False Economy - Alan Beattie [81]
Nor are the money changers an isolated example of Islamic business minorities. The Muslim Hausa ethnic minority has provided some of Nigeria's most successful traders, both before and after independence from the British empire. They brought kola nuts grown in the forest areas in southern Nigeria to sell in the savannah regions of the north, and sent grass-fed cattle the other way. As early as the 1880s, Hausa merchants pioneered the use of steamships to establish a sea trade route to Ghana.
Had Max Weber lived among the Hausa, he might well have concluded that Muslims were good for growth and based his convoluted psychological theories upon the tenets of Islam. Had he visited eastern Africa later in the twentieth century, he might well be scouring the Mahabharata for the secrets of commercial success. Had he wandered all over modern-day Southeast Asia, he might well be touting the works of Confucius as the world's first business-management text.
In fact, Weber himself accepted that while the Protestant ethic had helped get modern capitalism going, capitalism now had a momentum of its own and could be adopted by any society. "Victorious capitalism, in any case, ever since it came to rest on a mechanical foundation, no longer needs asceticism as a supporting pillar," he concluded.
It is too easy to infer causality from a casual look at economies and dominant religions. The reality is much more complex and, happily, much more optimistic. Muslim societies can choose to succeed, just as Christian or Jewish societies can, without sacrificing their beliefs. Religion does not determine economic fate. Islamic countries can get rich. In fact, some do.
Chapter 6. Politics Of Development: Why Does Our Asparagus Come From Peru?
If you are a European, or less so an American, take a look at your supermarket the next time you go shopping. If you live in an area where there is a consistent demand for fresh green asparagus, the chances are that—outside a short growing season in Europe and a slightly longer one in the United States—the asparagus on display will have been flown from Peru.
Even allowing for the fact that fruit, vegetables, and flowers are regularly flown from tropical countries to temperate ones, it may strike you as odd that, particularly in Europe, a cost-effective industry spontaneously emerged to airlift a perishable green vegetable thousands of miles around the world from the remote western coast of Latin America. Your wonder would not be misplaced.
The development of the world economy may look like an onward march of impersonal market forces, laying all inefficiencies to waste before it. In truth, as we saw in the chapter on water, some industries, but especially agriculture, are shaped as much by politics as by economics. Their sustenance owes much to the fact that small groups of producers who will throw everything into protecting their livelihoods can often win out over much larger interests who care much less.
Sometimes the initial support may make economic sense, but protection continues well after the original rationale has gone. Eventually, the cabals of producers often lose. But if we look at the various rises and falls of textile, sugar, and banana producers, as we will in this chapter, we'll see that the process can take centuries.
And even when they are defeated, it is generally not because society