(^250) THE WEALTH AND POVERTY OF NATIONS
All these countries were poor, handicapped by meager, highly vari
able rainfall that reduced agricultural yields far below those of well-
watered northern Europe. Spain was the least favored. A notional line
between wet northern Europe and dry southern (above and below
750 mm. [30 in.] of rain a year) divides Portugal and Italy approxi
mately in half; but 90 percent of Spain lies on the dry side, and much
of the wetter land above the line is mountainous and not arable. Add
in Spain's high average altitude and hence extremes of temperature,
and we have a bad country for cereals.^22
One might have thought such poor lands good candidates for cot
tage industry, à la suisse, but Iberia particularly wanted for enterprise
and skills, including the ability to read. These failings went back cen
turies—to religious zealotry and Counter-Reformation cultivation of
ignorance—and ruled out the kind of diversification that would have
compensated for agricultural infertility and poverty.^23 Comparative lit
eracy rates are not exact, in large part because definitions and judg
ments varied from one country to another. Even so, the contrast
between Mediterranean and northern Europe is undeniably large.
Around 1900, for example, when only 3 percent of the population of
Great Britain was illiterate, the figure for Italy was 48 percent, for
Spain 56 percent, for Portugal 78 percent.^24 The religious persecu
tions of old—the massacres, hunts, expulsions, forced conversions, and
self-imposed intellectual closure—proved to be a kind of original sin.
Their effects would not wear off until the twentieth century... and
not always even then.^25
(Needless to say, this indictment has not been to the taste of Span
ish elites, political and intellectual. No one likes to be told [reminded]
that his failures are due to his failings; or that his sources of pride are
vices rather than virtues. Hence a protracted effort by Spanish and his-
panophile scholars to dismiss the historical indictment as a "black leg
end"—a slander by people of bad faith. Yet the fact of "decadence"
remains and calls for explanation: more than three centuries of back
wardness exacted a high price in income and achievement.)
A few centers of exceptional (if modest) adaptability escaped the
general fate. In Spain, Catalonia diverged from the rest and as early as
the eighteenth century began mechanizing textile manufacture. Later
on, the exploitation of mineral resources, especially of iron ore in the
later nineteenth century, drew money and trade to the Basque coun
try. Most of this ore, however, went to ironmaking centers abroad;
Spanish industry made little use of it.
Italy moved ahead faster, especially in the Po Valley (Lombardy,
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