Review of the Book

When Histories Collide
by Raymond Crotty

Michael Mann*

[The Inaugural Raymond Crotty Lecture: Ireland in Crisis, Radical Alternatives
(Kilkenny, 15th October; Dublin 16 October, 2001]

* Michael Mann is Professor of Sociology, UCLA; Visiting Professor,
Queen's University Belfast, Ireland

Raymond D. Crotty. When Histories Collide. The Development and Impact of Individualistic Capitalism. Walnut Creek, California: Rowan & Littlefield, 2001, 311pp. This is an extraordinary book by an extraordinary man. For fifteen years a farmer in County Kilkenny, Ireland, Crotty began to write a column for the Irish Farmers Journal. He took an undergraduate degree by correspondence course and followed this with a master's degree at London University. He sold his farm, became an agricultural economist and worked as a consultant with international aid agencies. He authored books on the Irish economy and politics and on cattle farming. He had largely finished the manuscript of this much more ambitious book in 1992, but he died in 1994 before it was ready for publication. His son struggled through rejections of the manuscript but eventually found a publisher with the aid of Norwegian sociologist Lars Mjøset, who immediately recognized its quality and wrote the book's fine introduction.

Crotty was not a professor but an intellectual rooted in practical experiences and strong but unconventional politics - Irish nationalism and Third World populism, tinged with admiration for the American populist, Henry George. Once in a blue moon, backgrounds like this enable someone to write a book which we professors, weighed down by disciplines and schools of thought, could never write. There are some token references to comparative historians and sociologists (including myself), but this book is an original.

This is an economic history of humankind from the beginning to the present. It covers only agriculture and animal husbandry, but has been the basic economy for most of history and remains so for most humans today. From it has come human biological sustenance and property relations. The first great originality of the book lies in its concern with human nutrition, how humans managed biological survival from plants and animals, and how they branched out into different modes of nutritional adaptation. The second great originality is to derive from this a theory of social development from the Neolithic age to the present. And the third great originality is the powerful culminating analysis of how Western individualistic capitalism "undeveloped" much of the Third World by destroying its nutritional basis. Given the power and originality of these arguments, I feel it is my primary duty to present them, rather than to engage in my own critique. This should convince you that this book is a must-read.

From the original hunter-gatherers ("living like animals") came pastoralists and agriculturists. Agriculture developed most in fertile river valleys, where all land was cultivated and surplus capital generated industry and services, thus creating "civilization". Since there was no extra land, individuals could not work to produce further marginal value. There was no private property and social relations were profoundly collectivist. Everyone was trapped into dependence on the community. In a separate line of development among pastoralists in Asia appeared a fateful Darwinian adaptation toward "lactose tolerance", enabling pastoralists to digest their animals' milk (most of the world's population are lactose intolerant and cannot do this without getting sick). Their ability to consume milk and milk products also gave them a surplus and capital. However, since good grazing land was scarce, the marginal productivity of labour was again zero and collectivism (based on clans) again dominated.

Crotty now embarks on his cattle-grazer's theory of history. The population surplus produced by these pastoralists, combined with the extensivity of grazing practices, led them into invasions/ migrations southwards and westwards. Crotty briefly explores their incursions into China and Africa (stand-off between lactose-tolerant cattle-grazers and agriculturalists), India (caste and holy cows), the Near East (the ultimate destruction of its civilizations), and the Mediterranean (private property in slaves, eventually a dead-end). Yet he focuses on their migrations into the Central European forest-lands. Here subsistence was tough, involving back-breaking forest-clearing to uncover fairly poor quality land. Yet land was plentiful and so the individual created marginal productivity and value, unlike anywhere else. Survival depended on a mixed pastoral/ agricultural economy generating surplus food and fodder for the animals to last over the harsh winters. So private property appeared in land and in capital, in the form of cattle, homes, crops and food. Crotty says capitalism had uniquely emerged in central Europe by about 2000 BC - a dating far earlier than anyone else's. Eventually savings and investment led to technological innovations in agriculture and warfare, developing European civilization.

After more conventional sections on the rise of Europe and its transport revolutions (navigation and railways/ steamships) enabling conquest of much of the world, Crotty turns more interestingly to the consequences. Where settler colonies wiped out the natives, they could introduce individualistic capitalism on terra nullis. It flourished there among colonists who were used to it back home. But elsewhere individualistic capitalism was imposed on large native populations in land-scarce environments, as for example in India, Indonesia and Africa. Their prior economic systems had resembled those of the world in earlier times: land was scarce but not labour, whose marginal productivity was therefore near-zero. Their varied but more collectivist property systems were now arbitrarily dismantled, and colonial elites and a few native clients appropriated all ownership rights. In post-colonial states the only difference has been to increase the number of native capitalists.

This imposition of an alien system of production "undeveloped" the Third World. Neither of Crotty's conditions for development are met -- that "more people are better off than in the past and that fewer people are as badly off as was the case hitherto". Western agricultural and veterinary science made improvements for the owners but not for the population as a whole. The Europeans did bring more public order, public health and medical science, but the subsequent improvements in health occurred without any improvement in nutritional standards. The human and the cattle population both increase while their consumption levels decline. They live, but undernourished. The cattle produce less milk and meat. Only unconquered countries like China and Japan escaped this degradation, and their successful development, whether capitalist or not, has been much more collectivist.

As Mjøset notes, this is a devastating attack, not on capitalism, but on the forced imposition of an individualist capitalism out of context, where labour was plentiful but land was scarce. It would not have developed autochthonously across the Third World and it brutally disrupted existing economies. The natives were forced out of adequate subsistence economies to become surplus landless labourers or peasants occupying marginal lands. Inequalities, especially in cattle-ownership, widened. Therefore Crotty advances twin proposals to restore development to the Third World: reduce population levels and restore the commons. Only this would undo the damage done to the world by Western colonialism. How frustrated he must have been as a development consultant, recommending such unfashionable policies!

All this was written before it became clear (in the last decade) that absolute living standards in the poorest third of the world's countries had turned downward, and before the AIDs pandemic began to decimate the populations of many of these countries. Most historical pandemics have struck populations with declining nutritional levels. Perhaps this one does too. Nowadays most radicals tend to attack neo-liberalism and the US for global undevelopment. Perhaps the real target is the entire Western economic system.

Finally, a few brief criticisms. Though Ireland is used frequently and fruitfully as the first European colony, Crotty's contemporary comments on Ireland sometimes err -- the "Celtic Tiger" remains livelier than he suggests, while Protestant hegemony in the North is substantially weakening. More importantly, Crotty did not live to see the sustained development now occurring in some post-colonialist regions like India and South-East Asia. These do tend to have more collectivist elements in their political economies. But they also have other non-economic benefits derived from their prior civilizations, like literacy, effective states, shared cultures and higher levels of social cohesion. Economic determinism like Crotty's has its limits and indeed I would make objections on this score to many of his historical arguments.

Nonetheless, Crotty uses his distinctive brand of biological/ economic materialism to very powerful effect. Here we have a treatment of "the European miracle" which is highly critical and not remotely Euro-centric. It is also highly plausible - though one would have to assemble bodies of experts with very diverse technical backgrounds to assess its ultimate truth-content. But all social scientists and historians with broad comparative interests, especially in the economy, demography and human health of the South of the world, should read this book and reflect long upon it. What a pity the author is no longer with us.