1493_ Uncovering the New World Columbus Created - Charles C. Mann [251]
77 Sugar despotisms: Acemoglu et al. 2001, 2003. “Differences in mortality are not the only, or even the main, cause of variation in institutions. For our empirical approach to work, all we need is that they are a source of exogenous variation” (Acemoglu et al. 2001:1371). The counterargument is exemplified by Sheldon Watts’s claim that the turn to slavery was determined by the “general stagnation of Europe’s population growth.” In his view, “what really mattered were developments in the cosmopolitan core rather than the presence of the frightful country disease, yellow fever, in the Caribbean periphery” (1999:230–34, at 233). But he simply demonstrates that England’s population was increasing slowly in the late seventeenth century, not whether the resultant price increase for servants was actually big enough to have any impact. In my view, the contrary has been shown convincingly.
78 Fear of independent institutions: Acemoglu and Robinson forthcoming. After slavery ended in 1834, many sugar planters sold abandoned, marshy land to freed slaves at exorbitant prices. In the next decade, freed Africans created a series of prosperous, self-governing freeholds. Unhappily, they had never learned the techniques, pioneered by Guyana’s Indians, to drain the land for long-term cultivation. Because the “Village Movement” deprived British plantations of labor, the colonial government refused to provide the technology and engineering skills for building and maintaining dams and channels that it made available to elites. Unable to keep sugar fields dry, the Village Movement lost its economic base; the freed slaves were forced to return to their plantations (Moore 1999:131–35). Similarly, the wealthy elites feared the small shops opened by many freed slaves. To drive them back into the fields, they imported Portuguese merchants and financed their enterprises with low-interest loans, meanwhile denying all credit to ex-slaves. The ex-slaves soon went under (Wagner 1977:410–11).
79 Stagnation of extractive states: Acemoglu et al. 2002:1266–78 (discouraging settlement, 1271; “entrepreneurs,” 1273).
80 British Guyana and Booker Brothers: Rose 2002:157–90 (exports, 186–86); Hollett 1999:chap. 5 (Booker brothers); Moore 1999:136–37 (“their station”); Bacchus 1980:4–30, 217–19 (university); Daly 1975 (fear of education, 162–63, 233–34). On trial in 1823 for fomenting insurrection by teaching slaves the Bible, the missionary John Smith decried plantation owners who believed “that the diffusion of knowledge among the negroes will render them less valuable as property” (Anon. 1824:78). Indeed, he was charged with informing slaves about “the history of the deliverance of the Israelites” (ibid.:157) and teaching them to read.
81 Disease in U.S. Civil War: Barnes et al. 1990 (35 percent, table 6; 233 percent, table 30; 361,968, table 71; proportion of deaths, xxxviii).
82 “established institutions”: The Crittenden-Johnson resolution was adopted in July 1861 by a House vote of 119–2 and in slightly different form by a Senate vote of 30–5.
83 Malaria in American Revolution: Author’s interviews, McNeill; McNeill 2010:209–32 (“nearly ruined,” 215; “unhealthy swamp,” 220; troop levels, 226).
CHAPTER 4 / Shiploads of Money
1 Zheng He: Mote 2003:613–17; Levathes 1994 (suppression, 174–81); Finlay 1991 (survey of historians’ views, 297–99); Needham et al. 1954–:vol. 4, pt. 3, 486–528ff. (suppressed records, 525). In two books published in 2002 and 2008 a retired submarine commander named Gavin Menzies claimed that Chinese fleets went beyond Africa, reaching the Americas and Europe, dramatically changing world history along the way. Few historians have endorsed this thesis.
2 Chinese “insularity”: Author’s interviews, Goldstone, Kenneth Pomeranz; Jones 2003: 203–05 (“self-engrossment,” 205; “from the sea,” 203); Goldstone 2000:176–77 (“such voyages,” 177); Landes 1999 (“curiosity,” 96; “success,” 97); Finlay 1991. See also, Braudel 1981–84:vol.