ANSWERS TO GEOGRAPHY! EUROPE AND CHINA 21the worm infestations that plagued China and India.* (Only a few
years ago, one fifth of all Chinese who received blood transfusions
came down with hepatitis, because donors' livers had been ravaged by
parasites and blood screening was incompetent.)^3 Healthier Europeans
lived longer and worked closer to their potential.T4
This is not to say that European crop yields per area or population
densitieswere higher than those in warm irrigation societies. The gains
from animal fertilizer, plowing (which brings nutrients up from below),
and fallow could not match the fertile silt of the Nile, the Euphrates,
or the Indus; even less, the alluvial deposits of the Yellow and Yangtze
rivers, and the multiple cropping made possible by year-round
warmth.* On the other hand, irregular interruptions in riverine cul
tivation, whether by want or excess of water or by enemy action against
irrigation systems, could hurt far more than dry or wet spells in a rainy
climate. Averages are deceiving. Monsoon rains, generous over time,
vary a lot from season to season and year to year. Floods and droughts
are the norm. In China and India, repair and replenishment were that
much more urgent. Even without catastrophe, the demand for labor in
the rainy season and the big yields of wet cultivation promoted high
densities of population—30 times that of Africa per unit of arable, 40
* Eric Jones, The European Miracle, pp. 6-7: "Faeces discharged into water made
China the world reservoir of lung, liver and intestinal flukes and the Oriental schisto
some, all serious causes of chronic illness. Human excreta were used as a fertiliser, and
soil-transmitted helminth infestation was an occupational hazard for the farmer. Ac
cording to Han Suyin there was ninety per cent worm infestation among children in
Peking in the early twentieth century and worms were visible everywhere on paths and
alongside buildings.... Anti-social customs apart, this was the penalty for a dense pop
ulation operating irrigation agriculture in a warm climate, with inadequate sources of
fertiliser." India, with the unhygienic habit of defecating in public space, often in
streams and rivers that also served for washing and drinking, may have been in even
worse shape.
t Jones, European Miracle, who cites Narain, Indian Economic life, pp. 332-33. But
Narain's data come from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when Eu
rope had made substantial progress over earlier mortality levels. The differences be
tween Europe and Asia had presumably been smaller five hundred or a thousand years
earlier.
** The Yangtze alone deposits more silt than the Nile, Amazon, and Mississippi com
bined; and the Yellow River deposits three times that of the Yangtze—Link, "A Har
vest," p. 6.
* Because of dependence on artifice, such societies were highly vulnerable. It has
been argued, for example, that the destruction (fourteenth century) by Timur and his
Tartar hordes of the cisterns and water delivery systems of Persia was never repaired
and turned a once populous, fertile land into a waste. The kingdoms and peoples of
that area never recovered.