Brilliant Framing in Thomas Sowell's "Cultures" Trilogy

Thomas Sowell does something brilliant in his Cultures trilogy, which is comprised of his books Conquests and Cultures, Migrations and Cultures, and Race and Culture. The books are broadly about the notion that culture matters. Peoples tend to develop long-standing patterns of behavior that are adaptive to the particular times and places of their origins (or perhaps just idiosyncratically different from similarly situated peoples). When those peoples spread to other places via migration or conquest, they bring their long-standing traditions with them. And these traditions persist for generations. He makes it very clear that this is a non-genetic story of culture. It isn’t racial, except in the sense that a racial group might also be a cultural group. He is extremely clear that he’s talking about patterns of behavior that are learned and culturally enforced, not genetic propensities to behave in certain ways.

His brilliance is to lead with the example of the Roman conquest of northern Europe and Britain. A well understood stylized fact about modern Europe is that southern Europe tends to be more corrupt, poorer, and less well governed. In a book called Games Primates Play by an Italian author (Dario Maestripieri), there is a long discussion about the corruption that is rampant in Italy, and how this corruption is least bad in the north but gets worse as one moves south. Northern European states, by contrast, tend to be less corrupt, better governed, and richer (almost certainly as a consequence of their better institutions). Think Britain, the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Switzerland as compared to Italy, Spain, and Greece. Without a formal model or rigorous regression analysis, at a glance there is something to this stereotype.

Except two thousand years ago, this was flipped. Rome was the peak of western civilization. Northern Europe was backwards, filled with naked barbarians and disgusting villagers who were naked or clad in animal skins. According to Sowell, “[N]ot a single Briton’s name had entered the pages of history” before Julius Caesar conquered the island. What’s more, when the Roman Empire collapsed and retreated from these conquered territories, those territories retrogressed. They lost what civilization Rome had brought to them, in many places taking a millennium or more to recover. Often the very same people working on the very same land with the same equipment become more productive after the Romans conquered, because the Romans actually provided a predictable rule of law. They brought Roman legal traditions with them, along with the means of putting down violent uprisings and brigandry that weaker states (or non-states) couldn’t deal with. Merchant peoples followed the Roman conquerors into conquered lands and set up shop; they also followed them out when the Roman Empire declined. Uncivilized social disorder can be bad for business.  

Leading with this example achieves several things. It takes race out of the question. We’re talking about Europeans conquering other Europeans, so there’s no racial baggage. Given that, it’s safe for Sowell to make his next point: It’s fairly clear that the conquered peoples often benefited from the conquest. Even the faintest hint of this point applied to the 20^th century immediately gets bogged down in discussions of racism, and accusations that the speaker is “defending” violent military conquest or suggesting racial superiority of the conqueror. The example also makes the point that culture, while durable, is not permanent. The Britons benefited from Roman cultural traditions under Roman conquest, retrogressed to a more primitive state after Roman collapse, but then eventually became the richest, most culturally and militarily advanced nation in the world. If they were eventually surpassed, it was by their thoroughly Anglicized former colonies (America, Canada, Australia, South Africa, New Zealand), not necessarily by former colonies that did not thoroughly adopt English cultural traditions and institutions.

It's not that the "race" question is unimportant in a discussion of the history of conquest. Rather it's a topic that is so emotionally charged it can prevent people from thinking clearly or giving due consideration to probably-true propositions. Sowell certainly doesn't dodge the race issue. He meets it head-on. It features prominently in all three books. But the "Britons versus Romans" example presents a nice test case where these complications and their associated baggage aren't really present.

Culture isn’t race. With that out of the way...Culture matters. Culture is durable. Culture eventually changes. Culture can be bad as well as good. Bad things, like military conquest, can cause good things, like the spread of good cultural practices.