By and large, imperialism cannot be said unequivocally to have been a net economic benefit or a net economic loss to those who were conquered. In some cases, it was clearly one rather than the other. But even where there were long-run benefits to the descendants of the conquered peoples, as in Western European nations conquered by the Romans, the generations that were conquered and lived under Roman oppression were by no means necessarily better off. However, even such a British patriot as Winston Churchill said, “We owe London to Rome,” {940}because the ancient Britons created nothing comparable themselves. Yet the sufferings and humiliations inflicted on the ancient Britons provoked a mass uprising that was put down by the Romans with a merciless slaughter of thousands. #151 | | |
What can be said from an economic standpoint is that there is little compelling evidence that current economic disparities between nations in income and wealth can be explained by a history of imperial exploitation. There were usually large economic or other disparities before these conquests, and these pre-existing disparities facilitated worldwide conquests by relatively modest-sized nations like Spain and Britain, each of which conquered vastly larger lands and populations than their own. #152 | | |
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Trying to assign relative weights to the various factors behind economic differences would be an ambitious and hazardous undertaking. Even a sketch of just some of the individual factors involved in economic advancement suggests that equal economic outcomes for different regions, races, nations or civilizations have been unlikely in principle and rare empirically. When the various interactions of these factors are considered, the chances of equal outcomes become even more remote, as the number of combinations and permutations increase exponentially. For example, regions with similar rivers are unlikely to have similar economic outcomes if the lands through which the rivers flow are different, or the cultures of the people living on those lands are different, or the waterways into which the rivers empty are different in proximity to markets or in other ways. #154 | | |
Interactions are crucial. Despite the importance of geographic settings in limiting or extending opportunities for economic development, there can be no geographic determinism, since it is the interactions of the physical world with changing human knowledge and varied human cultures which help determine economic outcomes. Most of the substances found in nature that are natural resources for us today were not natural resources for the caveman, because human knowledge had not yet reached the level required to use those substances for human purposes. Only as the frontiers of knowledge advanced did more and more substances become natural resources, in unpredictable times and places, changing the relative geographic advantages and disadvantages of different regions. Even when geography is unchanging, its economic consequences are not. #155 | | |
Nevertheless the effect of geographic influences can be considerable in a sequence of events involving many other factors. Peoples isolated geographically for centuries—whether in the Balkan mountains or in the rift valleys of Africa—tend to be culturally fragmented as well. They may also tend to have highly localized loyalties (“tribalism” or “Balkanization”) that make it more difficult for them to combine with others to form larger political units like nation-states. In turn their individually small societies may for centuries be vulnerable to marauding enslavers or imperial conquerors. #156 | | |
Nor do cultures which originated in places that were geographically isolated for centuries quickly vanish when modern transportation and communications penetrate that isolation. Some people define environment as the physical, geographic or socioeconomic surroundings as of a given time and place. But this leaves out the cultural patterns inherited from the past, which can differ greatly among groups who are all currently living in the same setting, with the same opportunities, but leading to very different economic outcomes among these groups. Although the children of Italian and Jewish immigrants to the United States in the early twentieth century lived in very similar surroundings, and often attended the same neighborhood schools, they came from cultures that put very different emphasis on education, and these children performed very differently in school,{941} leading to different economic patterns as adults.{942} #157 | | |
Even the relatively few individual factors sketched here show many complications when examined in greater detail {xxxiv}—which is to say that the variables at work increase exponentially for each of these factors, making equal outcomes ever more unlikely. Other factors not explored here—such as demographic differences among regions, races, nations and civilizations—simply add to the complications and the inequalities. When the difference in median age between nations, or between racial or ethnic groups within a given nation, can be ten or twenty years, the likelihood that different peoples would have even approximately equal economic outcomes, despite their many years’ differences in adult economic experience, is reduced to the vanishing point. #158 | | |
While there are discernible geographic, cultural and other patterns behind many economic inequalities among peoples and nations, there are also sheer happenstances that can play major roles. Wise decisions or foolish mistakes made by those who happened to be political or military leaders of particular peoples at crucial junctures in history can determine the fate of nations, empires and generations yet unborn. The decision of China’s leaders, when that was the most advanced nation in the world, to seal off their country from the rest of the world, forfeited China’s preeminence in the centuries that followed. #159 | | |
The role of chance when closely matched armies clash on chaotic battlefields can make the difference between victory and defeat “a near run thing,” as the Duke of Wellington said of the battle of Waterloo, which he won against Napoleon—and which determined the fate of Europe for generations to come. Had the battle of Tours in 732 or the siege of Vienna in 1529 gone the other way, this could be culturally a very different world today, with very different economic patterns. #160 | | |
Other happenstances include the great biological vulnerability of the indigenous peoples of the Western Hemisphere to the diseases brought by Europeans, which diseases often decimated the native populations more than the European weapons did. Because the Europeans were far less vulnerable to the diseases of the Western Hemisphere, the outcomes of many of the struggles between the two races were essentially predetermined by microorganisms that neither of these races knew existed at the time. {xxxv} It was said of a kindly Spanish priest who went among the native peoples in friendship, as a missionary, that he was probably responsible for more deaths among them than even the most brutal Conquistador.{943} #161 | | |
Taking into account both discernible geographic, cultural and other patterns that present either wide or narrow opportunities for different peoples in different places and times, and unpredictable happenstances that can disrupt existing patterns of life or even change the course of history, suggests that neither equality of economic outcomes nor the indefinite persistence of a particular pattern of inequalities can be assumed. #162 | | |
What the centuries ahead will be like, no one can know. But much may depend on how well the many peoples and their leaders around the world understand what factors promote economic growth and what factors impede it. #163 | | |
