In that past India, China, Mali were massive economies and those didn't happen overnight. They took millenia and the weather stayed warm throughout that time.
As always it is often technology which creates wealth and whoever has the "current" tech usually shoots up for a few centuries and then the cycle repeats itself.
There is no simple answer here…it’s a mix of scenarios: migration, resources, cultures, historical needs, and govt policies, and corruption.
The US population expanded from the North East where the Industrial Revolution began. Economic jobs boomed and so did wealth. California created a tech boom, and Texas created an oil boom. While southern and middle states lack technology, industry, precious metals.
Major European countries (cold) joined forces economically to prevent ruin, while middle eastern countries (warm) face USSR style corruption.
In Russia, most of the countries resources are reverted to Moscow or St Petersburg. While warmer AND colder areas of the country lack basic funding/upkeep.
South Africa has the highest GDP in Africa primarily due to historical colonialism stabilizing the area and turning it into a major port. While surrounding countries are 1/10th the GDP due to govt policies and corruption.
The east side of Australia is heavily built up compared to the rest of the country. This is due to port access and farmland while the west coast is much more dry and rocky.
Obviously this isn’t exhaustive, but serves the point. There is no single answer and “warm is poor” only applies to VERY select regions.
Lee Kuan Yew, the founder of Singapore - a tropical nation - famously claimed that air conditioning was one of the most important inventions, as it "changed the nature of civilization by making development possible in the tropics". And I am inclined to agree.
As a person who grew up in a hot tropical country and is now living in a cool temperate one, I found it much easier to do things in a cooler climate than in a warmer one.
This is anecdotal of course. Take it for what it is, just my personal experience.
Taking snapshots of vastly complex systems and trying to find an explanation as to why it is configured a certain way in the snapshot is a fool's errand.
I don't agree with this article at all. It's the wrong lens.
Warm climates may have more resources, but the wealth concentration is somewhat artificial; nor that cold climates had difficulties in centralizing power.
Instead, the simpler and more accurate narrative is that cold climate countries are more resource starved, therefore have more incentive to plunder the resource-rich nations. The easiest nations to plunder are the technically lagging nations.
And what lead to a technology-savvy culture in the recent past? War, with the occasional dose of peace.
This is a deeply imperialist, Euro/Anglo-centric viewpoint, similar to the points in 'Guns, Germs, and Steel'. And this is despite the author being of Indian origin. There are so many flaws in his argument, and not least because the author looks only at the present. He conveniently overlooks the fact that Europe was—for lack of a better word—a broken collection of barbarian states for the majority of civilisation beginning at 3500 BCE. Only during the Greek and Roman empires from about 500 BCE to about 400 CE, and after the Renaissance at about 1450 CE—did Europe gain any sort of prominence. And funnily enough just before the Renaissance, the Black Death ripped through most of Europe because it was an unsanitary hell hole, with sewage and manure openly flowing at the surface level, and all Greco-Roman engineering mostly forgotten or left to rot.
Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indo-Gangetic plains, and the Yangtze are all in decidedly warmer climes than much of Europe, and the civilisations they birthed still endure.
In cold climates you can do fuck all during winter, and frankly, most of the year. Cash crops don't grow at all. All the water is frozen solid for months on end. There is hardly any sunlight. This means no plants. No plants means no animals. No plants and animals means no food. There's a reason why Antarctica, Greenland, Alaska, much of Canada, Siberia, the Tibetan plateau, and Patagonia remain completely undeveloped.
Many tropical and sub-tropical countries were extremely wealthy until at least the 1600s. India was amongst the richest countries in the world until the British colonised it, squeezed every last drop out of it, and then dropped it like a hot potato once Britain itself was nearly bankrupted and its infrastructure in smithereens following WW2 (and sliced it in half for good measure, setting the stage for an infinite casus belli between the Islamic Pakistan and the secular India). Belgium did something similar in the Congo, and there's probably a cathedral full of Congolese hands and legs somewhere in Brussels.
The early American colonists arrived to see most of the native Americans ravaged by smallpox and the plague, foreign diseases the latter had no immunity to. They saw open land for the taking, and called it manifest destiny in their race from Virginia to California and Oregon. They sequestered the remaining native Americans (who to this date are misnamed as 'Indians', another facet to the enduring racism and prejudice in the US) into 'reservations' and 'nations'. Likewise for Canada.
In central and south America the violently evangelical Catholic Spaniards and Portuguese took advantage of the fractious rivalries, and picked them off one-by-one usually allying with one empire against another, rinse and repeat—from the Aztecs, Maya, and Toltec to the Inca.
The large majority of modern European countries have built their current wealth on the backs (and blood) of exploited and colonised peoples from Central and South America, to almost all of Africa and the Middle East, to South Asia, Southeast Asia, and East Asia.
In a just world, Spain, Portugal, the UK, France, the US, and the Benelux countries would collectively be forced to pay reparations amounting to about five to ten trillion euros/pounds/dollars per annum to their ex-colonies, slaves, and exploited peoples until the latter returned to a semblance of development with everyone above the poverty line, and with reliable electricity, sanitation, food supply, housing, and Internet access.
Your argument - "[t]his is a deeply imperialist, Euro/Anglo-centric viewpoint" - is deeply lazy. You should be easily rebut the their points if the article is bad.
If anything - your arguments actually reinforce the article's point of view because resource heavy areas get pilfered by others and the victors often place or leave extractive institutions in these areas, thus leading to poor economies. Countries that have winters have incentives to colonize resource-rich areas for the reasons you cite. If these resource rich areas have the advantage of having resources... then why is it that these areas are often colonized instead of the other way around?
Also - the article presents these arguments because they're simply sourcing arguments from Daron Acemoglu, who is a labor economist from MIT. Therefore, it will be written from a developmental economics point of view, not from political economics.
>In a just world, Spain, Portugal, the UK, France, the US, and the Benelux countries would collectively be forced to pay reparations amounting to about five to ten trillion euros/pounds/dollars per annum to their ex-colonies, slaves, and exploited peoples until the latter returned to a semblance of development with everyone above the poverty line, and with reliable electricity, sanitation, food supply, housing, and Internet access.
You're not wrong for wanting reparations but this argument has nothing to do with the article at hand.
> then why is it that these areas are often colonized instead of the other way around?
Maybe because you dont really need to go to far flung places if you have all the resources at home.
European colonisation began due to rise of technology and just because a country is at the top now does not guarantee that it will be at the top forever. A quick look at history will tell you that.
Wealth, power, expansion of territory, and a state religion that made "spiritual expansion" a life goal for monarchs.
If you read about various big colonial enterprises, eg the Spanish colonisation of the Americas it's rare to see technology mentioned as a motivation that drives the action, at best it's an enabler that provides success when expanding into less advanced territory.
eg:
The Spanish expansion has sometimes been succinctly summed up as being motivated by "gold, glory, God", that is, the search for material wealth, the enhancement of the conquerors' and the crown's position, and the expansion of Christianity to the exclusion of other religious traditions.
For some reason everyone forgets that the Spanish monarchs who funded Columbus had just reconquered their own land which had been colonized for centuries by foreign invaders.
Not mentioning the reconquista is historical laziness.
The conquering of the Americas and the mass evangelization of Christianity into the new world is directly due to Muhammed and his conquests and their descendants.
Oddly there are those that argue the Reconquista is more of a 19th Century construct:
The linear approach to the origins of a Reconquista taken in early twentieth-century historiography is complicated by a number of issues. [.. etc.]
The period is seen today to have had long episodes of relative religious coexistence and tolerance. The idea of a continuous Reconquista has been challenged by modern scholars.
The consolidation of the modern idea of a "Reconquista" is inextricably linked to the foundational myths of Spanish nationalism in the 19th century, associated with the development of a Centralist, Castilian, and staunchly Catholic brand of nationalism, evoking nationalistic, romantic and sometimes colonialist themes.
Regardless of how we in the modern world think of as "the Reconquista" the question remains whether Spain at the time colonised the New World because for long periods of time Christians and Muslims peacefully coexisted and now that Muslims had been ejected it was "directly due to Muhammed and his conquests and their descendants" that Spain continued to do unto others what Islam was alleged to have done to them.
Human ingenuity combined with greed, a sense of all encompassing mission, a god given directive to expand and conquer. Why did the Mongols do what they did?
I do want to point out that the modern world is quite different. Extractive institutions tend to fail and network effects may create a new form of economic transparency. I don't believe humanity has to continue our old ways in the future. Although the space race might restart the conquest cycle.
I disagree, sorry. I started with this because I claim that racism and imperialism are the basis for the article—both this, and the study published by the MIT faculty member.
I will not accept any point that attempts to show that the current developmental state of the countries of the world are inevitable in any way. It leads to an extremely slippery slope that only ever ends in racism—'oh, X person is from Y region, they deserved to be conquered anyway, they don't deserve a place at the table, they are... subhuman'.
History could've turned at any point. If WW3 had happened (and we came fairly close several times), the 'Western world' and its cities as we know it today would be a smouldering, cratered, ruined moonscape, and the 'victors' (if you could call them that) would be the current third world.
And additionally, I believe my first paragraph has succinctly shown why Europe's development today is not a result of its climate. If that were the case, it would've been the most developed region for all or almost all of human history. It is not; Europe's development is a fairly recent development (pun intended).
> I will not accept any point that attempts to show that the current developmental state of the countries of the world are inevitable in any way. It leads to an extremely slippery slope that only ever ends in racism—'oh, X person is from Y region, they deserved to be conquered anyway, they don't deserve a place at the table, they are... subhuman'.
That you refuse to accept reality shouldn’t affect us. Poorer countries are poor primarily because of bad governance and resource management, not long-gone colonialism.
Richer countries (Europe and North America) are rich because they manage resources better and have much better leadership.
Denying the above facts does nothing but keep poorer countries in their poor states perpetually, instead of acknowledging that good governance, preferably a liberal democracy, helps these countries progress.
In the 21st century, there’s really no excuse for widespread poverty except bad governance.
Yours Truly, someone from a poor country (Nigeria).
Re: slavery - Almost all societies/cultures had slavery. Many on a far greater scale than US. The US took around 400,000 slaves from africa in total while the arab world took 10 million. The reason there is a huge “african american” population and not a huge “african middle eastern” population of slave descendants is because the arabs castrated their 10 million slaves.
Additionally, while almost every culture/society had slavery, it was UK/christians who basically ended slavery globally.
It bothers me when people find arguments to prove the current state of development of the Western world and the lack of development of everywhere else are inevitable, regardless of reason.
It almost always leads to a slippery slope that descends into scientific and then popular racism, ending with 'you are from X region/culture, you don't deserve to become developed anyway'. And the article the author is citing makes these sorts of claims.
In that past India, China, Mali were massive economies and those didn't happen overnight. They took millenia and the weather stayed warm throughout that time.
As always it is often technology which creates wealth and whoever has the "current" tech usually shoots up for a few centuries and then the cycle repeats itself.