For Richer or for Poorer

...As one goes beyond the 19th century deeper into the past, information becomes sparser and sparser...

...Perhaps so, but the quantity of violence and guilt on each side certainly was not symmetrical, and the tendency to demonize the behavior of Europeans of the early modern period strikes me as no more unreasonable than a similar view of their descendants' behavior in the years 1939-45...

...The new medieval civilization erected on the collapse of antiquity was freer, more inquisitive (but less tolerant) and, by the late Middle Ages, more productive than the civilizations of China, India, Mexico, Peru, and the Islamic countries...

...We ourselves have all lived through what will no doubt eventually be seen as the Office Revolution, the era when typists and file clerks were replaced by computers and employees capable of using them...

...It disapproves of discouraging words, which geographic comparisons abound in...

...The second running thread of Landes' argument is his rejection of the "a priori reasoning" of neoliberal economics...

...In matters of culture the author's pessimism takes the form of an aggressive Eurocentrism...

...In any case, everyone knows that the West is richer than the rest of the world, and that a large part of this wealth in the early days was gained through dreadful crimes...

...According to this school, he tells us, "it really made no difference to other countries that Britain had moved ahead in industrial technology and productivity [from 1760 to 1860...

...That pre-Columbian America had its own very unpleasant empires hardly changes this...

...One could trade Lyons silks and Bordeaux wines and come out the better for trade...

...It is also wrong...

...Nor do all kinds of production "have the same payoff in skills, knowledge and high-wage jobs...

...In exploring the east coast of Africa and the Atlantic Ocean at roughly the same time, Portugal and Spain used much smaller squadrons of much smaller vessels...

...He picks quarrel after quarrel with the theory of comparative advantage, which suggests that each country should concentrate on whatever it can produce most efficiently and import everything else...

...But the fact that expatriate Chinese and Indians are so successful suggests, even to the pessimistic Landes, that these cultures are not an absolute bar to wealth in the modern world...

...The author starts with a chapter on the influence of geography—an unpopular discipline today, he contends, because it "tells an unpleasant truth, namely, that nature like life is unfair...

...Some "cliometricians" have argued that in the context of the whole British economy in the years from 1760 to 1860, the Industrial Revolution really contributed only a small percentage of industrial (to say nothing of total) product in an economy still largely agricultural...

...Landes points especially to the scientific and manufacturing revolution of the High Middle Ages, involving the water wheel, eyeglasses, mechanical clocks, printing, and gunpowder weapons...

...Science and technology are the key...

...This Iberian effort could and would have continued even if the state had lost interest in it...

...There are great obstacles to this approach...

...Confucian officials who feared and despised businessmen taxed them arbitrarily...

...Probably the most provocative explanation," Landes somewhat unfashionably thinks, is that of the German sociologist Max Weber: Ascetic Protestantism in Western and Central Europe promoted regular, sober and peaceable behavior in a continent then sunk in picturesque but economically wasteful Rabelaisian excesses...

...The importance of natural endowments, Landes concedes, "can be reduced or evaded, though invariably at a price...

...Why Protestants and not Catholics...

...Each nation, after all, could and would follow its own comparative advantage, could and would buy what it needed on the most favorable terms...

...it flourished among the Japanese, as well as such minorities as the Jews, the Parsees, and expatriate Chinese, Indian, and Lebanese communities...

...A civilization like ours, with its drive to mastery, does not like to be thwarted...

...Nevertheless, from the standpoint of wealth creation, the difference between the most economically successful of the European empires, that of Britain, and other empires was not a moral one...

...There may be well-informed but conjectural estimates for particular industries at particular times in particular places...

...If this makes sense, there is not only no point in asking why Belgium is more prosperous than Benin but also no point in complaining about it...

...Some of these historians hope to drive the term "Industrial Revolution" from historical discourse...

...The third characteristic feature of Landes' book is its dismissal of "cliometry," the effort to found arguments on speculative statistical reconstructions of national economies and their component parts...

...Natural, cultural and political considerations all seem remarkably unpromising...

...China's western voyages, using fleets of huge ships, ended when the authorities, for reasons that are still unclear, terminated them...

...The mystery," writes Landes, "lies in China's failure to realize its potential...

...Besides few resources, it has an inward-looking culture conducted in a language no one else speaks, and from the midnth to the mid-19th centuries it attempted to cut itself off from a world it still holds somewhat in abeyance...

...And yet it was the Japanese, notes Landes, who "as no other non-Western people" mastered the science and industry of Europe and its offshoots...

...Natural conditions do change, sometimes for the better...

...China led in printing, paper, gunpowder, the use of waterpower to propel machines, and the smelting of iron...

...In periods with better statistics, it is clear that new industries have frequently come to prominence rather quickly...

...Imperial regimes exist to extract benefits from the ruled—ill-gotten gains that were practically always devoted to consumption...

...After the trees were felled, Northern Europe was strongly favored by such geographical factors as rainfall and navigable rivers...

...Most probably so...

...So what if Britain made better and cheaper iron and steel...

...We do not know how to inculcate these virtues in populations that lack them...

...Take the case of Japan...

...Landes asks...

...This was demonstrated by the Incas and the Aztecs and then by the early European empires...

...further, that nature's unfairness is not easily remedied...

...Europe did not invent most of these...

...Notwithstanding the Chinese contribution, the scientific and industrial revolutions were not, says Landes, the product of an essentially symmetrical interaction among civilizations, as "multicultural" historians maintain, or even between China and the West...

...Technological advancements were not recorded, improved or adopted systematically...

...This transformation does not seem to loom very large in terms of output either...

...Some activities, like the manufacture of automobiles, mobilize resources on such a large scale that they confer the ability to dominate large swaths of industry...

...During the 15th century, as Joseph Needham showed in his great history of Chinese science, the Celestial Empire actually mounted an ambitious series of expeditions to explore the western coast of Africa...

...Everything else is unclear...

...Yet it is evident in every office...

...The methods employed are less than convincing...

...One cross-cultural generalization that really seems to hold up is that there is very little long-term advantage to sudden bonanzas of this kind, however vast, "ft is always easier" as Landes observes, "to throw away windfall wealth...

...He notes, for example, that the thick hardwood forest covering most of Northern Europe was an obstacle to dense settlement until the appearance of iron cutting tools...

...Landes, while accepting this, complains "that anthropologists are sometimes motivated here by a need to see the European-Amerindian [and European-African] encounter in black and white, with all the wickedness on one side and only virtue on the other...

...Innovation often depended on large projects that could be mounted only by the state...

...Landes' answer to the question he raises is that "today's comparative advantage may not be tomorrow's...

...Economic history aims to generalize about how nature, culture and government policies promote or hinder prosperity...

...The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (Norton, 650 pp., $30.00), a survey of the past 500 years by economic historian David S. Landes, is the latest of many attempts to answer that question...

...In the 16th century the Spice Islands that are now part of Indonesia, were incorporated into what was briefly a global Portuguese dominion...

...What distinguishes Landes' entertaining, sophisticated book is, first, its pessimism...

...It could not dispose of a large quantity of spices, so they were actually handled in Antwerp, the Flemish city that enjoyed most of the profit...

...But why believe these estimates...

...One starts with the aggregate construct"—itself a "figment"—"and then shoehorns the component branches to fit...

...The driving force" behind progress, rather, has been "Western civilization and its dissemination: the knowledge, the techniques, the political and social ideologies...

...Multiculturalists claim, too, that it is no more relevant to ask why China, India and the Islamic world did not indigenously develop into modern societies than to ask why Europe did not develop a cult of ancestor worship...

...Indeed, looking over the record of the past two millennia, we might as easily be optimistic as pessimistic, since the productive capacity of almost every part of the earth has risen dramatically, albeit quite unequally...

...Landes rightly emphasizes that the British, and to a lesser extent the Dutch, who ousted the Portuguese from the lands of spices, exploited the loot from their empires in a fundamentally novel way: as the basis for new trading relationships, new industries and, eventually, new productive techniques and a sophisticated commercial economy...

...This restrained type of behavior is by no means limited to ascetic Protestants, notes the author...

...This is history cart before horse, results before data, imagination before experience...

...Portugal is a small, poor country on the western extremity of Europe...