China to peninsular Malaysia, New Guinea food production into Australia or
from Mexico northward to the US.
Diamond further argues that food production and domesticable animals
were a prerequisite for the production of guns, germs and steel, the founda-
tions of modern, high-income urban life. One acre under settled agriculture
can feed 10 to 100 times more people than when used for hunter-gathering.
The resulting increase in the density of population ultimately permitted
centralized political institutions, economic specialization, social stratification
and sustained wars of conquest. Domesticated animals provided the main
source of protein (meat and milk), clothing (wool and hides), manure and
pulling ploughs (agriculture), and the main mode of transport of people and
goods (warfare and industry) up to the Industrial Revolution in the nineteenth
century. The major killers of humanity throughout recent history such as
smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles and cholera are infec-
tious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals to which people in
Eurasia acquired an early immunity.
Diamond does offer persuasive evidence to explain why an army of Eurasia
conquered an army and empire of South America in the sixteenth century. The
argument so far remains too crude for our purposes in this book. Why was it
specifically Spain that conquered the New World? Why not any other country
in Eurasia such as Japan,Persia, or Russia?
A second,more specific historical example considers the very different
growth experiences of North and South America. This story encompasses not
just economic growth but also wider measures of development including liter-
acy and democracy. In 1700 the most prosperous economies of the New World
were in the Caribbean; in Barbados and Cuba estimated per capita incomes
were then 50–67 per cent higher than in areas that later became the US. The US
only established a clear lead by the nineteenth century. Explanations for this
growth story have included better protected property rights or the unique entre-
preneurial spirit of the US. This raises the question appropriate for this part of
the book:where did such differences arise? One answer emphasizes geogra-
phy: first, South America’s climate was more suitable for growing sugar,
which is most efficiently grown on large plantations using slave labour; and
second, the North American climate was more conducive to farming of grain
and hays, which is better suited to small-scale family farms. Thus geography
initiated a pattern of development based on inequality and slave labour in
South America and a more equal path based on family farms in North America.
The second stage of the argument is that these initial conditions persisted.
Equality in the North was perpetuated through the development of democratic
institutions, widely protected property rights and broad-based education. The
less equal South saw the consolidation of institutions that sustained a monop-
oly of power among a small class of elites (Sokoloff and Engerman, 2000).
The problem with this argument is the lack of generalization if we examine
an even more disaggregated picture. Jamaica, for example, was part of the
Caribbean sugar/slave economic system and 90 per cent of its population were
238 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth