The plunder lie about Western wealth

Plunder was normal across human societies, mass prosperity comes from its replacement.

There is an academic and non-profit/NGO industry in “explaining” the wealth of the Global North by it having “plundered” the Global South and/or the poverty of the Global South by it being “plundered by” the Global North.

There was such plunder. European imperial powers and adventurers did indeed plunder the colonised, especially during the process of conquest. This is the molehill of truth upon which a mountain of bullshit—statements uttered for rhetorical effect without regard to their truth—is erected.

Source: from here via here.

Well, perhaps the mountain of truth—there was a lot of such plunder—on which entire mountain ranges of bullshit are erected.

The normality of plunder

European wealth built on plunder is still bullshit analysis. First, because plunder was normal. Folk in the “Global South” plundered each other. Europeans plundered each other. Most elites were predatory. Most states were predatory, even if it was an ordering predation. Plunder was the, or a, dominant path to wealth more or less everywhere there were plunderable assets, regardless of whether you were in what is now the “Global North” or the “Global South”.

We now know from the genetic record that forager groups recurrently genocided each other. The most recent such forager genocide was the Inuit wiping out the previous Arctic foragers. That was plunder by territorial replacement.

Foraging populations are highly vulnerable to genocide. They have low population density, it is relatively easy to knock their numbers below the level where they can sustain their technology, and there is little useful role for captives in nomadic foraging societies. Extinction of local Homo sapien groups was a regular event in human prehistory.

Farming populations regularly genocided foraging populations. The Anatolian farmers who spread across Europe simply did not have enough European foraging ancestors for the process to have been peaceful. As far as we can tell, the Mesolithic foragers in the British Isles have no identifiable descendants. The incoming Neolithic farmers genocided them.

Pastoralist populations regularly massacred farming folk in large numbers. They genocided farming populations rather less frequently—not enough pastoralists, too many farmers.

Even so, the builders of Stonehenge and Newgrange—who were Neolithic farmers—seem to have largely wiped out by incoming Indo-European pastoralists (possibly assisted by plague). Just as the incoming Angles, Saxons and Jutes seem to have—helped by plague and flight—largely wiped out the Celts of England: hence the Celtic fringe.

I am using mainly European examples because it is the genetically (and archaeologically) best mapped continent. But these grim patterns are normal in the history of Homo sapiens. Consider, for example, the Bantu expansion across Africa that mirrors the march of Anatolian farmers across Europe.

The development of farming and animal herding led to the y-chromosome Neolithic bottleneck: a massive harrowing of male lineages that only about 1-in-17 male lineages survived. The development of farming and pastoralism created much higher populations plus plunderable assets. Folk developed much more coherent kin-groups. Teams of male warriors wiped each other out, taking the land, animals and women of the defeated as their spoils.

Plunder was thus endemic in farming and herding societies. The harrowing of male lineages came to an end via the development of chiefdoms and states. That is, the technology of exploitation—keep defeated males alive so they could breed more payers of tribute and taxes—overtook the technology of aggression (kin-groups).

States were both ordering and predatory. This process worked less well among pastoralists, as the need to defend the mobile assets of animal herds generated highly effective warriors who were harder to control or extract surplus from. Pastoralist states tended to be super-chiefdoms rather than full states and the harrowing of pastoralist male lineages continued, just at a lower level.

Africa was the continent of slavery because, being where Homo sapiens evolved, it was full of pathogens, parasites, predators and mega-herbivores that co-evolved with Homo sapiens, so could cope with them.¹ This kept population density down. This meant that labour was more valuable than land. There was more potential wealth in grabbing able-bodied people than in grabbing land.

This made slavery endemic in Sub-Saharan Africa long before the Islamic, then the Atlantic, slave trades developed. Sub-Saharan African states were overwhelmingly slave states. Even those that were trade states traded in slaves.

The Atlantic slave trade looks like the most extreme pattern of Europeans plundering others—in this case, Sub-Saharan Africans. It was certainly true that the Atlantic slave trade was horrific and had multiple adverse effects on African society. But those adverse effects were to intensify patterns that already existed. Moreover, the original plundering of people by turning them into slaves was done by … Africans.

The life expectancy of a European who left the African coast was about a year: it was not practical for Europeans to do the original enslaving. They bought the slaves from Africans. This enabled the slave trade carried on by Catholics to conform to the Papal Bull Sublimis Dei (1537) which banned Catholics from enslaving the indigenous inhabitants of the Americas (and, by implication, elsewhere), but did not ban trading in, or owning, slaves.

Wikimedia commons.

Plunder was endemic across human societies: including turning fellow humans into plunder—aka slavery. It was sadly ordinary. It was not a European pattern, it was a Homo sapien pattern. The Islamic slave trade was on the same scale—given it operated for centuries longer—as the Atlantic slave trade, the Saharan passage was every bit as horrific as the Atlantic passage, and the Islamic slave trade had the extra horror of the castration of male slaves. Hence, there is not an ex-slave diaspora in Islam as there is in the Americas.

Just as plunder was endemic, so was poverty. Mass poverty was the norm across farming societies. While there were economic efflorescences across human history, and evidence of periods of sustained growth, the dramatic shifts to mass prosperity since the 1820s—since the application of steam power to railways and steamships—is utterly without precedent. Moreover, it started in precisely one society—Great Britain. None of the other Atlantic littoral societies of Europe showed any sign of such a take-off.

Plunder explains so little of the modern world

Europeans plundering the “Global South” explains almost nothing. The European imperial expansion was not built on plunder: such plunder was a result, not a cause. It was built on discovering ways of building states of both unusually high capacity and unusually high domestic constraint mixed in with discovering new, highly effective ways, to generate and coordinate factors of production, including by generating and using ever-more capable technology. This reached an unprecedented-in-world history peak in Great Britain from whence the example spread.

Even when we look at European territorial imperialism, Europeans were able to conquer most of the planet with relatively minor expeditionary forces precisely due to the depth of their (home-grown) institutional, technological and organisational superiority (helped along, in the Americas, by a flood of introduced diseases).² Often, the biggest military difficulty even outside Europe was other European (or Neo-European) forces: American settlers, Boer farmers, rival European imperial forces. Even today, Western armies dominate conventional warfare. Areas which local diseases had previously made off-limits to Europeans became conquerable because the Europeans successfully applied technology to the problem.

But those territorial empires were by-products of social (and technological) capacity, they did not create that capacity. The various Imperial metropoles got richer after they lost their maritime empires. Access to the American market and the American-led maritime order was much more economically valuable than their territorial empires.

It is not that the European states taxed particularly lightly—on the contrary, they were relatively high-taxing states. The UK that launched the first Opium War against the Qing Empire had something like four times the income going to its central government than went to the Qing central government, from a much lower population.

Source.

The difference was that the UK provided a much more productive, and effective, balance of taxes and public goods, generating what increasingly became a higher, and broader, level of prosperity among its taxable residents. Within this much better balance of taxes and public goods there was an economy that managed a much more effective pattern of generating capital—the produced means of production, including technology—and productive labour and of coordinating land, labour and capital, accessing ever-higher amounts of energy. As economic historian Jack Goldstone notes:

by 1850 the average English person has at his or her disposal more than ten times the amount of moveable, deployable fuel energy per person used by the rest of the world’s population.

None of that energy came from plunder. It both supported, and came from, a more capable state and society that defeated China on its own territory with almost embarrassing ease in both Opium Wars.

The East India Company iron steam ship Nemesis, commanded by Lieutenant W. H. Hall, with boats from the Sulphur, Calliope, Larne and Starling, destroying the Chinese war junks in Anson's Bay, on 7 January 1841. Wikimedia commons.

The more productive your society, the more capital—the produced means of production—you produce. The more capital you can generate and coordinate, the more productive your society. The upward spiral of capital is a both a consequence and a creator of the upward and outward march of mass prosperity. That upward spiral is not the origin of these processes, but a positive-feedback consequence of them.

Hence the failures of attempts, via foreign aid, to just “drop” capital into societies that lack sufficient propensity to pro-socially coordinate factors of production. Hence also the endemic fiscal mismanagement across so much of the Global South and their attenuated ability to apply what is known to work.

Being able to shift land to more productive use was a pervasive advantage across European societies and does much to explain why Anglo-America became so much more prosperous and productive than Latin America. Indeed, the comparison of Anglo-America with Latin America provides a powerful example of how plunder is not crucial to mass prosperity.

Latin America is the creation of European settlement. European settlement of Latin America started a century or so before the European settlement of Anglo-America.

The mere fact of European settlement does not explain why one is so much richer than the other. Plunder by Anglo-America absolutely does not. Indeed, Latin America was far more built on plunder in its origins than was Anglo-America.

The difference in wealth between Anglo-America and Latin America comes down to the things all persistent differences in wealth come down to—culture and institutions (such as much more efficient use of land) including generating and using technology. Even great natural resource wealth is downstream of such, while culture and institutions (and ideology) affect profoundly how successfully, or not, natural resources are used. Venezuela, for instance, provides a text-book example of how to egregiously mis-use great natural resource wealth.

Latin American institutions advantage well-connected elites by creating very high transaction-friction public policy that such elites can manipulate to their own (at least relative) advantage. Hence it is often very expensive and time-consuming to transfer land ownership in Latin America. Latin American states are regularly poor at defining property rights—and often do not bother even trying in poor/underclass localities.

The very high rate of regulations and official discretions drives up transaction costs that the elite has the connections and the bribing capacity to get around—corruption being the market for official discretions. In a notorious experiment, students of Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto attempted to set up a small textile workshop. To get the required permissions took 278 days of dealing with bureaucracy. You can see a “progressive” form of this high-regulation-benefiting-elites model in Democrat-run “Blue” States and cities in the US that, like Latin America, generate economic emigrants.

Anglo-America was created on far more transaction- (so commerce-) friendly institutions than Latin America. Much lower transaction costs—with much broader effective economic and political participation—created much more prosperous societies. Broader effective economic and political participation tended to go together because each made it harder to do the “ring-fencing” of assets and advantages that entrenches predatory elites.

The most brutally predatory elites in the modern era have been the (Communist and Nazi) Party-states precisely because they so control economic and political participation. We see an echo of this in how the expansion of the unaccountable classes—those paid to turn up—within the Western democracies has much to do with increasing dysfunction and alienation within the Western democracies. The greatest offence against democracy in Western countries has been Western elites imposing on their voters levels and forms of migration those voters do not want and did not vote for, followed by increased censorship and Trans nonsense.

It is not accidental that much of this dysfunction and alienation is built on sanctification of activism—including malice activism (seeking to get people sacked and isolated for dissent)—based on ideas that are Critical Theory derivatives of Marxism. That is, are based on derivatives from the ideology that motivated the most murderous and tyrannical Party-states mixed in with creating moralised hierarchies that was a feature of those tyrannies, and of their Nazi counterpart, even if the contemporary intersectional moral hierarchy—coloured better than white, female better than male, trans better than cis, gay better than straight—reverses the Nazi one. Breaking up the demos into antagonistic groups is classic divide-favour-and-dominate dynamics.

Populism is what you get in a society of unwanted mass migration and skin-suited institutions. That is, institutions that do less and less of what it says on the tin—police that police crime unreliably; prosecutors that prosecute unreliably; schools and universities that educate unreliably; media that informs unreliably; public health that presides over worsening metabolic ill-health. Meanwhile, those same institutions transfer more and more resources and authority to the unaccountable classes, much of it via fiscally and socially disruptive migration.

This includes use of morally grandiose toxic nonsense—e.g. a person with a penis is a woman—to motivate, coordinate and differentiate the networks of those playing shared moralised status games that drive non-electoral politics of institutional capture of the unaccountable classes. Hence the rise of anarcho-tyranny: more and more restrictions on the law-abiding, less and less enforcement against those deemed “marginalised” or “righteously motivated”. This is very much the opposite of what built mass prosperity.

The mindset that says “Western wealth was built on plunder” is the mindset that cannot grasp how important creating effective and productive social order was to Western success. It certainly cannot grasp what is needed to build and maintain successful social order.

If you drive out, or silence, conservatives in academe and elsewhere, you drive out the conservative questions. So, you drive out the social order and social boundary questions, creating an academe of toxic conformities alienated from its wider society.

When you see someone trying to “explain” the wealth of the Global North, and the poverty of the Global South, by some plunder model, simply ask—what enabled European societies and some (but not other) Neo-European societies to allegedly engage in such one-sided plunder? Does this model explain why the move to increasing mass prosperity started in Great Britain and nowhere else? Does it explain the economic success of South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Singapore, Botswana, Switzerland? Does it explain the mass exit of mainland Chinese from poverty since 1979? Does it explain Japan’s postwar recovery? Does it explains Japan’s late C19th industrialisation? Does it explain why landlocked Switzerland, which never had an empire, is much more prosperous than Portugal, which had the longest lasting and (relative to its metropole) largest maritime empire? Of course not.

The plague of Theory-fools

None of this history is hard or mysterious. So when we see academics pushing the plunder canard, we are confronted with the “are they a knave or a fool?” question. Are they lying or are they that special type of academic fool, the Theory-fool.

A Theory-fool is someone who ends up advocating stupid, toxic, false, or ridiculously one-sided pictures of the world because their Theory—the mastery of which their cognitive identity is so built-upon—blocks them from seeing or acknowledging relevant parts of reality. Modern academe is full of Theory-fools. Indeed, in many ways, it is structured to produce them as the combination of cognitive arrogance and moral posturing is catnip to so many academics.

Many economists are Theory-fools when it comes to migration. Their worship of efficiency blocks them from considering the issues of social resilience. Their mathiness about human rationality, and delusions about uniform responses to incentives, lead them to massively under-estimate the costs of cultural diversity. Hence they seriously—even catastrophically—underestimate the potential (and actual) costs of immigration.

When we look at the fiscal impact of immigrants within European welfare states, we can see that their fiscal impact on their host societies generally corresponds to how economically successful their countries are—or how successful their particular group is within such societies. Their fiscal impact on modern welfare states mirrors their productivity back in their origin societies. Immigrants bring the patterns of behaviour dominant within their cultures with them.

The Loury principle of relations (connections) before transactions—that people spend two or more decades absorbing cultural patterns before they become significant economic transactors—tells us what evolutionary biology and anthropology also tell us: we Homo sapiens are profoundly cultural beings. We do not become cultural blank slates by the act of migrating.

The Global North wealthy/Global South poor-through-plunder nonsense has three great advantages for its adherents. It is a simple story that can be told in a pseudo-sophisticated way. It enables easy moral posturing. It enables its believers to feel oh-so-superior over past and present fellow citizens of their own societies. All things that make for Theory-fools—including Theory-fools being so prevalent in contemporary Western academe.

It is still a false picture of reality that sets folk up for catastrophically bad public policy. A false picture of reality that no one should be taken in by, nor have moral or intellectual respect for.

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1. The megafauna outside Africa—which did not co-evolve with Homo sapiens—almost all died out when Homo sapiens turned up.

2. Some commentators have pointed to the advantage for Europe of the access to New World foods, particularly potatoes. Such foods spread to Asia as well. The advantages of trade tend to be reaped by those who invest in it, something various European states were persistently more willing to actively do than most non-European states. Just as Europeans were investing more broadly in machines and other technology by the late medieval period than other civilisations: though this is a relative, not an absolute, judgement. As late as the C18th, per capita income in North-Western Europe, Yangtze delta China and Tokugawa Japan were comparable. The Qing dynasty achievement of rising per capita incomes along with a massive increase in population—from c.160m in 1700 to c.350m in 1800—was likely the greatest economic achievement in world history before the British-led C19th economic takeoff. Like other such periods of economic expansion, however, the Qing expansion generated stresses the political system proved unable to handle. What was different about what happened from the 1820s is that the application of steam power to transport (railways and steamships) (1) massively and continually increased market size, (2) set off ever-increasing access to energy, while (3) undermining the capacity for Mancur Olson’s “distributional coalitions” to freeze technological levels, and (4) occurred in a political system based on formalised political bargaining that was able to incorporate more and more groups into its political framework. The “woke” attack on freedom of speech and thought—and the use of mass migration to break up local social connections—clearly functions as an attempt by the unaccountable classes to restrict political bargaining to their favoured “in-groups” while “Net Zero” functions as a means to enforce an economic stagnation they can dominate as they have nothing to contribute to innovative prosperity. The shift from the reality of discovery to the bullshit notion of knowledge production is a sign of commitment to such status-protecting stagnation.