Leave Me Alone and I'll Make You Rich by Deirdre Nansen McCloskey & Art Carden

Author:Deirdre Nansen McCloskey & Art Carden [McCloskey, Deirdre Nansen & Carden, Art]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: BUS000000 Business & Economics / General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-10-30T00:00:00+00:00

17

It Wasn’t Imperialism

Nor was it successful violence of any stripe that made the West rich. Most obviously, it wasn’t warfare. As it turns out, aggressions that encourage the killing of your people and their suppliers and demanders are not really very good for you. War, like plague, might have kept wages high by keeping the amount of labor low relative to the available land, but where war flourished most—the German lands during the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), for instance, killing a third of their population—prosperity did not. Slavery, colonialism, and imperialism don’t explain why Walmart cashiers in the United States make so much more than their counterparts elsewhere in the world.

To be clear, we are not suggesting that the evils of war, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism were justified, or anything other than evil. True, it was only bourgeois places, we have noted, that began to end the evil. Until England in the late eighteenth century, war was the usual hobby of kings, imperialism seemed blameless, and hardly anyone objected to the system of slavery. And, true, “everyone” does it: African empires, like ancient Rome’s and Athens’s and Israel’s, were slave societies, and after their hobby wars the African imperialists sold people to the Europeans or Arabs waiting off the coast. The Sioux native Americans were tyrants of other native Americans. Yet such “what-about” does not excuse evil.

Or in these cases stupidity. We are saying, to be precise, that war, slavery, imperialism, and colonialism were on the whole economically stupid. Suppose killing people, taking their stuff, and establishing empire could create an “original accumulation of capital” that would jump-start the “capitalist mode of production” and thereby create a Great Enrichment. If so, as we have argued repeatedly, it would have happened a long time ago and not in northwestern Europe. Imperialism isn’t a new idea. The French liberal Jean-Baptiste Say remarked in 1803, before imperialism became fashionable among the clerisy, “Dominion by land or sea will appear equally destitute of attraction, when it comes to be generally understood that all its advantages rest with the rulers, and that the [home] subjects at large derive no benefit whatever.”1 In 1923, in the aftermath of World War I, a later liberal, the Italian economist and future president of Italy Luigi Einaudi wrote, “Before the [First World] war it was a favorite doctrine with nationalists that new, rising nations . . . were called to high destinies, to conquer territories, to become world Powers. . . . The war of new and rising nations against old and stationary . . . was erroneous both historically and economically.”2

Alas, others disagreed, such as the American Theodore Roosevelt, or the Japanese prime minister Hideki Tojo. “Our nation,” declared Tojo, “stands at a crossroads, one road leading to glory and the other to decline.”3 One still hears such guff. In 1997 the geographer Jared Diamond wrote a brilliant book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies, which was meant to answer the question of a New

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.