The End of Development: A Global History of Poverty and Prosperity - Hardcover

Brooks, Andrew

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1786990210 ISBN 13: 9781786990211

Verlag: Zed Books, 2017

Inhaltsangabe

A scathing indictment of the current development agenda, and an impassioned call for a new and radical approach to alleviating global poverty.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Brooks is a lecturer in development geography at King's College London. His research examines connections between spaces of production and places of consumption, and particularly the geographies of economic and social change in Africa. Fieldwork has taken him to India, Papua New Guinea and across Africa. Research in Africa has included extensive investigations of markets and politics in Malawi and Mozambique as well as Chinese investment in Zambia.

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The End Of Development

A global history of poverty and prosperity

By Andrew Brooks

Zed Books Ltd

Copyright © 2017 Andrew Brooks
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-78699-021-1

Contents

INTRODUCTION: WHAT'S WRONG WITH DEVELOPMENT?, 
PART I: MAKING THE MODERN WORLD, 
1 Environmental determinism and early human history, 
2 Colonizing the world, 
3 America: making the modern world, 
PART II: DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, 
4 Anticipating modernity, 
5 The resource curse and the debt crisis, 
6 East Asian tigers, 
PART III: AFTER DEVELOPMENT, 
7 Is Africa rising?, 
8 Depoliticizing development, 
9 What next? The end of development, 
NOTES, 
INDEX, 

CHAPTER 1

Environmental determinism and early human history

The Green Sahara

Around 8 million years ago a common ancestor of both chimpanzees and humans walked the earth, but Homo sapiens did not evolve from chimps. Picture an ancestral family tree growing up from the past to the present; different branches of species spread outwards and away from each other. Around 1.6 million years ago various types of 'Hominins' emerged on a different branch of the tree to the chimpanzees. Hominins is a group which includes modern humans and our other close ancestors. One such species was Homo erectus who were similar in statue to modern humans and had longer legs and shorter arms than other primates. Another was the powerful Neanderthals, which were bigger and stronger than Homo sapiens. Not all the hominin predecessors were so muscular and substantial. The diminutive metre-tall Hobbit-like Homo floresiensis were small, although with large feet. Homo floresiensis hunted dwarfed elephants and giant komodo dragon lizards in Indonesia. Archaeological finds show early hominins were making tools, using fire, and anthropologists speculate about language, culture, art and even religion. Neanderthals and other unsuccessful hominin species were driven to extinction. Maybe they were out-competed by modern humans, or the changing climate destroyed their way of life, or perhaps they succumbed to disease or another environmental disturbance?

Recognizably modern humans emerged around 200,000 years ago, so very, very recently in the world's 4.5 billion year history. Africa was the birthplace of humankind. Archaeological evidence suggests early humans first migrated from the Rift Valley region of Ethiopia, Kenya and Tanzania in East Africa and spread around the world. People moved south to present day South Africa, spread west through the tropics towards the Gulf of Guinea, and much later headed north into North Africa and beyond. Anthropologists, archaeologists, environmental historians, geographers and geologists all try to map the early spread of humans from Africa. A hot topic of dispute between researchers is associated with explaining how humans first traversed the Sahara Desert and spread north from East Africa to the rest of the world. Traditionally, natural scientists have assumed that humans dispersed out of Africa by following the course of the River Nile, because the Sahara Desert was assumed to be a barrier to human migration. The perception is that the vast inhospitable desert has been a fixed feature of the natural world throughout human history, separating sub-Saharan Africa from North Africa and the Middle East. New evidence, though, suggests a very different environmental history.

Rather than always being arid, the Sahara was once covered by major water features including rivers, swamps and huge inland waterways. Lake Megachad was the largest feature and covered an area of 361,000 km in the middle of the present day Sahara region. To put that into perspective, it was an area of water as large as the Caspian Sea, or more than four times the size of Lake Superior, in the middle of what is now known as the Sahara Desert. Megachad reached this extent during a humid period120,000 to 110,000 years ago. At that time, rather than being barren, the Sahara region was a savannah landscape, home to many different types of plants and animals. Humid corridors of vegetation could have provided human migration routes across the Green Sahara and the dates correspond with the first occupation of the Mediterranean coast of Africa by early modern humans 110,000 to 35,000 years ago. From there early humans could have carried on into the eastern Mediterranean before spreading onwards into Arabia, India and beyond.

It is important to say could, because it is difficult to conclusively prove these patterns. The Green Sahara hypothesis is relatively new and some archaeologists still believe humans dispersed out of Africa later, around 60,000 years ago, either along the Nile Valley or from Ethiopia and across the mouth of the Red Sea, and then northward through Arabia or along the Indian Ocean coast. While opinion is divided as to whether or not the Green Sahara provided the first route out of Africa for modern humans, evidence does clearly indicate that there were other later periods when the same region was populated by animals and humans.

Archaeological finds show two main cultural groups occupied the Sahara area practising different foraging and hunting livelihoods around 12,000 years ago during the early Holocene, which is the present warm or interglacial geological period. Remains of bone tools, fishhooks and arrow points have all been found. Historical sightings, rock art and fossil remains show savanna animals – including Nile crocodile, giraffe and African elephants – lived in the region during the second phase of the Green Sahara.

Once humans had migrated out of Africa they spread across the interconnected land-mass of the Middle East, Asia and Europe before journeying overseas. From the Pacific Ocean coast of Asia humans headed southeast down the Indonesian Archipelago to Australia, and from eastern Russia they crossed the Bering Strait in the Arctic when ice bridges linked the continents of Asia and North America. From the Canadian Polar Regions hunter gatherers moved south through North America down across the narrow Isthmus of Panama to South America.

There are many unknowns about how humans travelled to all the remote places on earth and hypotheses are difficult to prove. What has been established is that by around 10,000–12,000years ago humans had reached and settled on every continent and major land mass on earth, aside from Antarctica and some isolated Islands, such as the Azores. The last 12,000 years is also the period of time that encompasses the emergence of agriculture, major population growth and the massively increased impacts of the human species on the world. During the Holocene all of written history has occurred and major civilizations have risen and fallen.

Challenging nature

The idea of the Green Sahara demonstrates the contested and limited knowledge that surrounds early human history, and illustrates how what we think of as 'nature' is not a static reality. Movement across the Sahara was only possible at given periods because of the particular climatic conditions. Without the humid periods there was no vegetation, forests, grasslands or lakes so this natural environment limited human activity. The later periods of foraging and savanna hunting livelihoods in the Sahara region in the early Holocene show the natural environment moulded human activity. In early history the environment constrained and shaped human society, but the significance is easy to exaggerate. Early humans were still able to spread and settle...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Zed Books
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2017
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 1786990210
• ISBN 13: 9781786990211
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 296
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: preigu GmbH & Co. KG; mail@preigu.de; ; Lengericher Landstr. 19; Osnabrück; Niedersachsen; 49078; Deutschland