Review Essay

The Morality of Economic History and the
Immorality of Imperialism

DONNA J. GUY

"Everything's got a moral, if only you can find it."

Alice in Wonderland, Chap. 9.

Ever since the eighteenth century, economists, historians, sociologists, and political scientists have pondered why some countries have benefited so much from the rise of capitalism, modern agriculture, and industrialization, while others have languished. Neat and messy theories of comparative advantage, industrialization cycles, cultural, religious, geographic explanations, Marxism, dependency, and world-systems theories have all been offered. Driven by ideologies, belief in the veracity of particular types of data, and usually preaching to the converted, these theories have been both praised and scorned, particularly by historians who have a great penchant for finding the exceptions to all models, and who tend to tolerate their own evidence better than documentation offered by others.	1
If historians cannot accept the theories of others, then supposedly they should create their own. This is a difficult task because it implies knowledge of more than one country or region and reliance on the conclusions of other specialists, a hazardous proposition. It can also lead to historians searching for evidence to support a vision of one society that is then superimposed on others. David S. Landes confronts the thorny and contentious fields of national histories and macroeconomic theory in an extraordinarily ambitious study of nations across time and region to find out why some are more successful than others in the struggle for economic survival, The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998). His theory of moral and cultural capitalism is based on the empirical evidence found in the many monographs and articles listed in his bibliography. While this method has its own hazards, it is far more satisfying to the empirical demands of historical documentation, and it is easier to present the premises and the evidence than it is in ideological or model-based studies. Indeed, the bibliography, though not complete, is excellent. The question remains how the author utilized the information.	2
Since the basic premises as well as the conclusions are designed to promote specific and rigid Eurocentric prejudices that serve more to create controversy than to persuade the reader, it is evident that Landes searched the bibliography for information to confirm, rather than challenge, his moral and cultural perspective. An eminent and insightful economic historian of Europe and Egypt, he has produced a historical tour de force that broaches with wit, intelligence, and more than a hint of impatience topics that in recent years have been highly controversial. Relying on an enormous understanding of historical processes and the complex fabric of human interaction, as well as a strong belief in the positive contributions Europe has played in the international economic world, Landes is a modern Don Quixote ready to defend his ideas and ideals in a hostile world. In many ways, he succeeds in an impressive fashion, and poses confident challenges to many recent historical perspectives, but his moralizing leads to pitfalls and weakens not only his discussion of historical immorality but also his analysis of historical processes in countries outside Europe and North America. This particular review will focus on his perceptions of Latin America.	3
Unafraid of historical fashions, Landes argues forcefully for geographic and cultural determinism as major factors in economic history. He contemplates hundreds of years of history from Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and the New World. Rather than focus simply on an issue such as climate, he brilliantly explores the demographics of infant mortality, epidemic disease, and the ownership and control of water resources. These realities lead to the conclusion that people who live in the tropics simply cannot work as hard or efficiently as those in more temperate climates. It also places temperate Europe and North America in an advantageous position further benefited by the presence of appropriate natural resources. Forget about the role of air conditioning and the advances of modern public health since the 1950s, what held true in the nineteenth century for Landes still holds true today, and the conquest of smallpox, polio, and other epidemic diseases has been replaced by the presence of endemic diseases: Chagas' Disease, leprosy, and malaria (p. 10).	4
Supposedly free from the infestations of the tropics, Europe and North America were also endowed with populations of European origins that believed in Protestantism. Harking back to once-popular beliefs in religious links to the industrial revolution, Landes reexplores religion as a stimulus to creativity and progress. A firm believer in Max Weber: "it is fair to say that most historians today would look upon the Weber thesis as implausible and unacceptable . . . I do not agree" (p. 177), Landes argues that Protestants, particularly Calvinists, were at the forefront of industrial creativity and development when compared to Catholics, Jews, and Muslims. This highly complex issue, one that needs to focus as much on nonconformist Protestants such as Quakers, and the diversity of approaches to Judaism, Catholicism, Islam, and other religions, and even more on the issue of religious nonconformism generally, underpins much of Landes's Eurocentric approach. According to him, where there were Calvinists, there was progress, because mothers needed to be literate and Protestants tended to be at the forefront of the invention of clocks and concepts of time. Religion and temperament fomented creativity and gave a "big boost to literacy, spawned dissents and heresies, and promoted the skepticism and refusal of authority that is at the heart of the scientific endeavor. The Catholic countries . . . responded by closure and censure" (p. 179). As with all generalizations, there are many exceptions to this pattern, and what seems logical on a world scale can often fall apart at the micro level.	5
Imperialism is another topic used to validate Europe's key role in the advancement of capitalism and modernity, and Landes again refuses to give in to political correctness, the logic of subaltern resistance, or any theory that advocates Europeans' inability to grasp the nuances of non-Western culture: "In recent years, anticolonialist critics have made much of the alleged misdeeds of Western curiosity, putting scholars, spies, and diplomatic agents in the same knaves' basket . . . Insofar as the critique holds that only insiders can know the truth of their societies, it is wrong. Insofar as one uses this claim to discredit the work of intellectual adversaries, it is polemical and antiscientific" (p. 164). If it were true that no one can understand another culture, historians, anthropologists, sociologists, and literary critics would be out of work. Nevertheless, this does not mean that it is unimportant to examine how culture intervenes in the interpretation of the past and of other cultures. And to accuse such approaches of being unscientific is as oversimplified as the claim utilized by some postmodernists that historians are positivistic because of their reliance on documentation. Historians have always acknowledged the existence and significance of multiple viewpoints, and this reviewer hopes that tradition will continue.	6
Imperialism is a major concern for economic historians, because colonialism led both to the rise and the fall of imperialist nations throughout the world. At the same time, it stimulated capitalism, industrial commerce, and trade. Once again, Landes offers his own perspective on the matter by pondering the relevance of morality to the imperial mission. He sharply criticizes nations he believed relied on torture and extreme exploitation, and has little sympathy for historical currents that argue that these terrible events need to be placed into a perspective that avoids confronting solely the moral dilemmas they posed. Here, Landes belligerently critiques those who question the immorality of the Spanish conquest of the New World.	7
The Black Legend is a version of the Spanish conquest of the New World that argues that the Spanish were far more violent and oppressive than other European conquerors. It began in Elizabethan England and has never quite disappeared from scholarship. This point of view became fashionable in the United States in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and was fueled each time a new English translation of contemporary critiques appeared, particularly of works by Bernal Díaz del Castillo (who accompanied Hernán Cortés to Mexico) and Father Bartolomé de Las Casas (who criticized Spanish atrocities in sixteenth-century Latin America). The Black Legend has been the subject of scholarly debate among Latin Americanists since the late 1940s. While historians such as William Maltby, Benjamin Keen, Edmundo O'Gorman, and Lewis Hanke devoted an enormous effort to the task of separating anti-British sentiment from the documentation of Spanish cruelty toward the indigenous of the New World, Landes has little patience for such nuances.1 To him, the British were clearly more humane in their treatment of the indigenous, and this was in keeping with their morally superior nature. Indeed, Landes argues that, if confronted with the prospects of torture by either the British or the Spanish, he would have preferred to have been tortured by the British: "Dead is dead, but that way I might go to my death swiftly and reasonably whole" (p. 77n). This faith in British torture technique probably would be unappreciated by the remnants of the Pequot Indian nation attacked by British militiamen and their Indian allies in 1637. During the attack, "men, women and children burned or were speared to death. Pequot captives were beheaded or sent into slavery," and the massacre decimated this group.2 Torture is torture. No one has the moral high ground in such atrocities, yet Landes has absolutely no patience for any historian who questions either the cruelty of the Spanish or the good intentions of the British.	8
This desire to take the moral high ground and the unwillingness to nuance Latin American and other non-European regions is also clear from Landes's discussions of why Latin American countries have had difficulties meeting the demands of industrialization. One of the Latin American countries examined in greatest detail is Argentina. This temperate country has more in common climatically with Europe than with most of Latin America, although Landes does not mention it. Argentines think of themselves as Europeans rather than as Latin Americans, due to the impact of massive European immigration there in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Yet, to Landes, Argentina is just another Latin American country, one in which modern industries arrived too late to be of use. Like the rest of South America, "natural and social circumstances were unfavorable. Fuel and materials cost more than in Europe or the United States, and skills were wanting. It was all very rational: comparative advantage made it easier and cheaper to buy abroad" (p. 315). This interpretation in its own way is also very rational but not exactly accurate.	9
Let's examine the textile industry. The desire to produce textiles in Argentina was hampered by a series of factors: the female labor force familiar with textile activities was located in the Argentine interior rather than in industrializing Buenos Aires; the cotton grown in Argentina could not be adapted to cotton gins until intensive agricultural experiments took place in the 1920s, and the political climate discouraged those who tried to find solutions because leaders were afraid that major trading partners such as the British would retaliate against the growing Argentine beef and cereal trade. Furthermore, the textile industry linked agriculture to industries in ways not evident in England, supporting Tom Kemp's thesis that the British model of industrialization is not the only paradigm. Rather than creating new technology and machines, textiles in Argentina promoted land settlement and the integration of rural activities with urban industrialization.3 Steel, another sinew of European progress, was not inhibited by the lack of entrepreneurial cleverness or inventiveness. Efforts to promote steel production were thwarted first by the location of the iron ore in the mountainous north, second by the failure to find coal deposits until the 1930s, and finally and most importantly by efforts of the U.S. government to prevent the sale of steel manufacturing plants to Argentina in the 1940s.4	10
Economic history is not the sum total of cultural factors. Politics, natural resources, and the need to apply more sophisticated technologies than those utilized by England and Germany were also vital to the history of Argentine industrialization. Consider the fact that harnessing water power to feed the factories of Buenos Aires was impossible until electricity could be transported over long distances and Argentina could get diplomatic agreements with its neighbors to use the rivers that led into the Rio de la Plata estuary.	11
Landes blames Argentina's dominant Spanish and Italian population for the slowness of Argentine industrialization, but he fails to consider that British immigrants to that country also frustrated industrialization. In fact, British entrepreneurs usually invested in land or banking, and British investors chose to promote railroads rather than industries. Argentine industries were developed by entrepreneurs of German, French, Italian, and Argentine origin, with only British and U.S. meat-packing firms as a major exception. And those who developed industries, contrary to Landes's view, were clearly aware of existing technology and labor reforms. Indeed, many problems confronted by industrialists related to their over-investment in new technology that created excess capacity in the limited markets of Argentina, rather than technological inefficiency.5 It simply is not true that "industry [was] in a time warp of backwardness" (p. 326), and a number of works cited in Landes's bibliography have very different conclusions.	12
And how is one to explain the recent successes of Argentine economic reform in the 1980s? Has Calvinism intruded into the Argentine religious landscape, or, have President Carlos Menem and his advisers taken political hints about how to rethink Argentine economics? Instead of Protestant Europe, they turned to the model forged by Spain's Felipe González, whose position as the leader of the worker-supported Socialist Party enabled him to impose neo-liberal free market policies and spur an economic recovery hardly imagined by those who thought that Catholic Spain and Catholic Argentina could never modernize. Landes understands that culture cannot stand alone as an explanation for economic development, but he clearly believes that some cultures have more moral will to impose change than others, and this, I believe, represents the same prejudice that led him to dismiss any positive efforts by Latin Americans and other non-Protestant groups to promote modern economic policies.	13
Landes concludes his praise of European culture by noting that historians have great difficulty accepting cultural explanation: "It has a sulfuric odor of race and inheritance, an air of immutability . . . But applauding or deploring implies the passivity of the viewer—an inability to use knowledge to shape people and things" (p. 516). I believe those historians wary of cultural explanations are not passive, simply more cautious. Landes himself tempers his reliance on culture and morality in his final words. His conclusions offer no panaceas, no predictions, and no real way to tie together this ambitious project in a meaningful fashion except to urge nations to keep trying. It is a shame that such an ambitious, well-crafted, but flawed study should leave the reader with the impression that historians do much better analyzing what they know than trying to prove what they would like to believe.	14
Donna J. Guy is a professor of history at the University of Arizona. A specialist in both the economic and gender history of Argentina, she has published four books, Argentine Sugar Politics: Tucumán and the Generation of Eighty (1980), Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family, and Nation in Argentina (1991), Sex and Sexuality in Latin America (1997, co-edited with Daniel Balderston), and Contested Ground: Comparative Frontiers on the Northern and Southern Edges of the Spanish Empire (1998, co-edited with Thomas E. Sheridan), as well as many articles. Currently, she is working on a book about street children in Argentina. Notes 1 William S. Maltby, The Black Legend in England: The Development of Anti-Spanish Sentiment, 1558–1660 (Durham, N.C., 1971); Lewis Hanke, The Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America (Philadelphia, 1949); Edmundo O'Gorman, "Lewis Hanke on the Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America," Hispanic American Historical Review 29 (November 1949): 563–71; Hanke, "More Heat and Some Light on the Spanish Struggle for Justice in the Conquest of America," Hispanic American Historical Review 4 (August 1964), 293–340: Hanke, Bartolomé de Las Casas, Bookman, Scholar and Propagandist (Philadelphia, 1952); Benjamin Keen, "The Black Legend Revisited: Assumptions and Realities," Hispanic American Historical Review 49 (November 1969): 703–19. 2 New York Times (July 26, 1998): 31. 3 Tom Kemp, Historical Patterns of Industrialization (London, 1978); Donna J. Guy, "Women, Peonage and Industrialization: Argentina, 1810–1914," Latin American Research Review 16 (Fall 1981): 65–89; Guy, "Oro Blanco: Cotton, Technology, and Family Labor in Nineteenth-Century Argentina," The Americas 49 (April 1993): 457–78. 4 Paul H. Lewis, like Landes and Carlos Díaz Alejandro, blames the lagging Argentine steel industry on political strategies of Juan Perón after 1946. Landes relies on these two authors. Díaz Alejandro, an economist, is used as the basis of the discussion of industrialization for Lewis, and Lewis is cited by Landes on 326–27, nn. 30 and 31; Lewis, The Crisis of Argentine Capitalism (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1990). Neither Díaz Alejandro nor Lewis did primary research that would have revealed the role of the United States. U.S. National Archives, Record Group 835.6511/9–1944, Letter from the Department of State to ARA (ARMCO ARGENTINA), September 19, 1944, outlined U.S. opposition to investments in a steel factory in Argentina. These included U.S. support of the steel industry in Chile and Brazil. As part of these commitments, the United States intended that Chile supply steel to Argentina. The government was also concerned that the Brazilian steel factory would experience unfavorable competition from an Argentine source. These files are filled with documentation on U.S. efforts to prevent the growth of the Argentine steel industry. 5 H. S. Ferns, Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 1960). The problems of limited markets could also be detected in the Argentine textile, food, and shoe industries. Many factories produced a wide variety of products to overcome the limited sales of one particular item. This can be seen by an examination of early twentieth-century reports on Argentina industry conducted by the U.S. Department of Commerce.

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