• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 2957 0

building material. Beneath the palms lay scattered patches of manioc (cassava). This landscape of gardens, orchards, and waterways served for centuries as a bridge between the interior and the islands. Such complex arrangements typically are supervised by strong, well-organized governments. Europeans certainly thought the Indians had them—it explained why their repeated efforts to seize this rich agricultural land were repelled. Only in the eighteenth century did the foreigners gain a foothold, aided by the introduction of European diseases: smallpox, tuberculosis, and influenza cleared the way for malaria. Indians retreated into the interior as Europeans seized the coast, creating sugar plantations in what eventually became, after much international squabbling, Guyane (French Guiana), Suriname (formerly Dutch Guiana), and Guyana (formerly British Guiana).

Archetypical may have been Guyane, which was formally acquired by France in a treaty in 1763. Initial colonization efforts proved so disastrous that the nation almost forgot its existence until three decades later, when a military-backed coup overthrew the parliament established by the French Revolution. The new dictatorship piled 328 unwanted deputies, clergymen, and journalists into small vessels and dumped them in the colony. P. falciparum greeted them on the shore. Within two years more than half were dead, either killed by malaria or sufficiently weakened by it to be slain by other ailments. Undeterred, the French state kept sending over criminals and undesirables. French prisoners had in the past served as galley slaves on special prison ships in the Mediterranean. After the steam engine made galleys obsolete convicts were dispatched to Guyane. Violent offenders ended up in the infamous prison on Devils Island, seven miles off the coast; the rest joined chain gangs of agricultural labor. Disease claimed so many that Guyane became known as a “dry guillotine”—a blade that killed without needing to wet itself with blood. Perhaps eighty thousand Frenchmen made the passage. Very, very few returned.

Unable to settle in disease zones, Europeans never established communities there. The ideal was offshore ownership. Europeans would remain in the safety of the home country while small numbers of onsite managers directed the enslaved workforce. Because captives would outnumber captors, intimidation and brutality would be necessary to keep the sugar mills grinding. In the realm of falciparum and yellow fever, sugar despotism became the rule: tiny bands of Europeans atop masses of transplanted Africans, angry or demoralized or stoic according to their characters.

Nothing is wrong with offshore ownership per se. If French wine makers buy wineries in California or U.S. wine makers buy wineries in Bordeaux or Burgundy, the acquisitions may sting local pride but are unlikely to have any larger effect on either nation. It is different if foreign wine makers buy every winery—or, stronger yet, if people thousands of miles away dominate every industry. One all-too-representative example: a single Liverpool firm, Booker Brothers, controlled three-quarters of British Guiana’s economy for almost a century. All the profits ended up on the other side of the ocean. So did all of the entrepreneurial, managerial, and technical expertise. Locals provided only labor. Indeed, they were punished if they tried to do anything else.

The French artist Édouard Riou, now best known for his illustrations of Jules Verne, traveled to France’s colony of Guyane in 1862–63. A visit to the prison islands produced this image of the sea burial of a convict, presumably a victim of malaria or yellow fever. (Photo credit 3.4)

As the economists Acemoglu, Johnson, and Robinson noted, distant and disconnected owners had little interest in building the institutions necessary to maintain complex societies: schools, highways, sewers, hospitals, parliaments, legal codes, agricultural-extension agencies, and other governmental systems. In places with a full array of functioning institutions, locals can compete economically