Английский язык для специальных и академических целей: Международные отношения и зарубежное регионоведение. Часть 1 - [6]
A country's economic fortunes are determined by a combination of natural endowments (geography, broadly speaking) and human action (history, for short); this is economic history's version of the nature-nurture debate>10>>11. While a persuasive case can be made for the importance of such ‘given' factors as the mean temperature, humidity, the prevalence of disease, soil quality, proximity to the sea, latitude and mineral resources in determining economic performance, there seems strong evidence that history too plays a crucial part. In particular, there is good evidence that the imposition of British-style institutions has tended to enhance a country's economic prospects, particularly in those settings where indigenous cultures were relatively weak because of thin (or
Unit I. UK: from Empire to Democracy
thinned) population, allowing British institutions to dominate with little dilution. Where the British, like the Spaniards, conquered already sophisticated, urbanised societies, the effect of colonisation were commonly negative, as the colonisers were tempted to engage in plunder rather than to build their own institutions. Indeed, this is perhaps the best available explanation of the ‘great divergence' which reduced India and China from being quite possibly the world's most advanced economies in the sixteenth century to relative poverty by the early twentieth. It also explains why it was that Britain was able to overhaul her Iberian rivals: precisely because, as a latecomer to the imperial race, she had to settle for colonising the unpromising wastes of Virginia and New England, rather than the eminently lootable cities of Mexico and Peru.
But which British institutions promoted development? First, we should not underestimate the benefits conferred by British law and administration. A recent survey of forty-nine countries concluded that ‘common-law countries have the strongest, and French-civil-law countries the weakest, legal protection of investors', including both shareholders and creditors. This is of enormous importance in encouraging capital formation, without which entrepreneurs can achieve little. The fact that eighteen of the sample countries have the common-law system is of course almost entirely due to their having been at one time or another under British rule.
A similar point can be made about the nature of British governance. At its apogee in the midnineteenth century, two features of the Indian and Colonial services are especially striking when compared with modern regimes in Asia and Africa. First, British administration was remarkably cheap and efficient. Secondly, it was remarkably non-venal. Its sins were generally sins of omission, not commission. This too cannot be wholly without significance, given the demonstrable correlations today between economic under-performance and both excessive government expenditure and public sector corruption.
The economic historian David Landes recently drew up a list of measures which ‘the ideal growth-and-development' government would adopt. Such a government, he suggests, would
1. secure rights of private property, the better to encourage saving and investment;
2. secure rights of personal liberty ... against both the abuses of tyranny and ... crime and corruption;
3. enforce rights of contract;
4. provide stable government ... governed by publicly known rules;
5. provide responsive government;
6. provide honest government . (with) no rents to favour and position;
7. provide moderate, efficient, ungreedy government . to hold taxes down (and) reduce the government's claim on the social surplus.
The striking thing about this list is how many of its points correspond to what British Indian and Colonial officials in the nineteenth and twentieth century believed they were doing. The sole, obvious exceptions are points 2 and 5. Yet the British argument for postponing (sometimes indefinitely) the transfer to democracy was that many of their colonies were not yet ready for it; indeed, the classic and not wholly disingenuous twentieth-century line from the Colonial Office was that Britain's role was precisely to get them ready.
It is a point worth emphasising that to a significant extent British rule did have that benign>12>effect. According to the work of political scientists like Seymour Martin Lipset, countries that
were former British colonies had a significantly better chance of achieving enduring democratisa-tion after independence than those ruled by other countries. Indeed, nearly every country with a population of at least a million that has emerged from the colonial era without succumbing to dictatorship is a former British colony. True, there have been many former colonies which have not managed to sustain free institutions: Bangladesh, Burma, Kenya, Pakistan, Tanzania and Zimbabwe spring to mind. But in a sample of fifty-three countries that were former British colonies, just under half (twenty six) were still democracies in 1993. This can be attributed to the way that British rule, particularly where it was ‘indirect', encouraged the formation of collaborating entities; it may also be related to the role of Protestant missionaries, who clearly played a part in encouraging Western-style aspirations for political freedom in parts of Africa and the Caribbean.
