In the fourth chapter of The Accidental Superpower, Peter Zeihan gets to that accidental superpower:
The Mississippi is the world’s longest navigable river, some 2,100 miles long from its mouth at the Gulf of Mexico to its head of navigation at the Twin Cities in Minnesota. That’s about one-third longer than the mighty Danube and triple the length of the Rhine. And the Mississippi is only one of twelve major navigable American rivers. Collectively, all of America’s temperate-zone rivers are 14,650 miles long. China and Germany each have about 2,000 miles, France about 1,000. The entirety of the Arab world has but 120.
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The Americans benefit from a geographic feature that exists in few other places on the planet, and nowhere else in such useful arrangements: barrier islands. Chains of these low, flat, long islands parallel the American mainland for over three-quarters of the Gulf and East Coasts. The American barrier island chain turns three thousand miles of exposed coastline into dozens of connected, shielded bays. Tidal shifts are somewhat mitigated throughout the system, and the islands do an admirable job of blocking all but the most severe weather that the oceans can throw at the land, allowing for safe navigation from the Chesapeake to the Texas-Mexican border. The net effect of this Intracoastal Waterway is the equivalent of having a bonus three-thousand-mile-long river.
The most compelling feature of the American maritime system, however, is also nearly unique among the world’s waterways — the American system is indeed a network. The Mississippi has six major navigable tributaries, most of which have several of their own. The greater Mississippi system empties into the Gulf of Mexico at a point where ships have direct access to the barrier island/Intracoastal system.
All told, this Mississippi and Intracoastal system accounts for 15,500 of the United States’ 17,600 miles of internal waterways. Even leaving out the United States’ (and North America’s) other waterways, this is still a greater length of internal waterways than the rest of the planet combined.
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In the American example this allows goods — whether Nebraska corn or Tennessee whiskey or Texas oil or New Jersey steel or Georgia peaches or Michigan cars — to reach anywhere in the river network at near-nominal costs without having to even leave the country.
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Roads and rails do not come cheaply, so taxes need to be raised and government workforces formed. Not so in the United States. The rivers directly and indirectly eliminate many barriers to economic entry and keep development costs low. Even the early smallholders — pioneer families who owned and worked their own plots of land — found themselves able to export grain via America’s waterways within a matter of months of breaking ground.
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As of 2014, that consumer base amounts to roughly $11.5 trillion. That’s triple anyone else, larger than the consumer bases of the next six countries — Japan, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, China, and Italy — combined, and double that of the combined BRICs (Brazil, Russia, India, and China).
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The majority of the Lower 48 is within the temperate climate zone — warm enough for people to live and crops to grow, cool enough to limit populations of deadly, disease-carrying insects. The Rockies are a very serious mountain chain, but unlike the world’s other great mountains — the Alps, Himalayas, and Andes — they have six major passes with minimal avalanche dangers (so they can be kept open year round). Three of those passes are sufficiently wide to house major metropolitan regions — Salt Lake City, Las Vegas, and Phoenix — within them.
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In all, roughly two-thirds (including nearly everything east of the Rocky Mountains) of the Lower 48 can be reached easily, with some 90 percent of it within 150 miles of some sort of navigable waterway.
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The greater Midwest is absolutely massive: With 139 million hectares under till, it is the largest contiguous stretch of high-quality farmland in the world. The central portions of the plain are humid yet temperate, making them perfect for corn and soybean production. The western sections are considerably drier as they lie in the rain shadow of the Rocky Mountains, making them ideal for several varietals of wheat. In bad years the Midwest produces a billion bushels of wheat, 2.5 billion bushels of soybeans, and an astounding 9 billion bushels of corn.
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Of the United States’ 314 million people, some 250 million of them live within 150 miles of one of the country’s navigable waterways.
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The wealth of internal distribution options the United States enjoys means that for the bulk of its history American dependence upon the international trade system has been less than 15 percent of GDP.
IOW, wealth-building assets so huge, it is hard for our politicians to degrade it, but they are striving mightily to do so.
“GDP” is laughable bullshit. The author is not a stable genius. Other than this, well, duh. It’s almost an entire continent.
All these rivers explain why the area that is now the US was such a powerhouse and world leader in the 1300s.
And too, these rivers explain why the US was so slow to build railroads and roads. It’s hard to compete with river transport.
We must be careful when we explain history to ourselves.
On this subject, didn’t the Chinese build a significant canal that’s been in operation for some time now? Is that their trick for making so many people?
And, on this subject, how did the south-Asian Indians manage to create so many people, given their land?
Fun things to think about.
There’s a difference between transportation types. Cargo traffic requires only maximal throughput at minimal cost. Passenger traffic requires speed.
Mark Twain in his Mississippi book had some notes on the dynamics of river/rail transport development. Once both were developed enough, the river had lots of cargo barges, but only marginal passenger traffic compared to what it used to be. Trains took all the passengers.
It’s even more obvious with air transport. While it remained too expensive for most cargo that could be moved in any other way (up to and including dog sleds), the spread of passenger planes took a lot passenger traffic from rail.
Anyway, water transport reach is among the conditions in which the railroad network develops. Even when navigable rivers are numerous, they don’t go everywhere. But since the steamer/barge backbone had much greater capability, the role of railroads was to connect ports of different navigable rivers and reach from them into all the places barges could not go.
Later and on another continent…
Stalin had some remarkable masters of logistics placed where they could do much (read Grigorenko on Apanasenko — he does not get attention, but he was the man behind both all those Far East divisions appearing right in time and Japanese reluctance to open second front).
He wanted to develop rail as best as possible, find the best men for this. And eventually had rail logistics organized and refined as much as possible at this time. But he also demanded canals, to use the rivers more.
In the conditions when railroad was all-important either way, barges still mattered on strategic level, so much that even expensive ways to make river transport more useful became high-priority projects.