slaves in 1750, but Jamaica is one of the very few countries to sustain a demo-
cratic political system since independence (in 1962) and has long had much
higher levels of human development (literacy, health and life expectancy) than
could be expected given its level of GDP per capita. In the sixteenth century the
growth of world trade led to the intensification of coercive/feudal labour rela-
tions in Eastern Europe as landowners sought to tie down labour to benefit
from exporting grain (Wallerstein, 1974:91). Grain, of course, was the same
crop that was supposedly associated with small-scale, family farms and
democracy in North America. Much more detailed data on the scale and
pattern of the slave trade (discussed in Chapter 9) shows that all forms of slav-
ery were negatively related to subsequent economic development, and there is
no evidence that this relationship was driven by the large-scale plantation slav-
ery that was characteristic of South America (Nunn, 2007).
A third geography-resource story focuses on why China was unable to
sustain its economic lead established by the fifteenth century and why later
Britain surged ahead. After the mid-eighteenth century there was a growing
ecological threat to economic growth in Western Europe. In Italy, Spain, the
Low Countries and Britain forest cover was down to 5–10 per cent of land area
by1850 and water power was not sufficient to supply energy. The threat to
energy supply, it has been argued, was overcome by the fortunate locations of
coal deposits near emerging centres of European economic activity and the
growing skills in exploiting them. Coal proved essential for industrial growth
based on iron, steel, steam power and transport in Britain. The North and
North-west of China did have substantial coal deposits but by 1600 CE the
centre of population and economic activity had shifted to South China where
growth was hindered by a reliance on dwindling supplies of wood (Pomeranz,
2000). This story is plausible in that it seeks to explain the contrast between
gr owth in England and stagnation in China but it lacks strong empirical
support. Coal made only a limited contribution to the Industrial Revolution in
England until at least 1869 – almost a century after many scholars have dated
the first signs of industrialization. Careful empirical work by Clark and Jacks
(2007:46) shows that the absence of coal and so steam power would have
raised production costs in British industry in the early nineteenth century by at
most 10–20 per cent,so could not have been responsible for the dramatic
differences in outcome argued by Pomeranz.
These three examples are of little wider use in explaining growth in differ-
ent contexts and time periods. Another objection is that there is a general
presumption in all three stories that having important natural resources is a
‘good thing’, especially if that resource can be used as an input for industry or
has value in export markets. In fact some natural resources have even been
labelled ‘cursed’. Commodity prices tend to be very volatile on world markets
and growth in those countries dependent on them for export revenue experi-
ence parallel volatility in growth. The 43 resource-rich Sub-Saharan African
countries lurched from positive to negative economic growth from the 1970s to
the 1980s as a resource-price boom came to a dramatic end. In general as prices
Geography and Economic Resources 239