North American Carrying Capacity and the Northern European Agricultural Tradition

View this QuickTime movie of world crop cover since 1700 for evidence that Northern European “immigrants” to North America pulled their weight by increasing the carrying capacity. This increase in carrying capacity is something necessary (but insufficient) to justify foreign immigration and it is something no other immigrant group has approached since. With the exception of trade in African slaves by the southern plantations—plantations best seen as a part of the Central and South American tradition of centralized land ownership where slave trade was part of the practice—the US and Canada were built by Protestants deriving their yeoman farmer tradition from pre-theocratic northern European agricultural practices.

Posted by James Bowery on Thursday, December 29, 2005 at 08:42 PM in History
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Posted by William Smith on December 29, 2005, 09:50 PM | #

Let’s not be rediculous here. America and Canada were not economic and agricultural wonders because of Protestantism, but rather because it was settled by Anglo-Saxons! I can’t stand all the stupid yammering about “protestant work ethic”, as if the native racial intelligence of the northern European were dependant upon the religious speculatings of some fat German who lusted after nuns.

Max Weber was simply unaware of the genetic information that we have today. It is no coincidence that the mechanical clock was invented by medieval English monks, industrialization and capitalism were invented by British citizens, and England currently has the second greatest number of Nobel Prizes in the hard sciences. No other nation in the history of the world has given the world so much good. The Anglo-Saxons make it look easy, but you better believe it isn’t.

Posted by James Bowery on December 29, 2005, 10:20 PM | #

When I say
Protestants deriving their yeoman farmer tradition from pre-theocratic northern European agricultural practices I am not crediting Protestantism but the pre-theocratic traditions upon which Protestantism’s valuation of self-reliance and individualism were derived.

When you’re out in the frontier with no supporting infrastructure, you can’t stand around waiting for a Priest or Rabbi to come by and tell you what you can and cannot do to survive. You make your own decisions or you die. The same went for the paleolithic people who settled iceage Europe.

Posted by John S Bolton on December 30, 2005, 01:39 AM | #

If one is to look at this in terms of racial genetics, one oddity that stands out is that the settlement did not fan out from the outlet, on to the ends of the Misssisippi basin. Water transport was ~10x more efficient, but its natural availability did not generate the expected pattern of settlement. Instead one sees a tendency for the vanguard of agriculture to expand athwart the natural grain of the terrain. This could be explained in terms of the higher susceptibility of NWEuro’s to malaria and yellow fever.
The frontier elements landed at a steep hillside on the Hudson, north of NYC, following the great valley to the Ohio basin. They had to pass the swamps of the Wallkill valley before warm weather perhaps, the Delaware, the Susquehanna at Harrisburg PA., the Potomac, following valleys like the Shenandoah, which are well drained and underlain with limestone and caves.
In the cartographic motion picture, one can note how these people fanned out as they got well above the malarious coastal plain. In Kentucky and Tennesee they found some lower lying country full of sinkholes, but not swamps. Along the basin divide between the great lakes and the ohio drainage, they found the main route of their expansion onto the great plains. This was a belt of land with no swamps.
In terms of immigration and ethnic groups, the intensification of agriculture showing in the later 19th century, with the colors shifting to orange and red, is associated with the German immigration into the longer settled agricultural districts in the interior.

Posted by JRM on December 30, 2005, 01:52 AM | #

The movie is only as good as the data it uses. I find it hard to believe that the natives in the New World had no crop production. The New World is totally white at the year 1700. Likewise with Korea and Japan. On the other hand, the author may be using fictious Soviet grain production statisitcs in the USSR in the late 1900s.

Posted by Fred Scrooby on December 30, 2005, 02:13 AM | #

“It is no coincidence that the mechanical clock was invented by medieval English monks, industrialization and capitalism were invented by British citizens, and England currently has the second greatest number of Nobel Prizes in the hard sciences. No other nation in the history of the world has given the world so much good. The Anglo-Saxons make it look easy, but you better believe it isn’t.” (—William Smith)

Yeah the one thing they haven’t got the Nobel Prize in is Racial Self-Preservation—everybody on the planet beats them on that by a mile ...

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