Unlike geography, Peter Zeihan notes (in The Accidental Superpower), technology can move, and it keeps moving until it settles in a geography that can make the best use of it:
Just as agriculture didn’t remain hidden in Egypt, the deepwater technologies that allowed the Iberians to overturn Ottoman power diffused out of far western Europe.
[…]
The Thames provided all of the unification and local trade opportunities of Europe’s other rivers, but it empties into the North Sea, one of the world’s most dangerous bodies of water, frigid, tidal-extreme, and storm-wracked. There is no day where you dare bring your B game on the North Sea, as the Spanish discovered in 1588 when it wrecked over half their armada in their failed invasion of England. The severity of the North Sea is the quintessential example of why it took so long for humans to master the oceans, and it was in this crucible that the English naval tradition was forged.
[…]
England’s maritime acumen enabled it to nimbly switch trade partners at will, keeping it an economic step ahead of all competitors. Its navy let it land forces at the times and places of its choosing, keeping it a military step ahead of all competitors. And its ability to easily relocate military and economic pressure made it the ally of choice for any European power that it was not currently in conflict with.
And that was before the English learned the Iberian secrets of deepwater navigation. With deepwater technologies, England leveraged its superior maritime acumen onto the global stage.
[…]
Between 1600 and 1800, South Asia and the Far East were removed forcibly from the Portuguese sphere of influence. English colonies steadily supplanted their competitors at key locations in Gambia, Nigeria, South Africa, Diego Garcia, India, Singapore, and Hong Kong, relegating the time of Portuguese greatness to history.
The faster and more maneuverable vessels of the English allowed them to raid deep into the Caribbean while denying the Spanish treasure fleets the “safety” of the open seas, leaving the Spanish with no choice but to put their coastal colonies on security lockdown and to assign naval assets to protect convoys. It quickly became obvious that the only locations the Spanish would be able to derive long-term income from were those that they had directly colonized with populations sufficient to resist English attacks. In response, the English founded a series of their own colonies in the New World to start the ball rolling on a demographic overthrow of Spanish power in the Western Hemisphere.
[…]
Ships capable of making round-the-world voyages made every significant culture aware of the others. Those ships’ cargo capacity enabled every previously sequestered river valley to trade with all of the others. Interaction, whether peaceful or hostile, trade or war, was no longer local but global.
[…]
Unlike the Iberian monarchs, the English businessmen saw more in the wider world than just spices and precious metals. They also saw bottomless markets. The English system, therefore, didn’t seek (just) simple plunder, but also to develop a global trade system with England at the center. Unlike deepwater navigation, which developed in response to the economic need, industrialization was an outgrowth of opportunity.
[…]
Had the Industrial Revolution happened anywhere else on the planet, there would have been a market crash as the prices of goods would have cratered due to insufficient demand. But at the time the British (as the English became known after their union with Scotland in 1707) were masters of the oceans, ruling a vast military and commercial empire that spanned the globe. This allowed them to shove all of their (massive) excess production down the throats of any people that they could access via water, particularly within their own empire. The British were (easily) able to cover all of the administrative costs of their empire, the capital costs of their industry, and have huge additional streams left over to justify both a stronger navy and more industrial development.
Lloyd’s of London is love; Lloyd’s of London is life.
Geography does matter. Compare Greece with Sub-Saharan Africa. Attica had pentelic marble and the Mediterranean versus the Sub-Saharan savanna of grass and scrub trees.
Bleh. The whole “colonialism made _____ rich” seems mainly pushed by those who think, “if I could just steal all my neighbor’s shit, I’d be set.”
I’d suggest Britain became relatively wealthy in spite of, not because of, their empire building proclivities. Italy; France; Germany; others became similarly wealthy with a lot less ‘White Man Burdening.’
Also don’t like his emphasis on consumption, as if selling toilet paper is the only activity of an economy. There is the thing about adding value; creating wealth; producing things that make us better off, even if our population is small in number. Do you want to live among 100 wealthy people? A 1000 comfortable people? Or 10,000 in squalor?
Peter Zeihan is quite right in this. Overproduction—i.e., material abundance for non-shareholders—has been Capital’s Achilles’ heel for nearly a century. Fortunately, the solution to the problem of overproduction has been found in industry consolidation and cooperation, the regulatory state, and real-estate securitization.
Industry consolidation is self-evident.
Industry cooperation consists of standards boards and such. Perhaps the archetype of such is PCI-DSS.
The regulatory state creates tens of millions of jobs for middle-class women.
Real-estate securitization is how the banking system generates its good credit. Real-estate titling is monopolized by the court system, which lets the member banks of the Federal Reserve System inflate the unit of account (the dollar) by refinancing the nation’s real estate over and over. It is the four thousand member banks of the Federal Reserve System, and not the twelve Federal Reserve banks, that drive inflation, because substantially all dollars “in” banks originate with—that is, are created by—mortgage transactions. Everyone needs space and shelter, so the threat of homelessness is employed to keep the human resources “locked in”. One virtue of this arrangement is that trickle-down is minimized because the dollars created return to shareholders instead of bleeding out to jobs-havers, minimizing consumer inflation.
Thanks, Jim.
I’m wondering about the urge to securitize other things, like carbon.
What stops TPTB from nationalizing oxygen in the atmosphere, and charging us for it’s use; and punishing badthinkers by denying use of the resource?
Rest assured that, while the New York Stock Exchange has chickened out on its plan to list natural asset companies, or NACs, many of the world’s most conscious people continue to work diligently to financialize and/or securitize the natural world in toto.
https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/nyse-pulls-plan-environmentally-sustainable-asset-class-2024-01-17
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DvxxdZpMFHg
The author still seems good at polishing the good old narrative, but not as good at thinking.
As Karl Tagon said, «List all your assets, kid.» Maritime acumen, backstabbing acumen and hypocrisy acumen. I once linked a book with non-British view of the question: “Vampire of Europe”.
And the Romans didn’t seek (just) simple plunder, but also to develop an indefinitely expanding tribute system with Rome at the center. So?
If all those factories have suddenly built themselves elsewhere, prices would fall. Uh…
The author seems to assume supply & demand balance applies only to the consumer products, and the rest is shaped by fairy dust.