Environmental determinism
[1] Jared Diamond, Jeffrey Herbst, Ian Morris, and other social scientists sparked a revival of the theory during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
He attributes this to the fact that there are “no great shifts in the weather, which is neither hot nor cold but temperate”[6] and how the climate conditions allow Asians to live without shock or mental anxieties.
In comparison, locations “where the land is barren, dry, harsh, and harried by storms in the winter or scorched by the sun in the summers, there one would find strong, lean, well-defined.
[20] Ellen Churchill Semple, a prominent environmental determinism scholar, applied her theories in a case study which focused on the Philippines, where she mapped civilization and wildness onto the topography of the islands.
In contrast, Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson underscore that the geographic factors most influenced institutional development during early state formation and colonialism.
[27] Economists Jeffrey Sachs and John Luke Gallup have examined the direct impacts of geographic and climatic factors on economic development, especially the role of geography on the cost of trade and access to markets, the disease environment, and agricultural productivity.
Jared Diamond draws similarities between the changing climate conditions that brought down the Easter Island civilization and modern global warming in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.
[29] Alan Kolata, Charles Ortloff, and Gerald Huag similarly describe the Tiwanaku empire and Maya civilization collapses as caused by climate events such as drought.
[32] In the Pulitzer Prize winning Guns, Germs, and Steel (1999), author Jared Diamond points to geography as the answer to why certain states were able to grow and develop faster and stronger than others.
Diamond says that these natural endowments began with the dawn of man, and favored Eurasian civilizations due to their location along similar latitudes, suitable farming climate, and early animal domestication.
[33] Diamond argues that early states located along the same latitude lines were uniquely suited to take advantage of similar climates, making it easier for crops, livestock, and farming techniques to spread.
Crops such as wheat and barley were simple to grow and easy to harvest, and regions suitable for their cultivation saw high population densities and the growth of early cities.
The Americas also lacked the animals, metals, and complex writing systems of Eurasia which prevented them from achieving the military or biological protections needed to fight off the European threat.
[35] Herbst argues that the European state-building experience was highly idiosyncratic because it occurred under systemic geographic pressures that favored wars of conquest – namely, passable terrain, land scarcity, and high-population densities.
[36] Faced with the constant threat of war, political elites sent administrators and armed forces from the urban centers into rural hinterlands to raise taxes, recruit soldiers, and fortify buffer zones.
[40] The relative availability of livestock animals enabled European societies to form centralized institutions, develop advanced technologies, and create an agricultural network.
[44] Numerous scholars have argued that geographic and environmental factors affect the types of political regime that societies develop, and shape paths towards democracy versus dictatorship.
Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson, and James A. Robinson have achieved notoriety for demonstrating that diseases and terrain have helped shape tendencies towards democracy versus dictatorship, and through these economic growth and development.
For example, the development of economic institutions, such as plantations, was caused by the need for a large property and labor force to harvest sugar and tobacco, while smallholder farms thrived in areas where scale economies were absent.
[51] Jeffrey B. Nugent and James A. Robinson similarly challenge scholars like Barrington Moore who hold that certain factor endowments and agricultural preconditions necessarily lead to particular political and economic organizations.
[52] Nugent and Robinson show that coffee economies in South America pursued radically different paths of political and economic development during the nineteenth century.
Historians have also noted population densities seem to concentrate on coastlines and that states with large coasts benefit from higher average incomes compared to those in landlocked countries.
[28] Conversely, countries without coastlines or navigable waterways are often less urbanized and have less growth potential due to the slow movement of knowledge capital, technological advances, and people.
However, factors including fertile soil, nearby rivers, and ecological systems suited for rice or wheat cultivation can give way to dense inland populations.
[55] The authors used a terrain ruggedness index to quantify topographic heterogeneity across several regions of Africa, while simultaneously controlling for variables such as diamond availability and soil fertility.
[55] The impact that climate and water navigability have on economic growth and GDP per capita was studied by notable scholars including Paul Krugman, Jared Diamond, and Jeffrey Sachs.
[56] By using variables to measure environmental determinism, such as climate, land composition, latitude, and the presence of infectious disease, they account for trends in worldwide economic development on local, regional and global scales.
Locations with hot tropical climates often suffer underdevelopment due to low fertility of soils, excessive plant transpiration, ecological conditions favoring infectious diseases, and unreliable water supply.
The theory is the central argument of Philip M. Parker's Physioeconomics: The Basis for Long-Run Economic Growth, in which he argues that since humans originated as tropical mammals, those who relocated to colder climates attempt to restore their physiological homeostasis through wealth-creation.
[57] Political geographers have used climatic determinism ideology to attempt to predict and rationalize the history of civilization, as well as to explain existing or perceived social and cultural divides between peoples.
