Guns, Germs, Steel, Colonies and Coal

In July 1972, the biologist Jared Diamond found himself on a beach in New Guinea. By chance, he bumped into Yali, a local politician. What Yali wanted to know from the scientist was:

“Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?"

 It took Diamond a little while to answer, but the result was a book he wrote twenty five years later. His answer was that this was mostly an accident of geography.

Guns, Germs and Steel

The basic building blocks of civilisation are plants and animals that can be domesticated. As the largest of the continents, Eurasia has far more usable flora and fauna than any other continent. What's more, the East-West axis of Eurasia allowed these edible plants and tame animals to be propagated across all the major civilisations of the continent, west to Britain and east to China. European crops grow very well in southern Africa, but the harsh climate of sub-Saharan Africa lies in the way, meaning that cows and grain couldn't reach the bottom of the continent until Europeans learnt to sail the oceans. The Americas, meanwhile, were host to a decent number of useful species, from maize to potatoes, but they were each stuck in their particular climatic niche and couldn’t spread north or south.

Better farming led to higher population densities, but there were consequences to large numbers of people and animals living together, consequences that we are still living with today: disease. However, whilst the viruses and other pathogens from domesticated animals killed millions, the survivors passed their immunity on to their children. This meant that when the people from the Old World went to the New, Americans died in vast quantities of European diseases, but Europeans did not die of American bugs.

That is, in essence, the argument in Diamond’s book. But whilst it’s as good as far as it goes, there is a huge elephant in the room: China. China enjoyed all the benefits of the Eurasia farming inheritance. As the source of many of the world’s infectious diseases her population’s immunity was as good as anyone’s. So why was it Europe, and not China, that conquered the world? Diamond suggests the answer was political, that as China became a Universal State with no enemies of equal stature, she did not have the drive to improve that the warring European nations had. This is probably not right.

Instead, the next piece of the jigsaw is provided by Kenneth Pomeranz in his book The Great
Divergence. Comparing Europe and China pre-1800 he looks at all the reasons that are given for subsequent European domination, such as political and financial institutions, culture and economics, and so on, and finds almost all of them all wanting.

The one factor in which Europe did enjoy and advantage though was it’s American colonies. China had the vast Pacific to its east, whilst Europe had the more manageable Atlantic. The ship technology developed to navigate the stormy seas of western Europe could cross the Atlantic to reach the New World, but the Pacific was impassable to Chinese vessels. Superior military technology, and techniques, allowed Europeans to take what they wanted by force. Guns, germs and steal really.

The Great Divergence 

However, even with the spoils of an entire continent to be ruthlessly exploited, as well as the first factories,

Europe, as a whole, was not richer than China in 1800. Parts of Europe, like England, were far wealthier than the Chinese average, it is true, but equally parts of China, like the Yangtze Delta, were richer than the European average. The West only starts to accelerate away from the East in the nineteenth century when it begins to use significant amounts of coal. Now this is a complicated issue, because China has vast amounts of coal too. So why was the Industrial Revolution powered by anthracite from Wales, not Inner Mongolia? Pomeranz puts this too down to geography as well.

Chinese coal is mainly in the north, and the chief problem with extracting it is stopping it catching fire. With European coal mines the major issue was draining the water out. To solve this the Europeans, led by the British, used steam engines. In 1800 steam engines were grossly inefficient. However, when used in coal mines this didn’t really matter. Being based at the mine itself, not only were there no transport costs for the fuel, but they were able to run on the lowest quality coal that didn’t really have a commercial value anyway. Thanks to this free energy the European economy received an injection of free calories that were not dependent on the limited resource of land.

More significantly though, as steam engines were used more, they improved and became more efficient. Engineers like Watt became justifiably famous, but really this wasn’t the work a few geniuses, but a gradual improvement based on experience. With usable steam engines came railways, steam ships and all the paraphernalia of the industrial revolution. European heavy metal blew the Asian economy out of the water, in some cases literally.

So, there we have it. Not proven, by any means, but it is at least a theory that is consistent with the facts. Europe, for a while, was the dominant force in the world due to accidents of geography. Eurasian farming was the best. Eurasian diseases were the worst. Europe was gifted the Americas as colonies, and her coal reserves posed exactly the right sort of problems for the development of steam engines.

Sources

Guns, Germs, and Steel was first published by W. W. Norton in March 1997 by Jared Diamond

The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy (2000) by Kenneth Pomeranz