Jan de Vries Slides on Pre-WWI Colonialism, Imperialism, and Globalization

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“You come to us and tell us that the great cities are in favor of the gold standard; we reply that the great cities rest upon our broad and fertile prairies. Burn down your cities and leave our farms, and your cities will spring up again as if by magic; but destroy our farms and the grass will grow in the streets of every city in the country.... We will answer their demand for a gold standard by saying to them: You shall not press down upon the brow of labor this crown of thorns, you shall not crucify mankind upon a cross of gold.”

William Jennings Bryan: Democratic National Convention, 1896

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Comments

[David Lloyd-Jones]

Two points: the quote from Bryan, above, it the most utter horseshit. Cities can feed themselves -- if necessary by doing it the way Moscow did in the thirties, sending thugs out to rob the granaries left behind by the dead peasants (though of course Moscow arranged for the death of the peasants, while W.J. Bryan, a man with enough imagination to summon up creationism, merely imagines it as a hypothetical.)

It is a pity that Jane Jacobs died so soon, before she could collect her overdue Nobel in Economics, for it is to her that we owe the realisation that urban culture is the source of human wealth. Farms are just an expansion of the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, just as humant or nomadic cultures are the subcontracting of animal husbandry by fixed location farmers.

To this day Metro Manila is half farm-land, and Tokyo is about a third agricultural, not even counting the several percent of the city which consists of unlisted parks, unlisted because they are covered-over answers. There are hundreds, if not thousands, of farms on Manhattan island, though of course they specialise in high value products, mainly orchids, marijuana and bean sprouts. Bean sprouts have a time-to-crop of about 35 hours, so the return per acre, or square foot, anyway, is stunningly high, enough to pay the high rent and power costs of a basement farm in Tribeca.

Just for fun, not that all the corn in Kansas comes from seed originally developed in the upper storeys of Columbia labs on Morningside Heights, seed tested before it went west at the urban and urbane farms of Cold Spring Harbor on Long island. The farmers of Kansas are mere proles hired by the machine run out of New York -- and if Kansas ever vanished poof New Yorkers would grow corn under nuclear energy, no doubt in buildings supplied for the purpose by Donald Trump.

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One thing missing from your listing of the important things that happened in the railway period, say 1860 to 1925, isi the creation of some major modern languages, including French, English and Japanese. (Chinese is still a work in progress, and I'm not holding my breath for an Indian language to ever happen. Russian only a large, not a dominant, language even in Russia, but then Russian railways always did suck. Have they finished the damn BAM yet?)

One tends to forget that before the French male population was homogenised by rail to fight WWI, the country had two langusages, Langue'Oeil and Lange d'Oc, "oeil" and "oc" being the words for "Yes" in the South West and the north East respectively.

Men who survived the trenches took the language they had been addressed in home with them -- and this was the language of their officers, the language of the Paris military academies. And thus was modern French born.

English took longer, and is still developing rapidly as the class system at last begins to break down. Still the development of railways was the key. The speed record for Glasgow to London, an average of 126 miles an hour, was set in 1926. That was technological progress -- and Glaswegian was on its way to becoming a second or third language in Scotland.

A Japanese psychologist friend claims that railways brought about a 10 point rise in Japan's average IQ's -- as railways and then intermarriage brought about a decline in the centuries of idiot-breeding rural isolation. The cities of Hokkaido speak Tokyo Japanese, and north-of-Kanto Japanese is dying before our eyes. (In Japan this process has taken longer than in Europe because urbanization happened much later: Japan was still 45% rural in 1945, though urbanization since then has been almost total. There are still villages, but they are almost all immediate suburbs of Tokyo, Osaka, or the half dozen cities of only a couple of million.

[Ken Houghton]

Can we have those as, say, a PDF file? Granted, I may be the only one, but they're almost impossible to follow as currently posted.

[Ken Houghton]

The latitude graphic would make Jared Diamond proud.

[Theobald Smith]

Standardized written Chinese has been around for roughly 2000 years, since the end of the Han Dynasty. Its creation, and use as a binding to hold together the various Chinese empires, well predated the railroad era.

[Maynard Handley]

"Why could a Scotsman earn 9 shillings a day, an Indian only 1 shilling a day?"

Greg Clarke gives a detailed answer to this question in _A Farewell to Alms_. It surely behooves one to read what he has to say before implying that the answer is something mysterious and unknown. And if one disagrees with Greg's answer (for example pointing out that it's a whole lot hotter in India than in Britain, pace the latitude graphic) one should state one's objection.

[Aaron Gurwitz]

Isn't it odd that on Map 9 (Colonial Empires - 1914) Russia isn't considered an empire? It must be that conquest of contiguous territories -- the "near abroad" -- and subjection of their indigenous populations is somehow different from doing the same thing at a greater distance from the metropolis. Or maybe it's that conquest with annexation isn't imperialism. By that token, why isn't the U.S. West of the Mississippi an emprire?

[gordon]

Also in regard to Map 9 (which I take to be as at 1914), why are Canada and Australia shown as "British" in the same way as Nigeria or Egypt or India, while S.America is shown as "Once European dependencies, now fully independent"? I think the status of those two Dominions approximated much more to "once dependencies, now independent" than it did to Nigeria or Egypt or India in 1914. And to show the US as once a dependency and now independent in the same sense as, say, Mexico, is to cause even more confusion - the status of those two countries was in reality very different.

This is a misleading map; it systematically overstates European influence and minimises US influence, and groups States together whose status in fact varied widely and, as Aaron Gurwitz notes, makes no effort to categorise Russia and Central Asia at all. I'm surprised such a poor map was used in an academic presentation.

[Iqbal Latif]

Per capita-

Global Income difference between group A and group B highlights the importance of freedom, and level of education within a society, perhaps year 1500 was also the beginning of renaissance in the West and positive affect of that enlightenment cannot be overlooked.
A lot what happened after 1820 needs to be explained by the period 1500-1820. Between, 1500-1820 group B practically stagnated as group per capita grew by 70%. Now that can be partially explained by colonialism. India and China two modern day economic giants were under Qing and Moguls during the period 1500-1820. The Empires were introvert and were not outward looking they stifled any kind of progress or education or introduction of new technology.

What happened after 1820 to 2000 in group A that showed a 18 times growth in per capita income can be explained by the background and take off preparations, they also had an advantage of bleeding their colonies. The whole takeoff in the group A is little skewed; within group A Americas and Japan were the success stories of the 20th century, 18 times growth has to be seen in that perspective. The shift of the global per capita towards northern hemisphere may satisfy Jared findings but independence of America and Japan resurgence have made group A look far more successful than if one looks at it separately sans USA and Japan, actually UK and others share of global GDP declined. Most of the per capita increase can be attributed to meteoric rise of USA and Japan in the 20th century.

Indian and Scotsman-

The difference between Indian and Scotsman was based on free man and a colonised man. Second productivity still mattered and Scotsman had far higher productivity. Thirdly relatively Indian would earn far less in India and had lower living standards than a Scotsman in Scotland. The opportunities were far more available fro a Scotsman and far fewer for Indian, Indian higher population made availability of labour possible at far less prices. (Africans were made slaves for no payment, perhaps Indians fared well).

Latitude-

Latitude issues can to be put to rest if intellectual prowess of sub continent in next century rules the next wave of information and software technologies.

In my humble opinion until the inception of 1950’s the playing fields for North and South were not level, now with the 'death of distance' and global rise of consumerism new oasis of capital human as well as financial shall merge. The new tide of 'cyber globalisation' shall lift all boats, the globalisation we see until 1950 was’ iron age globalisation,’ the transformation of global economy from third generation to fifth generation in group A and from first generation to the fifth generation in group B has still not been properly accessed and thoroughly understood. The impact on global per capita in next 2 decades of newly rich consumers of what was the laggard group B shall be phenomenal. Most of the commodity rich countries which are mostly from the group B are great users of the depreciated $ products.

Commodity price hikes will only help yester poverty stricken societies armed with new wealth they fit in the resume of what the corporate in the west worry the most i.e. fall in demand... the new insatiable demand for west’s MCD junk food, GE power, and Kellogg’s, Air Buses. The demand and consumerism is not going to fall off the cliff. Welcome to the new world of consumerism, imagine billion new people liking the taste of KFC’s or Moet..

New global economy has new dimensions of demand and comparisons to great depression or other eras without fitting in these new consumers do not reflect the 'new cyber age globalisation' true potentials.