One of the seemingly invincible notions of our times is that great disparities in income
and wealth are strange, suspicious and probably sinister. However, there are large differences in
productivity behind income and wealth differences, whether among nations or among individuals.
Many of these national differences in productivity are due to geography, rather than to human beings.
In the early twentieth century, the average income in the Balkans was only about one-fourth of the
average income in Western European nations. Much of this was a result of geography.
Western Europe had produced an industrial revolution, based not only on technology but also
on the presence of iron ore and coal deposits, the key ingredients in the production of iron
and steel—which in turn were key ingredients of industrial production. Not only were such
deposits lacking in the Balkans, there was no economically feasible way to ship them there.
There were no such networks of navigable waterways in the Balkans as in Western Europe,
and mountain ranges blocked off much of the region from overland shipments. Not only have material
things suffered from geographical handicaps, so have the people themselves. Isolated peoples
have usually been backward peoples, whether they were isolated by mountains, jungles, or other
geographical handicaps, such as living on tiny islands scattered across a vast and empty sea.
Put differently, the size of a people’s cultural universe influences how far they can develop,
technologically and culturally. When British settlers crossed the Atlantic and confronted
the Iroquois in North America, they did not confront each other simply as the British
versus the Iroquois. They confronted each other as people with very different cultural universes
of very different sizes. The British were able to cross the Atlantic in the first place
only because of cultural advances that they had borrowed from other peoples in Europe, Asia and
the Middle East. The British steered their ships with rudders invented in China. They were able to
navigate with instruments based on trigonometry, invented in Egypt. Their calculations were done
with numbers invented in India. Much of what they knew about the world in general was acquired by
reading material written in letters invented by the Romans. The Iroquois had no similar cultural
universe. They could not draw upon the cultures of the Aztecs or the Incas, for none of these three
groups knew of each other’s existence, much less the existence of other cultures on the other side
of the oceans that surrounded and insulated them all. One reason for the greater cultural isolation
in the Western Hemisphere was that North and South America contained no horses, oxen or other
animals capable of carrying heavy loads for long distances. This limited how much trading could
go on and how great a distance it would pay to move products by the costly use of human porters.
In turn, that meant limiting the range of cultural contacts in general. Indian canoes could travel
for considerable distances on water but there was little or no economic incentive to build larger
vessels, capable of longer trips, since there were severe limits on how much cargo could be moved
when the vessels landed. Just the fact that the vast Eurasian land mass spreads from east to west,
while the continents of the Western Hemisphere spread from north to south, also limited the
size of the cultural universe differently in the two regions of the world. At a time when most of
the human race was engaged in agriculture or in animal hunting or animal husbandry, knowledge of
specific crops and particular animals was far more widely applicable when spread from east to west
than when spread from north to south. Knowledge of rice cultivation, for example, could spread
all the way across Asia and into Europe because much of Asia and Europe are in similar latitudes,
with similar climates. But bananas could not spread from Central America to Canada,
because north-south movement involves bigger changes in climate. Similarly, many tropical
animals do not exist in colder climates, so knowledge of how to hunt or domesticate animals
cannot be transferred as far from north to south as it can from east to west. All this is not a
matter of praise or blame, or even of genes. Human beings may discriminate against particular groups,
but geography discriminates more powerfully against whole peoples, nations and civilizations.