CIVILIZING VENGEFUL UNGRATEFUL BACKWARD NEGROES IN AFRICA

Europeans often introduced the plough, literacy, wheeled vehicles and other fundamental advances,... The mere imposition of law and order--the cessation of inter-tribal warfare as the colonial powers established their hegemony over the contending Africans--had profound economic implications, as it once had in Roman Britain or later in Scotland.  For example, land once too militarily vulnerable to cultivate could now be farmed.  Thus, although whites seized vast amounts of land in Rhodesia, Africans there cultivated more of their own land than they had before the European conquests.

Sowell, Conquests, p 116

But you then get into the Malthusian trap.........

GREGORY CLARK THE MALTHUSIAN TRAP RE TECHNOLOGY TRAP

The net effect, as we see today, is that it (TECHNOLOGY) has increased the stock of the human population (a bad thing), without improving much if anything else, and has done considerable harm in diverse ways to the natural world, what economists would later call externalities.

This post is dedicated to Greta Thunberg.

See Gregory Clark, A Farewell To Alms

Guess what happened to peasants in Europe after 1350, and for a hundred years. 

They were all on easy street.

Why?

Because the Black Death had already killed half of them!

Gregory Clark can explain that to you.
But, as an aside, Clark's account of the Industrial Revolution is not the most important aspect......

Wade's account of the backwardness of Africa and elsewhere leaves much to be desired.

It wasn't because African negroes were slaves. They weren't.

The slaves were sold by African negroes to white or Muslim traders and taken elsewhere.

My own view is that their own extreme negro diversity itself caused their ages long backwardness. See David Reich.

What other explanation with so wide a genomic soft sweep could there be?

After all, most all bitchin peasants throughout the world, of any goddamn color, were in the same Malthusian trap, more or less, as African negroes.

If you trot out the argument that Nordic pops faced more environmental adversity than other Europeans, or any others, to explain their dominance over the long prehistoric and historic time, I can trot out African negroes, not slaves of white people, who undoubtedly faced equally daunting though non Ice Age adversity in the Dark Continent, for eons, but didn't do a goddamn thing that was advanced. 

If you paid them off, wealth equalized them, Pikettied them, in order to make them global econozens, it would not work out very well, as Wade has pointed out re aid to Africa for over 50 years.

Radical endogamies, at the other extreme, in India, seem to have lead to similar backwardnesses, ironically enough. See Reich.