Why white people dominate (part 3)
February 10th, 2009 by David Entwistle Posted in Books
Continued from part 1 and part 2.
So if food production is the big advantage, why did some societies develop farming, while others didn’t? The answer is that in some areas of the world, food production is very easy, while in other areas, it’s nearly impossible. The difference is not the people, but where the people are. Some areas have more domesticable plants, better soil, and a better climate. One area of the world was so good for food production that people there began farming nearly 5000 years before anywhere else. That was the ‘fertile crescent’, or Mesopotamia, in modern day Iraq and Turkey.
The fertile crescent was a huge rich valley between two rivers, the Euphrates and the Tigris. It had a temperate climate with a warm summer and a cool, wet winter with lots of rain. But the big difference between the fertile crescent and the rest of the world was the plants. Of the seventeen grasses in the world with seeds longer than two millimetres, thirteen were native to the area. Of these, some proved easy to domesticate, and have since become staples of agriculture – wheat, barley and oats. Nowhere else in the world had native grain crops that could produce so much food.
The fertile crescent also had an abundance of domesticable animals. Of all the farmyard animals familiar to us now, only the pig and he chicken were domesticated elsewhere. Chickens came to us from India, while pigs were domesticated in China. Cows, sheep and goats were all native to the fertile crescent, and horses were domesticated just to the north, around the Caucusus. So of our six farmyard friends, the four biggest were available to people in the fertile crescent before anyone else.
The ability to produce their own food meant that people in the fertile crescent could settle in towns and developed economies, technologies and polities far earlier than people in any other part of the world. These societies became the first ‘great civilizations’ of the world – Egypt, Assyria, Babylonia and Greece. Groups in other places did end up developing farming, but only much later. Inca farming, for instance, were just starting to get going around AD 500-1500, but too late. The Spanish, heirs to the developments in the fertile crescent 8000 years earlier, came in ships, carrying guns, and wiped them out.
The series concludes with part 4.
Photo by Tambako via Flickr
3 Responses to “Why white people dominate (part 3)”
By Dave Elsing on Feb 10, 2009
Hey Dave,
Does he say anything about people in tropical climates not needing to cultivate farming becuase of the abundance of food in the rain forests? Why bother planting wheat if you can chill in the warmth and eat mangoes in the shade brother – amen? This would account for them being less developed (in technology, not genetics) peoples as they did/do not need to invent.
capitalism is required in harsher climates – what u reckon?. Maybe communism would have faired better if it grew out of the tropics, rather than implanted there like a feral introduced species?
By Jon Rumble on Feb 10, 2009
Dave, am I beginning to sense irony in your title?
By David Entwistle on Feb 12, 2009
Dave – yeah, there are lots of factors that affect whether a group will develop farming (like available species, climate, soil, etc.), and availability of wild food is definitely one of them. On rare occasions there will even be enough food that the group will be able to settle in a village before developing farming. So farming in tropical areas developed either very late, or never.
I’m not sure about the idea of capitalism in harsher climates. I think that once you develop a society (with food production, buildings, leaders, etc.) you will also need to start trading. So capitalism is another development in the chain. Communism could work in a small group – it seems that small bands of hunter-gatherers didn’t have formal leadership structures – although they would have had to have some kind of leader. Need to think about it more.
Jon – ‘irony’ makes it sound like I know what I’m doing!