The End of Development

A Global History of Poverty and Prosperity

Andrew Brooks

• Publisher: Zed Books
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781786990228
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Why did some countries grow rich while others remained poor? Human history unfolded differently across the globe. The world is separated in to places of poverty and prosperity. Tracing the long arc of human history from hunter gatherer societies to the early twenty first century in an argument grounded in a deep understanding of geography, Andrew Brooks rejects popular explanations for the divergence of nations. This accessible and illuminating volume shows how the wealth of 'the West' and poverty of 'the rest' stem not from environmental factors or some unique European cultural, social or technological qualities, but from the expansion of colonialism and the rise of America. Brooks puts the case that international inequality was moulded by capitalist development over the last 500 years. After the Second World War, international aid projects failed to close the gap between 'developed' and 'developing' nations and millions remain impoverished. Rather than address the root causes of inequality, overseas development assistance exacerbate the problems of an uneven world by imposing crippling debts and destructive neoliberal policies on poor countries. But this flawed form of development is now coming to an end, as the emerging economies of Asia and Africa begin to assert themselves on the world stage. The End of Development provides a compelling account of how human history unfolded differently in varied regions of the world. Brooks argues that we must now seize the opportunity afforded by today's changing economic geography to transform attitudes towards inequality and to develop radical new approaches to addressing global poverty, as the alternative is to accept that impoverishment is somehow part of the natural order of things.

part i

Making the modern world

 

chapter 1

Environmental determinism and early human history

The Green Sahara

Around 8 million years ago a common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans walked the earth, but Homo sapiens did not evolve from chimps. Picture an ancestral family tree growing up from the past to the present; different branches of species spread outwards and away from each other. Around 1.6 million years ago various types of ‘Hominins’ emerged on a different branch of the tree to the chimpanzees. Hominins is a group which includes modern humans and our other close ancestors. One such species was Homo erectus who were similar in statue to modern humans and had longer legs and shorter arms than other primates. Another was the powerful Neanderthals, which were bigger and stronger than Homo sapiens. Not all the hominin predecessors were so muscular and substantial. The diminutive metre-tall Hobbit-like Homo floresiensis were small, although with large feet. Homo floresiensis hunted dwarfed elephants and giant komodo dragon lizards in Indonesia.1 Archaeological finds show early hominins were making tools, using fire, and anthropologists speculate about language, culture, art and even religion. Neanderthals and other unsuccessful hominin species were driven to extinction. Maybe they were out-competed by modern humans, or the changing climate destroyed their way of life, or perhaps they succumbed to disease or another environmental disturbance?

Recognizably modern humans emerged around 200,000 years ago, so very, very recently in the world’s 4.5 billion year history. Africa was the birthplace of humankind. Archaeological evidence suggests early humans first migrated from the Rift Valley region of Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania in East Africa and spread around the world. People moved south to present day South Africa, spread west through the tropics towards the Gulf of Guinea, and much later headed north into North Africa and beyond. Anthropologists, archaeologists, environmental historians, geographers and geologists all try to map the early spread of humans from Africa. A hot topic of dispute between researchers is associated with explaining how humans first traversed the Sahara Desert and spread north from East Africa to the rest of the world. Traditionally, natural scientists have assumed that humans dispersed out of Africa by following the course of the River Nile, because the Sahara Desert was assumed to be a barrier to human migration.2 The perception is that the vast inhospitable desert has been a fixed feature of the natural world throughout human history, separating sub-Saharan Africa from North Africa and the Middle East. New evidence, though, suggests a very different environmental history.

Rather than always being arid, the Sahara was once covered by major water features including rivers, swamps and huge inland waterways. Lake Megachad was the largest feature and covered an area of 361,000 km2 in the middle of the present day Sahara region. To put that into perspective, it was an area of water as large as the Caspian Sea, or more than four times the size of Lake Superior, in the middle of what is now known as the Sahara Desert. Megachad reached this extent during a humid period 120,000 to 110,000 years ago. At that time, rather than being barren, the Sahara region was a savannah landscape, home to many different types of plants and animals. Humid corridors of vegetation could have provided human migration routes across the Green Sahara and the dates correspond with the first occupation of the Mediterranean coast of Africa by early modern humans 110,000 to 35,000 years ago.3 From there early humans could have carried on into the eastern Mediterranean before spreading onwards into Arabia, India and beyond.

It is important to say could, because it is difficult to conclusively prove these patterns. The Green Sahara hypothesis is relatively new and some archaeologists still believe humans dispersed out of Africa later, around 60,000 years ago, either along the Nile Valley or from Ethiopia and across the mouth of the Red Sea, and then northward through Arabia or along the Indian Ocean coast.4 While opinion is divided as to whether or not the Green Sahara provided the first route out of Africa for modern humans, evidence does clearly indicate that there were other later periods when the same region was populated by animals and humans.

Archaeological finds show two main cultural groups occupied the Sahara area practising different foraging and hunting livelihoods around 12,000 years ago during the early Holocene, which is the present warm or interglacial geological period. Remains of bone tools, fishhooks and arrow points have all been found. Historical sightings, rock art and fossil remains show savanna animals – including Nile crocodile, giraffe and African elephants – lived in the region during the second phase of the Green Sahara.5

Once humans had migrated out of Africa they spread across the interconnected land-mass of the Middle East, Asia and Europe before journeying overseas. From the Pacific Ocean coast of Asia humans headed southeast down the Indonesian Archipelago to Australia, and from eastern Russia they crossed the Bering Strait in the Arctic when ice bridges linked the continents of Asia and North America. From the Canadian Polar Regions hunter gatherers moved south through North America down across the narrow Isthmus of Panama to South America.

There are many unknowns about how humans travelled to all the remote places on earth and hypotheses are difficult to prove. What has been established is that by around 10,000–12,000 years ago humans had reached and settled on every continent and major land mass on earth, aside from Antarctica and some isolated Islands, such as the Azores. The last 12,000 years is also the period of time that encompasses the emergence of agriculture, major population growth and the massively increased impacts of the human species on the world. During the Holocene all of written history has occurred and major civilizations have risen and fallen.

Challenging nature

The idea of the Green Sahara demonstrates the contested and limited knowledge that surrounds early human history, and illustrates how what we think of as ‘nature’ is not a static reality. Movement across the Sahara was only possible at given periods because of the particular climatic conditions. Without the humid periods there was no vegetation, forests, grasslands or lakes so this natural environment limited human activity. The later periods of foraging and savanna hunting livelihoods in the Sahara region in the early Holocene show the natural environment moulded human activity. In early history the environment constrained and shaped human society, but the significance is easy to exaggerate. Early humans were still able to spread and settle the whole world and flourish in virtually every climate and physical landscape. Untangling the relationship between humans and the environment is at the core of explaining the uneven social progress of different regions of the world. To separate myth from reality first requires discussion of what we mean by ‘nature’.

Nature is a very problematic word and arguably the most complex word in the English language.6 Defining nature needs some careful attention. The way in which nature is taken here is as the material world itself excluding human beings. Think of nature as ‘the natural environment’. It is easy to confuse this meaning with the wider use of nature to express either the essential quality or character of something, or the inherent force which directs the world or human beings. These broader meanings are not of direct concern. Within the arguments presented here nature is the world outside of human control.

It appears to be inevitable that some parts of the world are rich and some parts are poor. One can easily imagine how certain places had a head start due to the favourable natural environment. It is intuitive. The fertile river valleys and plains of western Europe are simpler to farm than arid East Africa, and life seems easier in temperate northeastern American forests than in the humid mangroves of Central America. Progress is tough in some places. So perhaps we can say that ‘the environment determines society’. If we look at some of the places that are tough to live in today there are lots of examples of poor societies. The Sahara Desert is now dry and desolate and Saharan people, such as the Tuareg, are poor. The Nepalese Himalayas is a mountainous and impoverished region. The dense rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) is humid and tropical and a difficult place to carve out a living. However does this relationship hold up for all places we might think of as equally tough? Much of Saudi Arabia is also dry and desolate, but it is a rich society. The Swiss Alps are mountainous, but affluent. The rainforests of Queensland are humid and tropical, but Australians enjoy one of the highest standards of living on earth. Well maybe there are some unique circumstances that explain these examples. Saudi Arabia has oil reserves. Yet similar oil resources have been a stifling burden elsewhere and many oil-rich countries are wracked by poverty, including Equatorial Guinea, Iraq and Nigeria. Meanwhile Switzerland is perhaps different to Nepal because it is an affluent country, with a history of prosperity, and Australia has a well-developed economy and a democratic government, which contrasts to that of the DRC. In these two cases the exceptional circumstances are associated with Australian and Swiss culture, history and politics, which are all products of social interactions rather than the outcome of particular natural environments. So the signs point towards society as being more important than nature.

The brief examples discussed above are simplifications of complex geographical realities, but they begin to demonstrate some of the problems of ‘environmental determinism’: the idea that nature controls humans. The closer we examine the connections between the environment and present day patterns of wealth and poverty, the more we begin to see exceptions to the idea that the natural world determines society. Relationships between geographical space on the one hand, and human welfare on the other, begin to breakdown. Environmental determinism is a popular, intuitive and elegantly simple explanation for inequalities, but one that is almost entirely wrong.7 It is incorrectly used both to account for the present day wealth gap between the Global South and Global North, as well as to explain the earlier division of humanity between ‘haves and have-nots’ before the emergence of industrial society.8 The ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• About the author
• Title page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• Part I. Making the modern world
• 1. Environmental determinism and early human history
• 2. Colonizing the world
• 3. America: making the modern world
• Part II. Development and change
• 4. Anticipating modernity
• 5. The resource curse and the debt crisis
• 6. East Asian tigers
• Part III. After development
• 7. Is Africa rising?
• 8. Depoliticizing development
• 9. What next? The end of development
• Notes
• Index