experiment in building a society: notably the Greek peninsula, Italy, the
Iberian peninsula, Denmark, Norway/Sweden. Europe had two large islands
that became important independent societies, Britain and Ireland ... Europe
is transacted by mountain ranges that split up Europe into different principal-
ities: the Alps, the Pyrenees, Carpathians – China does not have mountain
ranges that transect China. In Europe big rivers flow radially – the Rhine, the
Rhone, the Danube, and the Elbe – and they don’t unify Europe. In China the
two big rivers flow parallel to each other, are separated by low-lying land, and
were quickly connected by canals. For these geographic reasons, China was
unified in 221BC and has stayed unified most of the time since then, whereas
for geographic reasons Europe was never unified. (Diamond, 1999:13)Military efforts continually failed to impose unification on Europe, whether
Charles V of Spain after 1500, Louis XIV after 1672 or Napoleon after 1805 in
France, or Hitler in Germany after 1939. The Reformation, in splintering the
Catholic Church,helped facilitate the political fragmentation of Europe after
- Diamond is not clear why or how Europe managed to achieve something
like an optimal degree of fragmentation,but he implies that 2,000 principali-
ties was a good thing during the Renaissance – what about 3,000 or 1,000? In
other parts of the world political fragmentation has not been associated with
economic dynamism. Income levels in Europe collapsed with the fall of the
centralized Roman Empire after the fifth century and subsequent fragmenta-
tion of Europe. The break-up of the Ottoman Empire in 1918 and its replace-
ment with fragmented states has hardly led to competitive dynamism in the
Middle East over the last century. The fragmentation of Africa, as noted earlier
in this chapter, has greatly increased the costs of trading. Fragmentation has
also been associated with an increased risk of conflict. Europe was devastated
by wars of religion between 1550 and 1650, linked to the disintegration of the
single Catholic Church and the rise of independent (Protestant) churches
during the Reformation. Between 1500 and 1799, for example, Spain was at
war with foreign enemies 81 per cent of the time, England 53 per cent and
France 52 per cent (Ferguson, 2012:36). If we contrast the dynamism of China
between 1100 and 1400,the civilization of ancient Rome from around 50 to
476 CE,or the Taj Mahal-building Mughal Empire of India in the seventeenth
century with the brutalities of fragmented Europe during the Thirty Years War
(1618–48), War of Spanish Succession (1701–14), Napoleonic Wars
(1792–1815), World War I (1914–18), and World War II (1939–45), frag-
mented states do not appear to be such a good thing. And, after all, fragmented
Europe was ultimately surpassed not by another more dynamic and frag-
mented entity but by the UnitedStates of America.
Geography and human health
The two-way link between health and economic growth was discussed in
Chapter 6. Cholera,for example, may impact on health (and so undermine
242 Patterns and Determinants of Economic Growth