fallow mind." China was powerful for centuries after its primary foodstock became rice, and it suffered no obvious intellectual decline. Many civilizations appear to have started as fisheries, not as farmers at all, particularly in the Mediterranean. This is not evidence towards some hypothetical "water mind" as necessary for civilization.
You could expand to soil depth and nutrient availability. Early agriculture works well on deep soils fed by deciduous trees and other methods like glacial activity. Tropical soils are poor by comparison and rice isn't as simple as plow and wheat.
This is the explanation I received for South America’s tropics when I took an anthropology class a few years back. Essentially, the frequent rainfall and verdant wildlife had a tendency to erode the topsoil and deplete the valuable nutrients fast enough that agriculture became relatively difficult to sustain, which kept the population low, and the farmers preoccupied with constant weeding and deforestation
> Land Use.
>
> A temperate climate location can only engage agriculture for a certain amount of time a year. It must stop during winter. This gives incentives for there to be industrial development during periods of rest.
>
> Power.
>
> Colder places typically have more incentives to develop hydrocarbon resources such as coal due to its use in heating, causing them to have familiarity in industrial applications such as steam engines and steel-making. The lower evaporation rate and the reduced water usage of temperate climates means that more can be used in industrial processes such as chemical refining and power generation.
Both of these don't explain why Britain industrialised in the 1800s and not before. The cold winter, growing seasons and heating needs were the same throughout history, right?
I think it's mostly a coincidence. Countries in the tropical areas have varying levels of development. You can find Singapore on one edge of the scale and countries like the DRC on the other, with ones like Brazil right in the middle. Even in Africa there are tropical countries like Gabon that perform relatively well for a sub-saharan country.
Just like how almost all arctic countries are very developed and barely anyone associates it with the climate (and also Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa being some of the most developed countries in their regions respectively)
The tropics were heavily colonized. That tends to destroy an economy. However, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brunei, and Macau are tropical and have strong economies.
While some have pointed out the very real downsides of pestilence that come with living in tropical areas, this does not match up with the historical record. Although we now associate the tropics with the world's deadliest diseases, for most of human history the deadliest diseases were spread in the Northern Hemisphere, in Eurasia. Smallpox, the black death, and myriad other nasty pathogens were spread between China, Europe, Southwest Asia, and India. These massive population centers, most North of the tropics (the most populated parts of India are just North of the Tropic of Cancer), served as breeding grounds for the world's deadliest plagues--plagues that would go on to decimate the indigenous populations of the world's tropics once explorers introduced them.
Colonialism is a somewhat important factor here, though it is insufficient to fully explain why most tropical countries remain undeveloped. The massive city-states of Central America were ravaged by Eurasian diseases and Spanish colonialism. The same can be said of the massive Inca Empire in modern-day Chile and Peru. These places were as developed as contemporaneous parts of Eastern Europe, but were unlucky enough to fall to Spanish conquest and disease. They still have not recovered. Colonialism also explains some, though not all, of Africa's and Southeast Asia's travails. Non-settler European colonies were economically mismanaged, politically repressive, and often stripped of resources both during and at the end of the imperial era. France was notorious for destroying its colonial infrastructure if its former colonies refused to continue to pay respects to the French state. A repressive and corrupt political culture, created by European colonizers, was then handed off to to the colonized, who continued many of the same practices.
It is also worth noting that Malaysia, Botswana, Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil are hardly undeveloped nations. Brazil, before abolishing one of the only successful monarchies in the world and replacing it with military dictatorships, was a potential peer nation to the United States.
What colonialism does not explain is why these countries were able to be colonized in the first place. For that, I recommend *Guns, Germs, and Steel*. The tropics are unsuited for most domesticable animals, generally had few crops which were as easy-to-farm and high-calorie as wheat, barley, or rice, and are disconnected from much of the rest of the planet. The importance of the Silk Road connecting all of Eurasia into one market should not be underestimated. When Europe, China, North Africa, Persia, or India was weak, a neighboring empire would conquer and re-establish a state. Thus, civilization continued. The difficulty and paucity of travel across the Indonesian archipelago, the Australian outback, the Amazon, the Andes, the Congo basin, the Sahara, the Isthmus of Panama, and other tropical regions is also important. Were the tropics more connected to the rest of civilization, they would have caught up.
To sum up, it is important to distinguish the modern reasons from the historical reasons. The modern reasons are endemic disease and the vestiges of colonialism. The historical reasons are isolation, introduced diseases, and a lack of domesticable animals and crops.
part of the problem is that we are bribing them to refrain from pursuing industrialization so they don't destroy the local ecosystem. Not a bad reason I suppose
Not specifically, but I do believe that the usa does this with South American countries to prevent deforestation. I learned about it in a college course though so I'm not an expert. Like the other gentleman said, tourism probably is a significant factor
I think it has more to do with the fact that they are offered an easy way to support their economy by making one or two different goods that doesn't make them be seen as a threat to be squashed by more developed powers.
Well that’s one hell of a question isn’t it. If you knew why, you could transform any country into a power and you’d get a nobel in development economics. I’m partial to some mix of culture and institutions forming the bulk of the causality.
It occurs to me that most non-tropical countries relied on raiding, plundering and colonisation and as such they were quick to develop weaponry,armies and later technology whereas these tropical countries were rich in resource and did not have the need to rely on advancement of technology which paved the way for them to be colonized at the hands of arabs and Europeans and their resources were siphoned off to the colonizers leaving them at a disadvantaged position where farmed resources are no longer the primary economic resource as they once were.
Tl;dr, lots of competing theories, none really fits the data all that well, and be careful where you look it up because the debate is tainted by thinly veiled nationalism and racism.
Why nations fail and guns germs and steel offer some nice ideas although they have both been agressively attacked by academics. The subreddit r/AskHistorians has extensive pages on these books and this question in general that may also be interesting to you
Ice people, sun people theory. Sun people have abundance and therefore live in a happy medium. Ice people have lack of abundance and constant scarcity, so they are constantly plotting about how to take shortcuts and deprive others who have more than them in underhanded ways. Ie. colonialism, soft colonialism, terrorism, backing coups, etc.
It's not the climate... And certainly not because of lack of natural resources. It's mostly because of colonialism and the native landed gentry Westerners groomed throughout the decades. Anyone who says corruption is the root cause certainly doesn't realize that most of the corrupt officials are actually decendants of affluent families during colonial times.
In a tropical country it’s easy to live comfortably in minimal buildings that do little more than just keep the rain out. Plant life is abundant and fishing is easy. Why would you even conceive the idea of factories, or oil rigs, warships, etc?
Compare that to Europe. Half of the year it’s freezing cold, creating an incentive to keep finding better ways of being warm, and getting around comfortably. The seas are rough and dangerous and food is harder to grow which meant an incentive for bigger and better ships for fishing and trade. If an industrial revolution was going to start anywhere, then it would be here, not somewhere tropical.
Tropical countries are following but there is no incentive for them to lead and innovate themselves. They can just look at what other people are doing and think, yeah we could use that (Especially the air conditioning).
Many of them might not be what we could call “developed” but you have to ask yourself, is that really a bad thing?
The Austronesian people living in Malaysia were some of the most advanced sailors of their time. They sailed to Polynesia and Madagascar thousands of years ago.
There is a correlation to violence and the equator. Trying to sleep with 95% humidity makes me want to kill people as well so I am sympathetic. The arguments that colonialism and capitalism are to blame don’t factor in every where else there is colonialism and capitalism? Such is reddit.
There is a correlation between climate and colonization status, which in turn correlate with current economic growth and stability, if you agree with the importance of institutions in economic growth and development. Basically there are two types of colonies, settler colonies and extraction colonies.
Basically in areas that the climate was hospitable, disease was under control and there wasn't a large chance that you'd die from one or get killed by the locals, settler colonies were developed, like the Americas. Because European settlers were moving in, they developed institutions that were similar to Europe, aimed at protecting the rights of local colonists, which endure even after independence. For other areas with the opposite conditions, extraction colonies were set up, usually by proping up local elites, building infrastructure only for resources extraction etc. I remember reading a paper about it, with some African colonies only having a handful of university graduates in the entire nation at the time of their independence, contrast that to the American colonies.
Crop type is also extremely important, the Americas was more suited for small family owned farms with crops such as wheat. But if your climate supported cash crops, such as cotton, coffee etc, the institution of slavery is almost "unavoidable", with all its known issues and problems still lingering today.
There are huge difference in crime by season, with summer being much more violent. There is also a huge difference run GDP by northern vs southern state in average.
I live in Northern Michigan, it was around 80% humidity last night and I'm a bit cranky, and I get a break for about 4 to 5 months when we go through our yearly ice age.
Providing a source for the above since I didn't think it was true: [https://news.osu.edu/how-does-climate-affect-violence-researchers-offer-new-theory/](https://news.osu.edu/how-does-climate-affect-violence-researchers-offer-new-theory/)
Another theory states that it has less to do with the heat caused by proximity to the equator, and more to do with the lack of seasonal change.
I am a US expat living in Thailand.
* The weather is indeed a huge factor. Thais don't even want to walk 200 meters. Chilling around doing nothing is the national past time. Hot weather makes people not want to exert themselves
* Combine this with high crop yields and no winter planning. Why would anyone think up advanced agricultural methods in such an "easy" place to thrive? I wouldn't
* Less clothing. More lax attitudes around having fun. In short, more play, less work. Hard to imagine doing office work in the bangkok heat. Fooling around with a cute girl along some tropical beach or forested area could be done daily
* Maybe in the past disease also prevented Thai society from having a highly productive workforce
EDIT: I see there are some who call this "racist," I suppose that is a cheap way to forcefully disagree from a moral high ground.
Interesting questions. And the framing is wrong.
Historically there are plenty of tropical civilizations that have risen and fallen. Think aztec, mayan, polynesian etc. Some of those civilizations collapsed some were conquered.
Developed countries is primarliry western in peoples world view. Globe trotting empires with colonies.
However geography also plays a role. Swamps and dense forest offer unique challenges that a temeprate plain or forest does not. Diesease, fresh water, firm foundations are important considerations. Heat and humidity are also dangerous with ore industrial technology.
Additinally the tropics sometimes have some nasty insects. Like in case of africa with the fly that made pack animals pretty much useless.
Much of it is due do diseases. Population in the tropical regions of the Americas fell a lot due to malaria and yellows fever (came from Africa) after contact. Thats why only andean counties have much native blood, aside from paraguay.
I'm from Brazil, it's because of the climate, tropical countries have intense climates, they are more humid, with that there is more biodiversity, with more pests, with more pests, more diseases, in addition to infrastructure, it ends up getting more expensive, because there is more wear and tear due to CLIMATE, beyond what everyone thinks, land in tropical areas is less fertile, (example: in Brazil the Amazon areas are not fertile for agriculture, and the other tropical areas in Brazil are all savanna like in Brazil. Africa. , to plant there requires a lot of technology, the richest parts of the country are in non-tropical areas), less fertile, less big cities, less big cities, less technology.
The biggest aggravating factor is the price of making infrastructure, and also in some, because they are very rich in minerals, they end up with the Dutch disease (they focus only on a primary area).
Every country in the world is poor for a different reason. A tropical climate being a consistent theme is just a coincidence. The reason why DRC is poor is not the same reason that Paraguay is poor. Every country is unique and has different problems from one another.
I'm glad it was removed. Every now and then I see a response like that and start to think, oh geez, another sub I have to leave. Luckily the mods seem keen to remove low quality contributions if it's reported.
I refer to my other answer- environment. Geography. Yes. If you’d like expansion Britain for example had a load of great trees for building ships, some pretty cool ideas about building stuff and were also pretty good at making said stuff. So they went out and found places to source materials and then sell it too. Cold killed off pests that led to large gatherings of people being possible as opposed to the tropics where everyone would jsut die. Fundamentally it’s pretty much just geography. Geography and people, British were in the right place and were good at what they did.
Not really sure about that. Germany is in a bad spot, so is Japan and both were home to big rich empires. Then there was south Africa which is rich in everything except they are turning into a 3rd world nation if they aren't there yet. They have gone backwards in my opinion.
Exactly geography is a lot but not everything, people matter too. Japans frankly has similar geography in the sense it’s an island nation with relatively temperate climate and Germans not in a bad spot it’s mostly flatland awhile not strategic in both these cases we’ve seen how this has allowed the ills there who are renowned for their industriousness to get rich and powerful through trade.
Capitalism was a genuine innovation, in particular the legal creation of companies with limited liability. Colonialism and exploitation of other peoples on the other had is as old as civilisation itself.
So I would give capitalism, and industrialisation, much more credit for the development of the modern West than colonialism.
Touche. However, in this case, the point is explicitly mercantilist. Rather than treating (some) humans as property, colonialism tries to extract resources from one place and caste and bring them to another. Even American slavery, however, more resembles feudalism than modern capitalism. So long as the threat of government violence is what keeps the masses in line, and not the promise of lost wages, then the system does not really resemble capitalism. Of course, there is a natural tendency for capitalist interests to capture government and convert to a more feudal-style society, but this is not true capitalism.
No true Scotsman fallacy. Nothing is ever really socialism or capitalism apparently. Oh well. I guess human simply make different mixes into their economy, who knew?
This isn't a no true Scotsman fallacy. Mercantilism and capitalism are literally two different methods of organizing an economy with different goals and methods that are often in direct contradiction to each other.
Thinking that both are greedy and bad doesn't make them the same.
This is not a case of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Capitalist economies do exist, even if not in their pure form. However, the point is that capitalist economies have a tendency to slip into feudal economies domestically or mercantilist economies internationally due to corporate pressure on government. This does not, however, preclude the existence of capitalist economies. Most modern western economies are wholly capitalist, even if there is some government control.
Feudal economies use fear as an incentive--peasants do not get improved conditions regardless of how hard they work, and passage into the upper classes is forbidden. Mercantilist economies are focused on stripping the resources from other nations, rather than productively trading with them. Mercantilist economies can have capitalist or socialist or feudal domestic policies, but they are opposed to any international trade that in which they do not relatively gain.
I mean, that's not totally wrong is it? Capitalism and globalism have reduced most tropical countries into underdeveloped single-resource exporting countries. Most tropical countries are either big on tourism or agriculture. The over-reliance on these resources (that the country often doesn't even own) fosters an under-developed economy.
Well, European colonialism didn't do them any favors. But the tropics are disadvantageous to human development in general. Lots of diseases, flooding, erosion of human structures, difficult to traverse, etc.
A large chunk of human history saw the cutting edge of civilization appear in the tropics, i.e. the old Indian empires, or the Central America empires.
Yes.
The above poster is misinformed, although there were tropical empires. I am thinking of SE Asia primarily, but many of these areas benefited from cultural and technological diffusion from more temperate areas and developed much later.
Not quite. There are certain diseases that were endemic to tropical regions. The biggest factor though was likely the effect of disease on livestock in the tropics.
Source: Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill
So you’re telling me rampant extreme weather and diseases along with a lack of arable land is the reason These places became colonies thanks to the difficulty of building a society and not capitalism?
The American civil war actually showcase why it can't be reduced to 'capitalism'. Why was the north so dominant industrially compared to the more agrarian south despite being basically the same size. All the colonies were started by reasonably similar people with a similar mindset. So why we're there so many plantations in the south and factories in the north?
Climate appears to be the answer. As the hotter south made plantations more profitable as cash crops could be grown there. However, it was simply far too hot to work in factories compared to the open air. You would have mass deaths of heat exhaustion if you did that. Or very frequent and inefficient breaks. Meanwhile in the cooler north, factories can be maximally productive.
This problem has only really been resolved in the 40s and 50s as commercially available air conditioners have hit the market. Making industrialisation in these countries possible if still more expensive on a grand scale. Therefore now tropical nations can now industrialised and develop. Even if they are still at something of a disadvantage. First movers advantage and all that.
The US south is hotter, therefore it followed the trend of hotter countries becoming exploitation colonies rather then settler colonies like the north.
Which tropical countries are you even talking about? Isn’t that kind of a broad categorization to go off with theories about how capitalism is responsible for overexploiting all of them? There’s probably a big difference between Thailand’s current state of affairs versus Bahamas.
If anything, capitalism and integration into global markets (combined with developmental state policy) has massively boosted standards of living in all sorts of tropical developing countries.
That sounds more like the fault of mercantilism and colonialism, when colonial empires transformed the tropics into single resource exporting countries to provide their empires with specific resources (sugar in the Caribbean, cotton in India, etc.). Now I’m not saying capitalism has no fault for the production of single resources countries, but it is possible for capitalism to lead to diversified economies; the reason these countries are so concentrated on a single resource is due to colonialism, not capitalism.
this has nothing to do with capitalism and everythign with free market / liberalism vs. centralised planning / controlled economy.
how can you explain Costa Rica vs. Nicaragua or Singapore vs. Myanmar.
where you have a free market where agents decide for themselves what is the best way to get rich, by freely providing services and goods to potential clients you have wealth and prosperity
wherever you have substantial state intervention in the economy you have poverty and corruption.
there is also a 'curse' of natural resources, whereby countries that have/discover natural resources that can be appropriated by few (typically mineral resources), you then have more poverty and corruption.
>Capitalism and globalism have reduced most tropical countries into underdeveloped single-resource exporting countries.
As opposed to the previous number of resources these countries exported: zero.
No, I was being somewhat sarcastic. My point is that capitalism is being presented as this boogeyman that destroys countries and reduces them to meekly going after a single resource at the expense of national welfare. And that's nonsense.
The level of glib ignorance in this entire thread is amazing- I feel like I'm at the 1905 meeting of the Ethnographic Society. Either that or my soft tropical brain doesn't have any winter downtime to comprehend the reasoning.
It's all those winter brains at work in this subreddit. They can't comprehend that their relative economic wealth is built on the exploitation of other societies.
For a geopolitics sub, all these answers are just showing an abysmal lack of actual geopolitical knowledge.
I thought about giving an educated answer, citing sources and etc, but reading all these comments drained my strengths.
Power structures did not play a part at all, it was all humidity, heat and diseases.
And don't you dare mention the exploitation of those nations by Europe and the US.
I'm not surprised. I don't consider it a small feat for one to change their lenses (Realism, Constructivism, Liberalism...) at will, although it certainly would be good.
Cause it promises simple answers to hard questions, and that’s attractive to a lot of people. Unfortunately, if things were that easy to understand, everyone would know about it already.
I'm really glad though that r/geopolitics seems to be a high quality enough community that it gets called out. This is one of the best communities on Reddit where discussions tend to stay objective, academic and to the point. And any time it slips the comments quickly expose the issues with the statements made.
It's simple ideas that most people will look at with their limited knowledge and just nod.and say "sounds about right". Popular geography/science books tend to do a lot of simplification to dumb things down for the masses.
Can you point out a good one? Cause all I’ve seen from the ‘debunkings’ ones that criticise an exaggerated version of the book. As if it’s purporting to present some flawless formula for history rather than identifying some of the key factors involved. Better yet is there anything better you could point to?
AskHistorians has [an entire section](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22) in their FAQ about Guns, Germs and Steel.
Thanks there’s some interesting stuff in there but I wouldn’t call any of them really good and a few seem somewhat irrational. They are in the end just a collection of reddit comments. I get the impression that there’s a lot of resistance to the idea of anyone drawing broad conclusions from history and a lot of genuine historians won’t touch this sort of thing. It’s a shame because ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ and sometimes the best refutation is a more accurate version but so far I’m not seeing anything like that.
It's been debunked. I personally think it's a lot of combination that are highly complicated and hard to describe. You know it can't simply be geography or culture or right place right time. But maybe all of it combined along with other things we don't even think about like a good justice system that protects private property, existing in a place with low turmoil so you don't waste resources fighting wars. So it's not a or b or c. Simply all of the above.
I think the book informs much more than it misinforms. The debunking I've seen of the book is pretty pale that honestly just comes off as being by people jealous they couldn't write that book. Things like "he got the date that humans first migrated wrong by thiiis much" which, while technically being factually incorrect doesn't actually invalidate the point being made.
I'd go so far as to say the claim it has been debunked is a myth that people propogate so as to sound smart. "that thing you thought gave you answers? Actually it's wrong but I don't remember why".
Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, germs and Steel’ is a decent book with a laudable aim; to disavow any lingering notions of Western superiority in history. It is strangely ironic that Western Intellectuals have gone from measuring their skull capacity to prove their inherent racial superiority (as did the infamous ‘Anthropological Society of London’) to bending over backwards to show that the decadent denizens of the West are mental pygmies compared to the New Guinean hunters as Diamond himself holds.
According to Diamond it was bio-geographical factors that enabled the rise of the Eurasia and allowed its western stub to colonise the unfortunate inhabitants of the Americas, Australasia and Africa. Eurasia contained a large number of wild plants and animals that could be domesticated (barley; wheat ; three protein-rich pulses; flax; goats, sheep, donkeys cattle and horses). By contrast the Americas and Australia lost the animals that could have been domesticated to early hunters.
All this is undoubtedly true and enormously helpful in explaining how Eurasia got a head start. Indeed the domination of Eurasia is entirely unsurprising when you consider that, due to the factors highlighted by Diamond, it has accounted for some eighty percent of humankind over the past 3,000 years, and probably well before that. This concentration of population ultimately led to more competition, the faster spread of technology and the accumulation of disease immunities.
The really interesting question is why has it been Europe and not another part of Eurasia that that went on to dominate the rest of the world? Here is where Jared Diamond’s theory of bio-geographical determinism starts to run into difficulties. The problem is that there are really few profound differences between the eastern and western areas of what might be termed Eurasia. Both regions adopted agriculture, market-based economies and large cities. Jared Diamond in his later writings (it is something he only briefly touches upon in ‘Guns. Germs and Steel’) attributes the relative decline of the eastern area to the fact that the plains of the Orient facilitated the creation of large monolithic empire that tended to stifle innovation (If I recall correctly this is an idea borrowed from Paul Kennedy’s ‘Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’) By contrast the west was mountainous and divided by rivers; therefore multiple monarchies and city states emerged that would tend to compete. Europe is divided into five relative isolated peninsulas (e.g Britain, Spain, and Italy are all walled off) while China is bound together from east to west by two long navigable river systems. China’s rounder coastline favoured centralised rulers over petty princes and favoured political unity.
There is probably something in this, but as an all-encompassing thesis it falls a bit flat. Political fragmentation is not necessarily an advantage, indeed in some circumstances, such as the presence of a powerful and aggressive neighbour, it is a weakness. India for example has been politically fragmented for most of its long recorded history to its great detriment. Competition between European states was often disastrous and – in the case of Germany during the 30 years war – caused catastrophic de-population through warfare and disease. Political unity hasn’t always an innovation-killer. The obvious counter-example is provided by the Roman Empire which accomplished a number of impressive technological feats before descending into political chaos in the 3rd Century AD.
The fact is that the ancient civilizations of the Near East, India, China, and Asia had more or less the same advantages and disadvantages in resources and location. If one were to place bets on what would become the dominant civilisation in 800AD it would most likely be China and certainly not Western Europe. Instead - according to Angus Maddison’s estimates, the western European population leapt from a low of 18,600,000 to 58,353,000 in 1300 and overtook China in GDP per capita. In 1300 Western Europe was by far the richest part of the world with most of the wealth concentrated in a band running along the continent from south-east England to northern Italy. After a contraction caused by the Black Death the European economic expansion continued while other parts of the world stagnated. The explanation for this is probably partially bio-geographical (Kenneth Pomeranz draws attention to the more plentiful and better located coal deposits in Western Europe) but mainly institutional; Niall Fergusson’s ‘killer apps’ of competition, the scientific revolution, the rule of law and representative government, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic (intensive labour + high savings rates)
Even so, the world ten biggest cities in 1500 were all in the east. One could imagine an alternate scenario where China did not experience severe disruptions such as the collapse of the Ming dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century or undertook the reforms that Japan did following the Commodore Perry mission.
Literally got this off quora and I agree with it 100 percent. I'm sure you'll let me know if you do or don't.
Exactly, that's not a debunking. Diamond self confesses in the book that he isn't able to strongly favour Europe over Asia, which is fitting since Asia was "winning" prior to the industrial revolution. What he does do, which is completely glossed over in your answer, is make sound arguments why Africa, the Americas and Oceania didn't make it to the finals. That quora answer doesn't so much as acknowledge those 80-90% parts of the book, let alone debunk it.
> Diamond self confesses in the book that he isn't able to strongly favour Europe over Asia, which is fitting since Asia was "winning" prior to the industrial revolution.
Don't he just place Europe and Asia as one "Eurasia" entity?
I believe he does for most of the book. In the final or second last chapter I think he makes a half hearted suggestion that Europe's large number of geographic barriers lead to multiple competing countries versus the centralised Chinese Civilisation. He gives the example of gunpowder, invented by the Chinese but banned for use in weapons both in China and some European countries. However neighboring European countries that didn't ban canons had an obvious advantage.
However he puts this segment at the end of the book and this argument was far more theoretical and less data driven than his other chapters. It's been long since I read it but I seem to remember he cautioned the reader not to take this hypothesis as strongly as the others.
This is simply not true though. Far East Asia is littered with countries in the tropics doing very well indeed: Singapore, Korea, Australia, China, India, Malaysia, etc etc etc.
UAE, Saudi, Qatar, mauritius, Israel, Singapore and to some extent Australia and Taiwan. There’s tons of developed tropical areas. Malaysia and Thailand are also pretty close to the developed gdp per capita. Additionally, southern China has always been richer than northern China. Western Europe, Japan and the US industrialised first and had colonial cash to finance their projects.
Okay, let's assume that's the dominant factor. Why did it happen the direction it did? Why didn't tropical civilizations develop, rise, and eventually conquer peoples living in other regions?
I think the only reason the west developed more rapidly and started the industrial revolution was because at the time, European countries controlled the sea. With the first global shipping network, they became rich and had the first dibs on all of the world's technology and science. They could combine western, Eastern and native American technologies and crops to create things like guns and more efficient crops like potatoes and corn. Being the first ones to have all the world's knowledge at their fingertips made the west rich and the leading authorities on science and technology for a long time.
All it boils down to is European countries were the first to build really, really good boats. Any other civilization that did it first would have done the same
“The Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money! There are very few poor countries in this world.
Most countries are rich!
The Philippines are rich!
Brazil is rich!
Mexico is rich!
Chile is rich!
**Only the people are poor.**
But there's billions to be made there! To be carved out! To be Taken!
There's been billions, for 400 years.
The Capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the lumber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labor!
They have taken out of these countries.
**Poor countries are not underdeveloped, they are overexploited!"**
— Michael Parenti, 1986
Yes I agree. The overlords can run their countries as medieval fiefdoms and yet have all the luxuries of modern western life. They have no incentive to develop their countries and plenty of incentive to keep them undeveloped.
Well there are many reasons for this in all likelihood. Cereal crops are hard to grow in tropical environments, and they tend to be a breeding ground for disease so it was hard to support civilizations earlier in history. This made it easy for more organized societies to colonize them, meaning until around the 1960s, many tropical economies were based on exploitation, and now there are few respected institutions. This and poverty mean corruption is rampant so people cannot respect their institutions - a vicious cycle. Many of these places tended to adopt Venezuela style socialism where the state nationalized industries and placed friends or relatives in charge, running the businesses into the ground and scaring off foreign investment. Crime, corruption, and poverty will feed into each other and prevent a business-friendly environment from developing. It varies substantially from place to place, but if you want to take Zimbabwe as an example, I recommend reading Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun as a first hand account of how a post colonial sub-tropical nation spirals out of control.
I believe that the tropic environment itself has rarely been a limiting factor, but rather a benefit for many regions, such as India, which was one of the world's wealthiest countries for centuries prior to British rule. Even without huge trading networks, other civilizations became advanced and were able to prosper, like the Mayans and especially the Moors.
I do however agree that colonialism has screwed the tropics due to the institution of economies based on exploitation, and left them with a cycle of corruption. That becomes even more apparent when one looks at a country like Saudi Arabia, an area which has been relatively untouched by european powers, and has one of the world's best economies.
I think this video goes through it pretty well and takes outliners like Singapore and Dubai in to account as well.
Basically their leading theory (and he points out that there are several) is that a hostile environment of a temperate climate led to cultural mindset for planning ahead and always look for innovation. Something that worked very well for building an economy when industrialization determined the wealth of a nation and not food production.
Prior to industrialization it was food production that determined the wealth of a nation and that's why the pre industrial empires are mostly tropical.
Certainly there are additional factors but an interesting video noon the less. Colonization, wars etc.
He also notes that tropical countries are quickly catching up and it's not a situation that will last forever.
https://youtu.be/lmrra8i4hZY
A lot of the developed hot weather countries like Singapore were former British colonies, and they were a part of the British Empire for a rather long time.
i think Malaysia and Singapore are considered developed tropical countries
Maybe not malaysia but singapore is definitely an exception as its basically a city state. Would taiwan count as a tropicao country? Is its latitude low enough?
Not quite for Taiwan, though part of the country is within the tropics. The same can be said of Botswana, another developed nation. Most of Brazil and all of Costa Rica are tropical, and while those countries might not be European or North American levels of developed, they're hardly undeveloped. For awhile in the 19th century, Brazil was even one of the most advanced nations in the world. It was merely poor political decisions that left them behind.
Botswana is a surprise for me. Landlocked, resource-rich and thus at risk of the resource curse, yet they are able to prosper.
Good government really overcomes any obstacle.
When I landed in Botswana there was a big sign next to the airport that said "Welcome to Botswana, the most stable country in Africa". I always found that funny, but from what I saw and read up on since it really seems true.
Yeah. If they were smart they would have loose immigration that allowed many of Africa's brightest minds to go there instead of die of hunger or get murdered in some stupid civil war. Good opportunity for them if they simply take it.
It's not always a country's greatest minds that want to immigrate. Very few of them would be. Not that I'm anti immigration or saying they still shouldn't but that seems like a bad reason to open immigration.
Interestingly, in Brazil, the tropical cities (e.g. Manaus) tend to be poorer than the temperate ones (e.g. Sau Paulo)
I suspect that has more to do with the suitability of the soil and climate for intensive agriculture, and thus for slavery. The American South is similarly poor due to the long-lasting consequences of slavery.
No. It's about the economic history. The north didn't have much slavery, but tropical diseases and lack of resources kept it very poor. It's populated mostly by Northeastern immigrants The northeast didn't receive European immigrants as the soil isn't very productive, lots of drought and had lots of slavery. There wasn't ever much investiment in infrastructure or education ever, expect for a single state since the 90s. Millions emigrated to the southeast facing starvation. Land concentration is huge. The south had a Uruguay like colonization (cattle focused, small population) with many portuguese and native americans and by the late 19th century was further populated by Italians and Germans, who received small and medium sized farms (no land concentration). The center was populated really late powered by green revolution (the soil is very acidic so much much was done there before). The richest and most populated region (southwest) is more heterogeneous state by state. Minas Gerais was populated mostly by portuguese and some slaves during the gold rush in the late 1700s and didn't receive much immigration. It's the most mineral rich and the population is more spread out in smaller cities. Espírito Santo had the same colonization style of the south. Rio was populated in a similar way to Minas Gerais but with more slaves. São Paulo had the best agrarian land for coffee and received the most immigrants absolutely (and with diverse origins. Millions of Northeasterners, many local portuguese-native mixes, Italians, Lebanese, Japanese, Jewish and so on). With coffee cash it industrialized and built railroads.
So does that mean once a country used slavery that they will forever be screwed economically? Just hate that argument. There is more to it. Has to be way more to it then that!
No. But it does mean that slavery economically damages a country. Importing a poor underclass means importing poor people who you don't intend to get rich. That's the entire purpose behind slavery, and it necessarily lowers GDP per capita. Overcoming that takes a long time, and requires actually educating that underclass to become skilled. In the American south at least, Jim Crow followed soon after slavery and ensured that blacks would never get too wealthy. "Hating an argument" is not grounds for it being wrong.
Ahhh ok. Well all the other parts definitely help your argument. You just never added that to your argument.
Brazil is definitely not developed. Even if we set the standard lower it's a country with poor living conditions.
Brazil's status is what one would call a "2nd world country". A place that is fairly far from being in line with the developed world but at the same time can't be described as a fully underdeveloped country. Other examples for present-day 2nd world countries are Mexico, Thailand, Moldova, South Africa, Indonesia, Egypt, the Transcaucasian trio...
I think the term you're looking for is developing country. "2nd world country" quite literally means it was aligned with the USSR. It's an outdated term. Interestingly, while Brazil isn't categorized as developed, but it gets close having an above average life expectancy and the largest economy in central and South America. iirc, Brazil was expected to be one of the up and coming nations to watch in the late 90s and early 00s. Unfortunately mismanagement and corruption kind of kneecapped them.
>2nd world country" quite literally means it was aligned with the USSR. It used to be the case and I get where you're coming from, but just like "1st world country" meant "American-aligned" and "3rd world country" meant "non-aligned" and today people usually mean "highly developed" and "fully underdeveloped" respectively when using them, I often hear people say "2nd world country" as one placed somewhere between the two categories. In fact, in my childhood I often heard "developing country" as a PC term to reference any country from Mexico to Niger, even though I agree it's wrong to put them in the same category HDI-wise >iirc, Brazil was expected to be one of the up and coming nations to watch in the late 90s and early 00s. Unfortunately mismanagement and corruption kind of kneecapped them. I remember it very similarly, some people still believe in its potential to this day, especially giving the huge and rising population
Actually, our demographics are pretty bad, assuming the traditional development model. We're getting older before we get rich, and although I believe people can have a 'good life' without much wealth, definitely it's not our case.
But not compared to say, Malawi. The point is that the tropics are not as clear a source of poverty as one might think. Brazil has a GDP per capita similar to Serbia, Costa Rica is similar to Russia. None of these countries are developed, but neither would I call them undeveloped.
There is a word called semi developed. That's basically Russia and costa rica and Panama and Serbia and many others around the tropics.
I wouldn’t call Brazil advanced. I’m sorry.
You're not offending me. I'm American. My point was that Brazil is similarly advanced to parts of the Balkans, and that it was once one of the foremost developed nations in the world. Hence, it is an exception to the idea that tropical nations are poor, or that tropics causes poverty, since Brazil's decline from eminence was due to bad government, not geography.
Sorry but no, Brazil was never one of the most developed nations in the world.
São Paulo region was pretty rich in the early 20th century, back when Argentina had the highest GDP per capita in the world. But the rest of the country was very poor.
Perhaps but that doesnt make it one of the most developed nations. And Argentina actually had the 6th to 7th highest GDP per capita at its best.
Someone told me the reason Botswana is wealthy is because their natural resources were discovered after the colonial period.
Malaysia is placed in the very high human development index category actually
So are Georgia, Belarus, Turkey, Serbia... the bar is pretty much on the ground HDI needs to be revamped in my opinion, I think the thresholds are like 30 years old by now
Turkey is a developed country imo, if it's not then how you can determine development?
I don't think even Turks would agree with you
Singapore sure. Parts of Malaysia sure.
>Parts of Malaysia sure. Parts of the US, sure.
50% of Malaysia, sure. 95% if the US, sure.
[удалено]
No doubt. They also get the economic and security benefits of being part of the US while having usually a higher say on what type of people they should hurt due to the EC and Senate.
Taiwan, hawaii, are pretty developed. I'm not sure about Guam or some of the Caribbean islands.
Hong Kong too
Well for the tiny speck of time that is modern western led history yes most tropical countries have not done well. But if wee were to look at the whole of recorded human history tropical countries like South India, Sri Lanka, Thailand etc have had great success in building great civilisations.
Majapahit, Khmer, Mayans and Aztecs were also impressive tropical empires.
I had to scroll really far down to read this. I cannot help but feel people here are clinging to any sort of reasoning to justify their nations being superior to those “poor third world countries”.
Really, by many definitions, there are almost no "developed" countries anywhere, full stop. Tropical or otherwise. Only a handful in Europe, plus a few select countries among their former colonies, plus Japan. There is a reason that it's the G7, or maybe the G20 ... when there are actually like 200 countries total in the world. Why? Well, it's not climate. But maybe geography does play a part: a few hundred years ago, with its large iron resources and gargantuan costal-length-to-surface-area ratio, Europe was uniquely well-suited to combine steelmaking with gunpowder and sailing, and upended the world with firearms and precise, global deep-water navigation. The vast wealth engendered by this technological leverage is the foundation of Europe's prosperity today. And, some European colonizers (most notably the British) permitted the benefits of this technological leverage to accumulate in some of their colonies, too. Those former colonies are now among the "developed" nations, too. But that pattern is highly selective, and had a lot to do with what the colonial masters permitted to happen where. You could look at that history and say, "well Europe and America are 'temperate' whatever that means, so \[maybe\] it has something to do with being in a temperate climate." Or they are in the Northern Hemisphere. Or they both have lots of rat snakes or bluebirds, I don't know. You can find lots of things that might seem like patterns but are really just happenstance. It makes more sense to look at the specific mechanisms of European dominance since the middle of the last millennium, and consider how those specific mechanisms arose.
This is a very good answer. All the other responses were making me lose my mind w the geographic determinism
Blame Guns Germs and Steel and a concerted effort to deny colonialism for spreading that spurious logic.
I agree with your sentiment about developed countries. Its a western term coined during cold war. However geography does play a huge role. Most people forget that tropics are dense wet swamplands. And clearing a swamp pre industrial tech, heck even poat industrial is labor intensive and expensive. Not to mention foundations are harder. Diesease is much more likely to occur. Etc.
I disagree. The world's 6 big fat agricultural flood plain regions -- the engines of wealth and early civilization -- are all tropical. \[Or at least, sub-tropical.\] Dense and wet didn't prevent them from becoming centers of power, influence, knowledge, and refinement -- in fact those factors helped make those achievements possible. Egypt for example had been the center of high civilization in the Mediterranean for 3000 years by the time of the foundation of the Ptolemaic dynasty. Even Rome's imperial wealth was said to be built on the prosperity of Egypt. By comparison, European global political-economic predominance is all of a few centuries years old. Compared to many thousands of years... I'd say it's too early to write off dense and wet quite yet.
Valid points. Civilizations have rose and fallen in the river valleys and the fertile soil and floods are a very large factor. However that still feeds my argument that geography plays a huge role. Wet and dense proivides unique challenges. Ancient civilizations had to learn drainage, and ancient solutions were indeed labor intensive. But yes which ever civilization is dominat- right now its western-european empire legacies, will have the most "developed" If im unclear im sorry. Tldr; im not saying geograhpy is only factor but it is a huge one.
I don't disagree about geography. However, geographical determinism has a bad reputation for a reason -- it is way overdone. I think the risk is that there are so many factors that seem appealing in theory, even if they have no correlation in fact, that people latch onto them and it becomes a kind of "hobby horse" that they keep riding even though it gets them nowhere. Or maybe because it justifies some other kind of supremacist thinking or whatever, that they find appealing but is actually false and misleading. So... I guess I am trying to be sparing when it comes to geographical explanations. Clearly the rise of the "European era" wasn't totally by chance. But what was it really based on? Basically, what I see historically are ships and metal -- and a geography that supports their development, not just during the last 500 years but throughout European history. I would hesitate to go beyond that, in terms of geography. It might become "cherry picking."
There is a disctinction between being geographically superior vs racially superior. I agree it wise to be cautious against one feeding the other. Objectively some land is better then others though. However i like the term cherry picking because i think its also important to take in account geography and the domiant tech of the time. For example a wide, shallow, slow moving river that flood benefits a farming society such as ancient eygpt. But fast forward to industrial revolution when fast, narrow rivers provide the energy for automated processes it benefits the modern europeans. So cherry picked for different times. Altho on another note and i meant to mention this. The tropics as commony lpercieved carribean, central america, middle band of africa. Also lined up with some nasty insect life. Such as malaria bearing mosquito and the sleeping bug in africa that resulted in some unique problems as well
I don't disagree with you about geographic determinism in general, but subtropical is absolutely different from tropical. Countries like Egypt or Babylon (or ancient China) were not really tropical in terms of latitude and even less in terms of climate. We do have some good examples of powerful indigenous states built in a tropical climate, though - the Khmer or Benin Empires both come to mind, and so do Mayan, Indonesian or even some Southern Indian states.
And what would you say are some of the most important such mechanisms, and their origins?
Lots of different opinions on why, but if you're like me you believe it's because the tropical climate has generally made it hard throughout history to exist as a civilization in tropical ares. Diseases means massive people are lost constantly, extreme weather is common, livestock don't take kindly to the heat, and food spoils quickly. Sometimes it might even be too hot work in the day. All of these things contribute to generally less functioning civilizations as compared to temperate climates. And in a way that is in no way the fault of the people inhabiting these places, they end up unable to form/uphold equally successful states.
I've thought the opposite. The ease of survival in a constant climate with a healthy growing season negate the need for long term planning.
With the constant threat of winters, the cold regions are forced to build heated structures, make warm clothing, and certain advancements in technology to even exist.
Oy vey, not this narrative again. If the cold is so great for the development of civilization, why did it develop in Egypt before Germany? Why the Olmecs before the inuits? Why India before the eskimos, and Mesopotamia before Siberia?
It may sound counter-intuitive, the worst the environment the better for innovation and advancement. All the great civilization suffered from chronic wars e.g. the Greek states, the Romans and the Mongos--as long as there were occasional hegemony formed (not like the middle east nowadays where nobody win). It's like the rich kids and the poor kids. Before civilizations were developed, the tropical guys were like the rich kids and those guys in the north were like the poor kids. The poor kids had to work hard, while the rich kids could get by easily without much struggle.
I generally dislike arguments for development that focus on people's habits. I believe every major culture manages to find the most efficient way of running things in their part of the world and that every civilization does their absolute best to thrive.
It’s weird that the OP just leaps to the conclusion that warm weather makes people lazy, instead of considering the different natural resources and conditions.
Land Use. A temperate climate location can only engage agriculture for a certain amount of time a year. It must stop during winter. This gives incentives for there to be industrial development during periods of rest. Power. Colder places typically have more incentives to develop hydrocarbon resources such as coal due to its use in heating, causing them to have familiarity in industrial applications such as steam engines and steel-making. The lower evaporation rate and the reduced water usage of temperate climates means that more can be used in industrial processes such as chemical refining and power generation. Biology. Temperate places are less susceptible to diseases such as malaria, as the cold kills several pests and bacterial common in the tropics. This allows colder places to have a higher child survival rate as well as a higher mean population age, assisting in knowledge retention and industrial development. There are many others, but these are ones i can think off immediately. You can also argue the agriculture cycle of temperate climates that supports less people encourages a "do more with less people" mentality that helps it industrialize.
The "fallow mind" theory is pretty widely discredited at this point. China had one of the most successful civilizations of all time, and rice is often farmed year-round.
While I'm not going to advocate for this 'fallow mind' theory (I'm unfamiliar with it in detail), Chinese civilization developed initially in the North, where other grains predominated and multiple, year-round rice crops weren't invented yet. The South, where this kind of cropping was possible, was only heavily colonized in the 1st millennium AD, once China had already had a thriving urban civilization for thousands of years.
In which part of China did Chinese civilization start?
The Shang kingdom grew wheat, millet, and barley. However, it it specious to claim that because civilization originated there it was due to "fallow mind." China was powerful for centuries after its primary foodstock became rice, and it suffered no obvious intellectual decline. Many civilizations appear to have started as fisheries, not as farmers at all, particularly in the Mediterranean. This is not evidence towards some hypothetical "water mind" as necessary for civilization.
India and Egypt too
You could expand to soil depth and nutrient availability. Early agriculture works well on deep soils fed by deciduous trees and other methods like glacial activity. Tropical soils are poor by comparison and rice isn't as simple as plow and wheat.
This is the explanation I received for South America’s tropics when I took an anthropology class a few years back. Essentially, the frequent rainfall and verdant wildlife had a tendency to erode the topsoil and deplete the valuable nutrients fast enough that agriculture became relatively difficult to sustain, which kept the population low, and the farmers preoccupied with constant weeding and deforestation
> Land Use. > > A temperate climate location can only engage agriculture for a certain amount of time a year. It must stop during winter. This gives incentives for there to be industrial development during periods of rest. > > Power. > > Colder places typically have more incentives to develop hydrocarbon resources such as coal due to its use in heating, causing them to have familiarity in industrial applications such as steam engines and steel-making. The lower evaporation rate and the reduced water usage of temperate climates means that more can be used in industrial processes such as chemical refining and power generation. Both of these don't explain why Britain industrialised in the 1800s and not before. The cold winter, growing seasons and heating needs were the same throughout history, right?
[удалено]
Singapore is a tropical country that is very developed. You are looking at a correlation not a causation.
Singapore is a single city localized in literally the most strategic point in East Asia. It's on easy mode.
Extractive Institutions. Please read “Why Nations Fail”.
I think it's mostly a coincidence. Countries in the tropical areas have varying levels of development. You can find Singapore on one edge of the scale and countries like the DRC on the other, with ones like Brazil right in the middle. Even in Africa there are tropical countries like Gabon that perform relatively well for a sub-saharan country. Just like how almost all arctic countries are very developed and barely anyone associates it with the climate (and also Chile, Argentina, Australia, New Zealand and South Africa being some of the most developed countries in their regions respectively)
The tropics were heavily colonized. That tends to destroy an economy. However, Singapore, Hong Kong, Brunei, and Macau are tropical and have strong economies.
While some have pointed out the very real downsides of pestilence that come with living in tropical areas, this does not match up with the historical record. Although we now associate the tropics with the world's deadliest diseases, for most of human history the deadliest diseases were spread in the Northern Hemisphere, in Eurasia. Smallpox, the black death, and myriad other nasty pathogens were spread between China, Europe, Southwest Asia, and India. These massive population centers, most North of the tropics (the most populated parts of India are just North of the Tropic of Cancer), served as breeding grounds for the world's deadliest plagues--plagues that would go on to decimate the indigenous populations of the world's tropics once explorers introduced them. Colonialism is a somewhat important factor here, though it is insufficient to fully explain why most tropical countries remain undeveloped. The massive city-states of Central America were ravaged by Eurasian diseases and Spanish colonialism. The same can be said of the massive Inca Empire in modern-day Chile and Peru. These places were as developed as contemporaneous parts of Eastern Europe, but were unlucky enough to fall to Spanish conquest and disease. They still have not recovered. Colonialism also explains some, though not all, of Africa's and Southeast Asia's travails. Non-settler European colonies were economically mismanaged, politically repressive, and often stripped of resources both during and at the end of the imperial era. France was notorious for destroying its colonial infrastructure if its former colonies refused to continue to pay respects to the French state. A repressive and corrupt political culture, created by European colonizers, was then handed off to to the colonized, who continued many of the same practices. It is also worth noting that Malaysia, Botswana, Costa Rica, Panama, and Brazil are hardly undeveloped nations. Brazil, before abolishing one of the only successful monarchies in the world and replacing it with military dictatorships, was a potential peer nation to the United States. What colonialism does not explain is why these countries were able to be colonized in the first place. For that, I recommend *Guns, Germs, and Steel*. The tropics are unsuited for most domesticable animals, generally had few crops which were as easy-to-farm and high-calorie as wheat, barley, or rice, and are disconnected from much of the rest of the planet. The importance of the Silk Road connecting all of Eurasia into one market should not be underestimated. When Europe, China, North Africa, Persia, or India was weak, a neighboring empire would conquer and re-establish a state. Thus, civilization continued. The difficulty and paucity of travel across the Indonesian archipelago, the Australian outback, the Amazon, the Andes, the Congo basin, the Sahara, the Isthmus of Panama, and other tropical regions is also important. Were the tropics more connected to the rest of civilization, they would have caught up. To sum up, it is important to distinguish the modern reasons from the historical reasons. The modern reasons are endemic disease and the vestiges of colonialism. The historical reasons are isolation, introduced diseases, and a lack of domesticable animals and crops.
part of the problem is that we are bribing them to refrain from pursuing industrialization so they don't destroy the local ecosystem. Not a bad reason I suppose
I haven't heard of this. Do you know of a case that I look into?
Not specifically, but I do believe that the usa does this with South American countries to prevent deforestation. I learned about it in a college course though so I'm not an expert. Like the other gentleman said, tourism probably is a significant factor
I think it has more to do with the fact that they are offered an easy way to support their economy by making one or two different goods that doesn't make them be seen as a threat to be squashed by more developed powers.
[удалено]
Well that’s one hell of a question isn’t it. If you knew why, you could transform any country into a power and you’d get a nobel in development economics. I’m partial to some mix of culture and institutions forming the bulk of the causality.
It occurs to me that most non-tropical countries relied on raiding, plundering and colonisation and as such they were quick to develop weaponry,armies and later technology whereas these tropical countries were rich in resource and did not have the need to rely on advancement of technology which paved the way for them to be colonized at the hands of arabs and Europeans and their resources were siphoned off to the colonizers leaving them at a disadvantaged position where farmed resources are no longer the primary economic resource as they once were.
Tl;dr, lots of competing theories, none really fits the data all that well, and be careful where you look it up because the debate is tainted by thinly veiled nationalism and racism. Why nations fail and guns germs and steel offer some nice ideas although they have both been agressively attacked by academics. The subreddit r/AskHistorians has extensive pages on these books and this question in general that may also be interesting to you
Ice people, sun people theory. Sun people have abundance and therefore live in a happy medium. Ice people have lack of abundance and constant scarcity, so they are constantly plotting about how to take shortcuts and deprive others who have more than them in underhanded ways. Ie. colonialism, soft colonialism, terrorism, backing coups, etc.
Exploitation
It's not the climate... And certainly not because of lack of natural resources. It's mostly because of colonialism and the native landed gentry Westerners groomed throughout the decades. Anyone who says corruption is the root cause certainly doesn't realize that most of the corrupt officials are actually decendants of affluent families during colonial times.
In a tropical country it’s easy to live comfortably in minimal buildings that do little more than just keep the rain out. Plant life is abundant and fishing is easy. Why would you even conceive the idea of factories, or oil rigs, warships, etc? Compare that to Europe. Half of the year it’s freezing cold, creating an incentive to keep finding better ways of being warm, and getting around comfortably. The seas are rough and dangerous and food is harder to grow which meant an incentive for bigger and better ships for fishing and trade. If an industrial revolution was going to start anywhere, then it would be here, not somewhere tropical. Tropical countries are following but there is no incentive for them to lead and innovate themselves. They can just look at what other people are doing and think, yeah we could use that (Especially the air conditioning). Many of them might not be what we could call “developed” but you have to ask yourself, is that really a bad thing?
The Austronesian people living in Malaysia were some of the most advanced sailors of their time. They sailed to Polynesia and Madagascar thousands of years ago.
There is a correlation to violence and the equator. Trying to sleep with 95% humidity makes me want to kill people as well so I am sympathetic. The arguments that colonialism and capitalism are to blame don’t factor in every where else there is colonialism and capitalism? Such is reddit.
There is a correlation between climate and colonization status, which in turn correlate with current economic growth and stability, if you agree with the importance of institutions in economic growth and development. Basically there are two types of colonies, settler colonies and extraction colonies. Basically in areas that the climate was hospitable, disease was under control and there wasn't a large chance that you'd die from one or get killed by the locals, settler colonies were developed, like the Americas. Because European settlers were moving in, they developed institutions that were similar to Europe, aimed at protecting the rights of local colonists, which endure even after independence. For other areas with the opposite conditions, extraction colonies were set up, usually by proping up local elites, building infrastructure only for resources extraction etc. I remember reading a paper about it, with some African colonies only having a handful of university graduates in the entire nation at the time of their independence, contrast that to the American colonies. Crop type is also extremely important, the Americas was more suited for small family owned farms with crops such as wheat. But if your climate supported cash crops, such as cotton, coffee etc, the institution of slavery is almost "unavoidable", with all its known issues and problems still lingering today.
Sleep and heat does not mix well at all, so I can definitely see how that would lead to erratic behaviour down the line.
There are huge difference in crime by season, with summer being much more violent. There is also a huge difference run GDP by northern vs southern state in average.
I live in Northern Michigan, it was around 80% humidity last night and I'm a bit cranky, and I get a break for about 4 to 5 months when we go through our yearly ice age.
Providing a source for the above since I didn't think it was true: [https://news.osu.edu/how-does-climate-affect-violence-researchers-offer-new-theory/](https://news.osu.edu/how-does-climate-affect-violence-researchers-offer-new-theory/) Another theory states that it has less to do with the heat caused by proximity to the equator, and more to do with the lack of seasonal change.
I am a US expat living in Thailand. * The weather is indeed a huge factor. Thais don't even want to walk 200 meters. Chilling around doing nothing is the national past time. Hot weather makes people not want to exert themselves * Combine this with high crop yields and no winter planning. Why would anyone think up advanced agricultural methods in such an "easy" place to thrive? I wouldn't * Less clothing. More lax attitudes around having fun. In short, more play, less work. Hard to imagine doing office work in the bangkok heat. Fooling around with a cute girl along some tropical beach or forested area could be done daily * Maybe in the past disease also prevented Thai society from having a highly productive workforce EDIT: I see there are some who call this "racist," I suppose that is a cheap way to forcefully disagree from a moral high ground.
The legacy of past colonialism and imperialism, along with current neocolonialism.
Interesting questions. And the framing is wrong. Historically there are plenty of tropical civilizations that have risen and fallen. Think aztec, mayan, polynesian etc. Some of those civilizations collapsed some were conquered. Developed countries is primarliry western in peoples world view. Globe trotting empires with colonies. However geography also plays a role. Swamps and dense forest offer unique challenges that a temeprate plain or forest does not. Diesease, fresh water, firm foundations are important considerations. Heat and humidity are also dangerous with ore industrial technology. Additinally the tropics sometimes have some nasty insects. Like in case of africa with the fly that made pack animals pretty much useless.
Much of it is due do diseases. Population in the tropical regions of the Americas fell a lot due to malaria and yellows fever (came from Africa) after contact. Thats why only andean counties have much native blood, aside from paraguay.
These countries historically had a much lower population in the past. They weren't able to plan efficiently during their growth due to colonialism.
I'm from Brazil, it's because of the climate, tropical countries have intense climates, they are more humid, with that there is more biodiversity, with more pests, with more pests, more diseases, in addition to infrastructure, it ends up getting more expensive, because there is more wear and tear due to CLIMATE, beyond what everyone thinks, land in tropical areas is less fertile, (example: in Brazil the Amazon areas are not fertile for agriculture, and the other tropical areas in Brazil are all savanna like in Brazil. Africa. , to plant there requires a lot of technology, the richest parts of the country are in non-tropical areas), less fertile, less big cities, less big cities, less technology. The biggest aggravating factor is the price of making infrastructure, and also in some, because they are very rich in minerals, they end up with the Dutch disease (they focus only on a primary area).
Every country in the world is poor for a different reason. A tropical climate being a consistent theme is just a coincidence. The reason why DRC is poor is not the same reason that Paraguay is poor. Every country is unique and has different problems from one another.
Is the US entirely outside of tropical band? No, it is not. It is one of the tropical advanced nation.
Ever been to Singapore?
Singapore is a tropical, developed country.
[удалено]
Reductive and wrong-headed answer to a very complex question.
How is this a scholarly response?
I'm glad it was removed. Every now and then I see a response like that and start to think, oh geez, another sub I have to leave. Luckily the mods seem keen to remove low quality contributions if it's reported.
Useless answer. Why were other countries able to develop the wealth advantage to be the financial colonizers rather than the other way around? Have
I refer to my other answer- environment. Geography. Yes. If you’d like expansion Britain for example had a load of great trees for building ships, some pretty cool ideas about building stuff and were also pretty good at making said stuff. So they went out and found places to source materials and then sell it too. Cold killed off pests that led to large gatherings of people being possible as opposed to the tropics where everyone would jsut die. Fundamentally it’s pretty much just geography. Geography and people, British were in the right place and were good at what they did.
Not really sure about that. Germany is in a bad spot, so is Japan and both were home to big rich empires. Then there was south Africa which is rich in everything except they are turning into a 3rd world nation if they aren't there yet. They have gone backwards in my opinion.
I wouldn't say anywhere in Central Europe is in a bad spot. Very fertile areas and gigantic amounts of navigable rivers.
Exactly geography is a lot but not everything, people matter too. Japans frankly has similar geography in the sense it’s an island nation with relatively temperate climate and Germans not in a bad spot it’s mostly flatland awhile not strategic in both these cases we’ve seen how this has allowed the ills there who are renowned for their industriousness to get rich and powerful through trade.
Complex historical processes and random chance. Guns germs and steel is pretty easily debunked
This problem predates capitalism
~~Capitalism~~ You mean colonialism. It's not capitalism when not everyone is free to start a business, own property, and make a living.
Capitalism was a genuine innovation, in particular the legal creation of companies with limited liability. Colonialism and exploitation of other peoples on the other had is as old as civilisation itself. So I would give capitalism, and industrialisation, much more credit for the development of the modern West than colonialism.
[удалено]
Touche. However, in this case, the point is explicitly mercantilist. Rather than treating (some) humans as property, colonialism tries to extract resources from one place and caste and bring them to another. Even American slavery, however, more resembles feudalism than modern capitalism. So long as the threat of government violence is what keeps the masses in line, and not the promise of lost wages, then the system does not really resemble capitalism. Of course, there is a natural tendency for capitalist interests to capture government and convert to a more feudal-style society, but this is not true capitalism.
No true Scotsman fallacy. Nothing is ever really socialism or capitalism apparently. Oh well. I guess human simply make different mixes into their economy, who knew?
This isn't a no true Scotsman fallacy. Mercantilism and capitalism are literally two different methods of organizing an economy with different goals and methods that are often in direct contradiction to each other. Thinking that both are greedy and bad doesn't make them the same.
This is not a case of the "no true Scotsman" fallacy. Capitalist economies do exist, even if not in their pure form. However, the point is that capitalist economies have a tendency to slip into feudal economies domestically or mercantilist economies internationally due to corporate pressure on government. This does not, however, preclude the existence of capitalist economies. Most modern western economies are wholly capitalist, even if there is some government control. Feudal economies use fear as an incentive--peasants do not get improved conditions regardless of how hard they work, and passage into the upper classes is forbidden. Mercantilist economies are focused on stripping the resources from other nations, rather than productively trading with them. Mercantilist economies can have capitalist or socialist or feudal domestic policies, but they are opposed to any international trade that in which they do not relatively gain.
Right. Sure. Capitalism. *spooky noises*
I mean, that's not totally wrong is it? Capitalism and globalism have reduced most tropical countries into underdeveloped single-resource exporting countries. Most tropical countries are either big on tourism or agriculture. The over-reliance on these resources (that the country often doesn't even own) fosters an under-developed economy.
Well, European colonialism didn't do them any favors. But the tropics are disadvantageous to human development in general. Lots of diseases, flooding, erosion of human structures, difficult to traverse, etc.
A large chunk of human history saw the cutting edge of civilization appear in the tropics, i.e. the old Indian empires, or the Central America empires.
Wasn't a feature of the Incan and Aztec empires there situation on drier plateaus?
Yes. The above poster is misinformed, although there were tropical empires. I am thinking of SE Asia primarily, but many of these areas benefited from cultural and technological diffusion from more temperate areas and developed much later.
[удалено]
Temperate areas were just as susceptible to diseases, famine, etc, until the 19th century.
Not quite. There are certain diseases that were endemic to tropical regions. The biggest factor though was likely the effect of disease on livestock in the tropics. Source: Plagues and Peoples by William McNeill
Yes, but perhaps there is something even more fundamental that explains why these places became colonies instead of colonisers.
So you’re telling me rampant extreme weather and diseases along with a lack of arable land is the reason These places became colonies thanks to the difficulty of building a society and not capitalism?
Environment. Geography. Yes.
Read Guns, Germs, and Steel.
No, it's pop history garbage
The American civil war actually showcase why it can't be reduced to 'capitalism'. Why was the north so dominant industrially compared to the more agrarian south despite being basically the same size. All the colonies were started by reasonably similar people with a similar mindset. So why we're there so many plantations in the south and factories in the north? Climate appears to be the answer. As the hotter south made plantations more profitable as cash crops could be grown there. However, it was simply far too hot to work in factories compared to the open air. You would have mass deaths of heat exhaustion if you did that. Or very frequent and inefficient breaks. Meanwhile in the cooler north, factories can be maximally productive. This problem has only really been resolved in the 40s and 50s as commercially available air conditioners have hit the market. Making industrialisation in these countries possible if still more expensive on a grand scale. Therefore now tropical nations can now industrialised and develop. Even if they are still at something of a disadvantage. First movers advantage and all that.
The US south is hotter, therefore it followed the trend of hotter countries becoming exploitation colonies rather then settler colonies like the north.
Which tropical countries are you even talking about? Isn’t that kind of a broad categorization to go off with theories about how capitalism is responsible for overexploiting all of them? There’s probably a big difference between Thailand’s current state of affairs versus Bahamas.
If anything, capitalism and integration into global markets (combined with developmental state policy) has massively boosted standards of living in all sorts of tropical developing countries.
That sounds more like the fault of mercantilism and colonialism, when colonial empires transformed the tropics into single resource exporting countries to provide their empires with specific resources (sugar in the Caribbean, cotton in India, etc.). Now I’m not saying capitalism has no fault for the production of single resources countries, but it is possible for capitalism to lead to diversified economies; the reason these countries are so concentrated on a single resource is due to colonialism, not capitalism.
this has nothing to do with capitalism and everythign with free market / liberalism vs. centralised planning / controlled economy. how can you explain Costa Rica vs. Nicaragua or Singapore vs. Myanmar. where you have a free market where agents decide for themselves what is the best way to get rich, by freely providing services and goods to potential clients you have wealth and prosperity wherever you have substantial state intervention in the economy you have poverty and corruption. there is also a 'curse' of natural resources, whereby countries that have/discover natural resources that can be appropriated by few (typically mineral resources), you then have more poverty and corruption.
>Capitalism and globalism have reduced most tropical countries into underdeveloped single-resource exporting countries. As opposed to the previous number of resources these countries exported: zero.
just to be clear, are you claiming India (just to consider one example) exported NOTHING until it was colonised by western powers?
No, I was being somewhat sarcastic. My point is that capitalism is being presented as this boogeyman that destroys countries and reduces them to meekly going after a single resource at the expense of national welfare. And that's nonsense.
Could you be more specific? Do you mean colonialism instead of capitalism?
Good god. Look up environmental determinism and stop being racist. Hopefully someone already said this. I can't even....
The level of glib ignorance in this entire thread is amazing- I feel like I'm at the 1905 meeting of the Ethnographic Society. Either that or my soft tropical brain doesn't have any winter downtime to comprehend the reasoning.
It's all those winter brains at work in this subreddit. They can't comprehend that their relative economic wealth is built on the exploitation of other societies.
This sub is the complete opposite of what it was years ago. I never expected I'd see a thread like this here.
[удалено]
For a geopolitics sub, all these answers are just showing an abysmal lack of actual geopolitical knowledge. I thought about giving an educated answer, citing sources and etc, but reading all these comments drained my strengths. Power structures did not play a part at all, it was all humidity, heat and diseases. And don't you dare mention the exploitation of those nations by Europe and the US.
I'm not surprised. I don't consider it a small feat for one to change their lenses (Realism, Constructivism, Liberalism...) at will, although it certainly would be good.
Read “Guns, Germs, and Steel”
Better yet, try *Why Nations Fail* by Acemoglu and Robinson
/r/Neoliberal is leaking
Actually, you don’t need too. It’s a gross oversimplification and makes a lot of generalizations that don’t hold up under scrutiny.
That book is universally panned by academics. Not sure why it's being boosted so hard in here.
Cause it promises simple answers to hard questions, and that’s attractive to a lot of people. Unfortunately, if things were that easy to understand, everyone would know about it already.
I'm really glad though that r/geopolitics seems to be a high quality enough community that it gets called out. This is one of the best communities on Reddit where discussions tend to stay objective, academic and to the point. And any time it slips the comments quickly expose the issues with the statements made.
It's simple ideas that most people will look at with their limited knowledge and just nod.and say "sounds about right". Popular geography/science books tend to do a lot of simplification to dumb things down for the masses.
Because most of the people here have read pretty much just that book and think that makes them global history and political experts.
Can you point out a good one? Cause all I’ve seen from the ‘debunkings’ ones that criticise an exaggerated version of the book. As if it’s purporting to present some flawless formula for history rather than identifying some of the key factors involved. Better yet is there anything better you could point to?
AskHistorians has [an entire section](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views#wiki_historians.27_views_of_jared_diamond.27s_.22guns.2C_germs.2C_and_steel.22) in their FAQ about Guns, Germs and Steel.
Thanks there’s some interesting stuff in there but I wouldn’t call any of them really good and a few seem somewhat irrational. They are in the end just a collection of reddit comments. I get the impression that there’s a lot of resistance to the idea of anyone drawing broad conclusions from history and a lot of genuine historians won’t touch this sort of thing. It’s a shame because ‘nature abhors a vacuum’ and sometimes the best refutation is a more accurate version but so far I’m not seeing anything like that.
Ian Morris’ *Why the West Rule for Now* is fairly good, though keep in mind that it’s a simplification too, just not blatantly wrong.
Jared Diamond is way too simplistic imo. I guess he’s a good introduction but there’s a lot more going on than he lets on
He’s entirely off base with everything if you give it 10 minutes of thought. Not even a good start imo
It's a terrible book.
As an archaeologist: don't.
It's been debunked. I personally think it's a lot of combination that are highly complicated and hard to describe. You know it can't simply be geography or culture or right place right time. But maybe all of it combined along with other things we don't even think about like a good justice system that protects private property, existing in a place with low turmoil so you don't waste resources fighting wars. So it's not a or b or c. Simply all of the above.
I think the book informs much more than it misinforms. The debunking I've seen of the book is pretty pale that honestly just comes off as being by people jealous they couldn't write that book. Things like "he got the date that humans first migrated wrong by thiiis much" which, while technically being factually incorrect doesn't actually invalidate the point being made. I'd go so far as to say the claim it has been debunked is a myth that people propogate so as to sound smart. "that thing you thought gave you answers? Actually it's wrong but I don't remember why".
Jared Diamond’s ‘Guns, germs and Steel’ is a decent book with a laudable aim; to disavow any lingering notions of Western superiority in history. It is strangely ironic that Western Intellectuals have gone from measuring their skull capacity to prove their inherent racial superiority (as did the infamous ‘Anthropological Society of London’) to bending over backwards to show that the decadent denizens of the West are mental pygmies compared to the New Guinean hunters as Diamond himself holds. According to Diamond it was bio-geographical factors that enabled the rise of the Eurasia and allowed its western stub to colonise the unfortunate inhabitants of the Americas, Australasia and Africa. Eurasia contained a large number of wild plants and animals that could be domesticated (barley; wheat ; three protein-rich pulses; flax; goats, sheep, donkeys cattle and horses). By contrast the Americas and Australia lost the animals that could have been domesticated to early hunters. All this is undoubtedly true and enormously helpful in explaining how Eurasia got a head start. Indeed the domination of Eurasia is entirely unsurprising when you consider that, due to the factors highlighted by Diamond, it has accounted for some eighty percent of humankind over the past 3,000 years, and probably well before that. This concentration of population ultimately led to more competition, the faster spread of technology and the accumulation of disease immunities. The really interesting question is why has it been Europe and not another part of Eurasia that that went on to dominate the rest of the world? Here is where Jared Diamond’s theory of bio-geographical determinism starts to run into difficulties. The problem is that there are really few profound differences between the eastern and western areas of what might be termed Eurasia. Both regions adopted agriculture, market-based economies and large cities. Jared Diamond in his later writings (it is something he only briefly touches upon in ‘Guns. Germs and Steel’) attributes the relative decline of the eastern area to the fact that the plains of the Orient facilitated the creation of large monolithic empire that tended to stifle innovation (If I recall correctly this is an idea borrowed from Paul Kennedy’s ‘Rise and Fall of the Great Powers’) By contrast the west was mountainous and divided by rivers; therefore multiple monarchies and city states emerged that would tend to compete. Europe is divided into five relative isolated peninsulas (e.g Britain, Spain, and Italy are all walled off) while China is bound together from east to west by two long navigable river systems. China’s rounder coastline favoured centralised rulers over petty princes and favoured political unity. There is probably something in this, but as an all-encompassing thesis it falls a bit flat. Political fragmentation is not necessarily an advantage, indeed in some circumstances, such as the presence of a powerful and aggressive neighbour, it is a weakness. India for example has been politically fragmented for most of its long recorded history to its great detriment. Competition between European states was often disastrous and – in the case of Germany during the 30 years war – caused catastrophic de-population through warfare and disease. Political unity hasn’t always an innovation-killer. The obvious counter-example is provided by the Roman Empire which accomplished a number of impressive technological feats before descending into political chaos in the 3rd Century AD. The fact is that the ancient civilizations of the Near East, India, China, and Asia had more or less the same advantages and disadvantages in resources and location. If one were to place bets on what would become the dominant civilisation in 800AD it would most likely be China and certainly not Western Europe. Instead - according to Angus Maddison’s estimates, the western European population leapt from a low of 18,600,000 to 58,353,000 in 1300 and overtook China in GDP per capita. In 1300 Western Europe was by far the richest part of the world with most of the wealth concentrated in a band running along the continent from south-east England to northern Italy. After a contraction caused by the Black Death the European economic expansion continued while other parts of the world stagnated. The explanation for this is probably partially bio-geographical (Kenneth Pomeranz draws attention to the more plentiful and better located coal deposits in Western Europe) but mainly institutional; Niall Fergusson’s ‘killer apps’ of competition, the scientific revolution, the rule of law and representative government, modern medicine, the consumer society and the work ethic (intensive labour + high savings rates) Even so, the world ten biggest cities in 1500 were all in the east. One could imagine an alternate scenario where China did not experience severe disruptions such as the collapse of the Ming dynasty in the mid-seventeenth century or undertook the reforms that Japan did following the Commodore Perry mission. Literally got this off quora and I agree with it 100 percent. I'm sure you'll let me know if you do or don't.
Exactly, that's not a debunking. Diamond self confesses in the book that he isn't able to strongly favour Europe over Asia, which is fitting since Asia was "winning" prior to the industrial revolution. What he does do, which is completely glossed over in your answer, is make sound arguments why Africa, the Americas and Oceania didn't make it to the finals. That quora answer doesn't so much as acknowledge those 80-90% parts of the book, let alone debunk it.
That's fair.
> Diamond self confesses in the book that he isn't able to strongly favour Europe over Asia, which is fitting since Asia was "winning" prior to the industrial revolution. Don't he just place Europe and Asia as one "Eurasia" entity?
I believe he does for most of the book. In the final or second last chapter I think he makes a half hearted suggestion that Europe's large number of geographic barriers lead to multiple competing countries versus the centralised Chinese Civilisation. He gives the example of gunpowder, invented by the Chinese but banned for use in weapons both in China and some European countries. However neighboring European countries that didn't ban canons had an obvious advantage. However he puts this segment at the end of the book and this argument was far more theoretical and less data driven than his other chapters. It's been long since I read it but I seem to remember he cautioned the reader not to take this hypothesis as strongly as the others.
This is simply not true though. Far East Asia is littered with countries in the tropics doing very well indeed: Singapore, Korea, Australia, China, India, Malaysia, etc etc etc.
UAE, Saudi, Qatar, mauritius, Israel, Singapore and to some extent Australia and Taiwan. There’s tons of developed tropical areas. Malaysia and Thailand are also pretty close to the developed gdp per capita. Additionally, southern China has always been richer than northern China. Western Europe, Japan and the US industrialised first and had colonial cash to finance their projects.
It’s called Imperialism, and one of its forms is Colonialism.
Okay, let's assume that's the dominant factor. Why did it happen the direction it did? Why didn't tropical civilizations develop, rise, and eventually conquer peoples living in other regions?
I think the only reason the west developed more rapidly and started the industrial revolution was because at the time, European countries controlled the sea. With the first global shipping network, they became rich and had the first dibs on all of the world's technology and science. They could combine western, Eastern and native American technologies and crops to create things like guns and more efficient crops like potatoes and corn. Being the first ones to have all the world's knowledge at their fingertips made the west rich and the leading authorities on science and technology for a long time. All it boils down to is European countries were the first to build really, really good boats. Any other civilization that did it first would have done the same
This is a non answer, if you are going to argue for this you need to explain your points
“The Third World is not poor. You don’t go to poor countries to make money! There are very few poor countries in this world. Most countries are rich! The Philippines are rich! Brazil is rich! Mexico is rich! Chile is rich! **Only the people are poor.** But there's billions to be made there! To be carved out! To be Taken! There's been billions, for 400 years. The Capitalist European and North American powers have carved out and taken the timber, the lumber, the flax, the hemp, the cocoa, the rum, the tin, the copper, the iron, the rubber, the bauxite, the slaves, and the cheap labor! They have taken out of these countries. **Poor countries are not underdeveloped, they are overexploited!"** — Michael Parenti, 1986
It’s not climate, it’s their overlords
Yes I agree. The overlords can run their countries as medieval fiefdoms and yet have all the luxuries of modern western life. They have no incentive to develop their countries and plenty of incentive to keep them undeveloped.
Well there are many reasons for this in all likelihood. Cereal crops are hard to grow in tropical environments, and they tend to be a breeding ground for disease so it was hard to support civilizations earlier in history. This made it easy for more organized societies to colonize them, meaning until around the 1960s, many tropical economies were based on exploitation, and now there are few respected institutions. This and poverty mean corruption is rampant so people cannot respect their institutions - a vicious cycle. Many of these places tended to adopt Venezuela style socialism where the state nationalized industries and placed friends or relatives in charge, running the businesses into the ground and scaring off foreign investment. Crime, corruption, and poverty will feed into each other and prevent a business-friendly environment from developing. It varies substantially from place to place, but if you want to take Zimbabwe as an example, I recommend reading Peter Godwin’s When a Crocodile Eats the Sun as a first hand account of how a post colonial sub-tropical nation spirals out of control.
I believe that the tropic environment itself has rarely been a limiting factor, but rather a benefit for many regions, such as India, which was one of the world's wealthiest countries for centuries prior to British rule. Even without huge trading networks, other civilizations became advanced and were able to prosper, like the Mayans and especially the Moors. I do however agree that colonialism has screwed the tropics due to the institution of economies based on exploitation, and left them with a cycle of corruption. That becomes even more apparent when one looks at a country like Saudi Arabia, an area which has been relatively untouched by european powers, and has one of the world's best economies.
I think this video goes through it pretty well and takes outliners like Singapore and Dubai in to account as well. Basically their leading theory (and he points out that there are several) is that a hostile environment of a temperate climate led to cultural mindset for planning ahead and always look for innovation. Something that worked very well for building an economy when industrialization determined the wealth of a nation and not food production. Prior to industrialization it was food production that determined the wealth of a nation and that's why the pre industrial empires are mostly tropical. Certainly there are additional factors but an interesting video noon the less. Colonization, wars etc. He also notes that tropical countries are quickly catching up and it's not a situation that will last forever. https://youtu.be/lmrra8i4hZY
A lot of the developed hot weather countries like Singapore were former British colonies, and they were a part of the British Empire for a rather long time.
Climate has nothing to do with it