False Economy - Alan Beattie [80]
The religious minority as a thriving business community is a phenomenon observed repeatedly throughout history. The Jews and French Huguenot Protestants of medieval Europe, the Indians in postcolonial East Africa, the Parsees in India itself, the Lebanese in West Africa and Latin America, and the Chinese across Southeast Asia: all have proved to be economically much more successful than the majority culture or religion in which they operate. One of the richest men in the world today, surpassing perhaps even Microsoft's Bill Gates, is reckoned to be Carlos Slim, a Mexican telecommunications magnate who is the son of Lebanese immigrants.
Their success endures despite resentment and envy. It is frequently the fate of such groups to be targeted by unscrupulous politicians. Appealing to the base instincts of the majority, demagogues will claim that the minority grouping is stealing from the rest of the country. The Asians of East Africa were scapegoated and driven out by thugs like Idi Amin, the murderous dictator of Uganda. Similarly, there is a perpetual growling resentment of the Chinese business families of Southeast Asia. Usually subterranean, the prejudice surfaced in attacks on life and property during the Asian financial crisis of 1997-1998. Jewish prominence in business and finance has been one of the most reliable wellsprings of anti-Semitism throughout their long history of persecution in Europe.
It would appear that the success of such communities owes more to the operation of group sociology than it does to the nature of their particular religious beliefs. Close-knit cultural and religious (and family) groups tend to dominate trade in poor countries because they enjoy a certainty and means of enforcing contracts that the wider economy may lack. Where commercial law does not work well and courts are too slow or too corrupt to enforce contracts, more informal forms of sanction can be very useful. The threat of exclusion from a charmed circle of busi-nesspeople and traders is one such. It is evidently easier to hold such a group together if all members share either a kinship bond or a common religion. A collective identity also gives a signal to outsiders that a member of the circle is backed by the collective sanction of all its members. Cross one trader and you cross them all; should one trader cross you, you can be confident that the other traders will hold her to account.
The operation of group sociology may, in fact, explain some of the traditional success of Jewish business communities within the Islamic and Christian worlds. It is perhaps not so much that they were Jewish as that they were minorities. Moreover, in many Christian countries, they turned to banking and business because they were systematically excluded from the professions, such as law and medicine.
All sorts of religions and cultures can provide group cohesion—even those generally considered a source of failure at home. There is not much sign of the alleged Confucian fatalism of China undermining economic growth among the wealthy Chinese traders of Malaysia or Singapore, nor of fatalist Hindu stasis holding back the successful Indians in Nairobi or Kampala.
Indeed, there are enduringly successful minority Islamic business communities as well. If you want to get the best exchange rate for your foreign currency in modern Nigeria in the mainly Christian areas in the south of the country, you will generally do well to pull up at a roadside mosque. One of many one-man bureaux de change will emerge out of the crowd. Proffered dollars