Geography, however, doesn’t always play a direct role—sometimes its effects are more roundabout. Rugged, mountainous terrain isn’t great for growing crops or conducting trade, but one study from 2007 found that such regions in Africa nonetheless reached higher levels of development. Why? Because historically, that same treacherous landscape protected certain areas from slave traders.So if the most successful regions of Africa are the least well-endowed, just because it was too hard for slavers to extract their wealth and human capital, how much of Africa's suffering is directly due to the slave trade?
But there's this, too:
Other studies have shown that people matter more than institutions or locations. Many poorly endowed lands have experienced a “reversal of fortune” since 1500, producing more income per capita than their past would have suggested. Those economies benefited from the European colonizers and their human capital—a familiarity with centralized state institutions, efficient agriculture techniques, and new technologies that let one generation build upon the advances of the last.Now that seems to be a reversal of the first argument: Europeans colonized the parts of Africa that are worst-performing, too. I assume this is a way of talking about India, which wasn't subject to the slave trade and thus wasn't plundered in the same way. But India and Pakistan sit next door to one another, and were subject to the same British rule. There's an element of responsibility that goes beyond "what did the Europeans do to them?" and lies at the question of what they have done with their inheritance.
The piece ends on a note of hope, which is where I think we should aspire to go as well. The question shouldn't be one of punishment or vengeance, but of development of human capacities. We want people to come to flourish.
10 comments:
The Left convinced a lot of Democrats and anti Americans in the world that the US had a high GDP because of natural resources.
There was nothing exceptional about the population at all. Given Hussein and the Americans that became Obamacans, hard to argue with that right now.
You're granting a lot of weight to what seems to be a single study that's not been replicated these last seven years.
That aside, [t]he piece ends on a note of hope.... The question...[should be one] of development of human capacities. We want people to come to flourish.
As does the matter of moving on altogether from the question of reparations, and instead devoting resources toward helping today's unfortunates and toward our duty to the future.
Eric Hines
Who wants people to flourish? Not the proponents of reparations, as far as I can tell. It's about revenge (or its flip-side, an expiation of inherited guilt), and/or a free lunch. An independent flourishing has little to do with it.
And while I readily admit that slavery was devastating to the first black Americans, I don't at all see that the slave trade was what has consistently crippled Africa for centuries. That would be a hard explanation to swallow even if the slave trade hadn't consisted primarily of Africans enslaving Africans. Europeans extracted resources, certainly, but what was preventing Africans from making good use of their own resources? I don't think the answer is anything that can be laid at the feet of Europeans.
Africans have never developed a system that works, nor have they adopted from other people systems that work. None of that is the fault of non-African people who have developed or adopted systems that work. Nor is it inevitable that every post-colonial culture should be a raging, flaming mess. Nor is it at all obvious that Africa wouldn't still be a raging, flaming mess even if it had never been sullied by colonization.
All this focus on whether dead Europeans bequeathed us guilt just obscures the need for Africa to change from within. I'm not sure we can reform them from without, and I'm not even sure we're entitled to try.
Kim Du Toit used to say (and he was from South Africa) that the best thing that could be done was to build a wall around it and forget about it.
But leaving the place alone is probably better than trying to 'reform' it, whatever that may mean.
Kim Du Toit- how I miss his blog.
A lot of people in the know say that the aid the west gives to Africa does essentially the same thing it does here- promotes dependency, enriches kleptocrats, and destroys competing businesses.
There are even a few on the left who have finally woken up to this.
African investment, as opposed to UN-style 'aid,' might be worth a re-think. They've stolen something of a march while we've been preoccupied with our recession/"recovery." It's still very poor compared to other places, but it's been showing remarkable improvement for a few years. There remain concerns about stability, but it's drawing some private investment now.
However, the whole world isn't our problem. I posted the article largely as an analogy: how the same issues we were discussing re: American history are playing out in world history.
As for your suggestion (Mr. Hines) that we should 'move on' without regard for the past, I agree with it partially. We should be aiming at some desirable future state, not at 'fixing' the errors of the past. But we would be foolish to proceed without a careful consideration of the past, for the same reason here as in every human venture.
I consider Africa's past all the time, as a cautionary tale--about Africa's behavior more than about Europe's.
[W]e would be foolish to proceed without a careful consideration of the past....
Hence my agreement (in another thread) that we should study the past for its lessons. I've never said "without a careful consideration of the past," or if I did, I wasn't clear or outright misspoke.
Eric Hines
Good. Then we are in complete agreement, or so it appears.
"Because historically, that same treacherous landscape protected certain areas from slave traders."
That's an odd conclusion to come to- I'd think it had far more to do with providing security from other tribes, and therefore promoting stability. Let's remember that the first link in the chain of slave traders was Black Africans themselves.
You see what you want to see, I suppose.
As for wanting people to flourish- it used to be that promoting the American experiment was the best path we had found for that. I hope it's still so, but surely even our 'leaders' don't believe it or practice it.
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