guns, germs and steel : the fates of human societies, the...

In 1997 and 1998, two books became best sellers. The first one, Guns, Germs and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies, was written by Jared Diamond , and it won a Pulitzer Prize. The book’s basic premise was that the advantage some peoples have had during various epochs over other peoples cannot be ex plained by their genetics, their intelligence, or cultural superiority. It was linked to their geographical location and various environmental factors. Diamond neatly summarized his argument, stating: “History fol-lowed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples’ environments, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.”1

The second book was written by David S. Landes , and it bore the title The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor. In contrast to Diamond , Landes believes that Max Weber was right, and that the history of economic development demonstrates that culture makes the difference.2 As for geography, he tended to minimize its influence by deriding the French geographer Edmond Demolins who claimed, at the beginning of the twentieth century, that, if the history of the world were to start over again in a context where the surface of the earth remained unchanged, it would follow the same broad lines.3

Since the beginning of history, wealthy and healthy peoples have held the conviction that their genes, their race, their culture, or their religion has made them superior to poor and ill peoples. Writing their own history, they

1. Jared Diamond , Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Fates of Human Societies (New York and London : W.W. Norton, 1997), 25.

2. David S. Landes , The Wealth and Poverty of Nations: Why Some Are So Rich and Some So Poor (New York : W.W. Norton, 1998).

3. Edmond Demolins , Comment la route crée le type social (Paris : Didot, “Les grandes routes des peuples, essai de géographie sociale,” 1901), 1-ix.

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4 Urban World History





have attempted to persuade others that their wealth and good fortune was derived from their inner fortitude, hard work, and superior intelligence—all internal or “endogenous” factors—and that “exogenous” factors such as geogra-phy and environment played only a very minor role in their success. History presented this way, if unchecked and unchallenged, can lead to racial intoler-ance. The position of this book is much closer to Diamond and Demolins ’s in that it argues world history can be better explained by finding and under-standing the numerous spatial regularities that mark humanity’s historical evolution, while adopting a neutral perspective with respect to cultures, races, and civilizations. However, rather than highlighting the importance of geogra phy in terms of regional climate, flora, and fauna, as do Diamond and Demolins, this work demonstrates the widespread and determining influence of what will be referred to as “topodynamic inertia”—best described as the tendency for economic development to follow long-standing spatial patterns and trends. Cultures adapt to the spatial economic logic, much more than they determine it.

Space is the main organizer and the great mold of socioeconomic phenomena. Economies are based on exchanges, which take place at markets, and the flows of exchanged goods and services follow commercial routes, which are very much influenced by geography. Seas, rivers, plains, caravan routes, canals, roads and railways are all dependent on the form of the conti-nents, their topography, climate, hydrography and vegetation. The resulting commercial routes form networks and the nodes of those play a dominant role in the economic development. Innumerable examples of this will be presented throughout this book.

While spatiotemporal regularities can be identified throughout history, it is impossible to propose a coherent and systematic racial explana-tion of human evolution. All main racial groups have been, in turn, masters and slaves. It must not be forgotten, for example, that in the Roman Empire , and, more recently, in the Ottoman Empire, blond peoples with blue eyes were much more likely to be slaves than masters. In Ancient Egypt , the Semitic Jews were slaves while the Pharaohs of the Nubian dynasty were Negroid, or at least Nilo-Saharan.

The non-racial model of history found in this work situates topo-dynamic inertia within the context of more general topodynamic theory (in ancient Greek, topos means “location,” and dunamis, “force”). This original theory aims to provide a coherent vision of the space-economic evolution of the world since the appearance of urbanization. It is an early contribution to “anoeconomics,” a new part of economic theory (in ancient Greek, ano means “going back through time, and going up through space”). Anoeconomics studies world economic phenomena on a scale that transcends individuals,


Introduction 5





firms, groups, and even states and governments. It is predicated on the “law of economy worlds”4 according to which economic cores exist that dominate large regions of the world, covering various territories and countries. Economy world s law suggests that wealth is distributed from rich cores to the poor peri-pheries according to what Landes calls “development gradients”5 whose logic is much more geographical and spatial than national and macro economic. Anoeconomics is the natural extension to microeconomics (which focuses on individuals and firms in the context of market supply and demand), mesoeconomics (which deals with regional economies), and macroecono-mics (which studies government policies mainly with respect to inflation and unemployment).

Adopting an anoeconomic perspective, this work traces patterns of spatial regularities and the evolution of the spatial distribution of world’s populations and productions over the past six thousand years, both on the global and local (city) levels. Once such regularities have been detected, geo-economic, political, sociological, cultural or racial logics will be looked for in order to explain them. The priority will be given to the search for culturally neutral explanations before resorting to too-often simplistic explanations based on races, cultures, or political systems. What emerges is a theory that shows clearly the predominance of space-economic explanations, and rele-gates to a secondary position the influence of cultural and socio-political factors on the evolution of wealth and well-being. In short, two questions will be addressed. First, are there geographical regularities in economic develop-ment? Second, if such regularities can be identified, how do they relate to economic theory?

Other questions will also be addressed, particularly in the theoretical chapters. Why is it that, since the very beginning of urbanization, economic development has been structured by what can be referred to as urban poles? These can be described as urban agglomerations that dominate an urban system or at least a significant part of it. How can we explain that, through-out history, new poles have emerged, and progressively supplanted the old dominating poles? Why is it that dominant economic poles end up declining? Is there an explanation for why dominant poles succeeded one another according to identifiable spatial trajectories? Are spatial regularities better explained by political, sociological and cultural factors, or by space-economic and geographical factors?

4. This expression comes from Hervé Le Bras , La planète au village: migrations et peuplement en France (La Tour d’Aigues: Datar/Éditions de l’Aube, 1993), 199. Le Bras refers to Fernand Braudel ’s concept of “economy world.”

5. Ibid., chap. 16.







In exploring these questions, three main regularities are examined. The first delves into the very existence of poles, that is, it grapples with the idea of urbanization as an elementary phenomenon. The second refers to the “polarization of the poles,” which conjoins with the fact that poles polarize each other to produce: 1- urban systems and hierarchies; 2- “urbexplosions,” namely organic urban systems that evolve through time and space; 3- Braudelian “economy worlds.” The third major regularity is related to the historical succession of world’s dominating poles within “topodynamic corridors.”

The concept of the urban system is static. It refers to the structural relationships of domination, which link together the urban poles of various sizes within a given regional, national or continental space. For instance, authors can study the French , Canadian, and North-American urban systems as well as Californian or Siberian. Most of the time, urban systems are defined with respect to political units and borders. From a systemic point of view, urban systems can and usually do extend beyond such borders, especially when they grow. This is why the concept of “urbexplosion” is useful.

The idea of urbexplosion is dynamic.6 It corresponds to an evolving urban system that has an organic unity characterized by the presence of one or several poles that dominate, simultaneously or successively, the whole system, and by the fact that its external limit evolves through time in order to include many zones belonging to various regions, provinces, or countries. For example, the urbexplosion presently dominated by New York was domi-nated by Philadelphia , 180 years ago. Its external limit progressively extended to the interior of the continent, both in Canada and in the United States . As a dynamic construct, it even occasionally moved back as a consequence of the expansion of the Chicago or Los Angeles urbexplosions.

The concept of the economy world, conceived of by Braudel , inspired by German geographers, and taken up by Wallerstein , is more static than dynamic. It refers to an urban system, or a macro-system made of urban systems, which extends over an important part of the globe, includes a dominat ing core, a semi-periphery as well as a periphery, and has reached such a degree of eco-nomic integration and self-sufficiency (autarky) that it constitutes a world in itself. The Roman Empire and the Chinese Empire from the beginning of our era are good examples of economy worlds. The widely used concepts of core and periphery lie at the heart of the notion of economy world.

6. Luc-Normand Tellier , “Projecting the Evolution of the North-American Urban System and Laying the Foundations of a Topodynamic Theory of Space Polarization ,” Environment and Planning A, 27 (1995): 1109–1131.


Introduction 7





To best understand the predominant influence of space, it is necessary to refer to theories focused on the role of geographical space in human eco-nomic systems, particularly space-economic theory. Geographical space is very complex, and it is not easy to translate it into mathematical models without losing important aspects of its context and substance. From a mathematical point of view, geographical space can be treated as a plane or spherical space, as bi- or tridimensional, as well as Euclidean, network, or topological space. Each option bears both advantages and disadvantages—each one articulates important aspects of real geographical space while leaving other influential factors in the dark. A given model may be suitable for studying a particular case while insufficient in another case. A good example of this relates to urban system theory. The classical central-place theories of Walter Christaller and August Lösch are premised on the simple concept of Euclidean “as the crow flies” distance, and succeed in illustrating how urban systems can develop in a logical way, while referring to a very abstract and unrealistically homogeneous plane (a “circular isotropic space,” to be more scientific) where all consumers are uniformly distributed.7 In contrast, Vance , and Hohenberg and Lees have created a theory of urban systems called the network system theory, based on network space and in which distances are calculated along networks.8 Both approaches are worthwhile: as a matter of fact, the urban system of France is better understood by means of Christaller’s model whereas the Canado-American system corresponds more to the network system model.

Studying a given spatial reality may reveal very different spatial logics depending on the scale used. Surprisingly, Euclidean and network dis-tances have a very different relevancy at various scales. For instance, inside the city, the analysis of individual trips usually requires taking into account network distances instead of “as the crow flies” distances, since citizens nor-mally travel along networks made of corridors, sidewalks, streets, highways, subways, bus routes, elevators, and so on. At the scale of the individual the city is, above all, an entanglement of networks. On the other hand, in studying the city as a whole or the relations between its centre and the suburbs, Euclidean distances remain relevant and essential. In the case of urban systems, the same phenomenon prevails. At the scale of a section of an urban system, for

7. About central-place theory, see Walter Christaller , Central Places in Southern Germany (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1966), and August Lösch , The Economics of Location (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1954); about the notion of circular iso-tropic space, see Luc-Normand Tellier , Économie spatiale: rationalité économique de l’espace habité (Boucherville, Quebec : Gaëtan Morin, 1983, second edition).

8. See James E. Vance , Jr., The Merchant’s World: The Geography of Wholesaling (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1970), and Paul M. Hohenberg and Lynn Hollen Lees , The Making of Urban Europe, 1000–1950 (London and Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1985).







instance at the scale of the Boston -dominated part of the northeast section of the North-American urban system, network distances are more relevant than Euclidean ones. But, at the scale of the entire northeast section of the North-American urban system, Euclidean distances are extremely useful in understanding the global logic of that system.

It is interesting to note that passing from Euclidean to network dis-tances may be progressive. One of the best tools to study spatial regularities is the analysis of gravity fields (based on gravity models).9 In such analyses, lower values of the distance exponent yield gravity fields that are better inter-preted in terms of Euclidean distances to the centres, whereas higher values of the distance exponent generate maps of gravity fields that must be interpreted in terms of network distances.

Passing from static to dynamic analysis makes things even more com-plicated. Looking at the evolution of urban systems throughout the world, de Vries points out that a great stability of the system at the international scale may be associated with an important instability of various subsystems at the national or regional scales while, inversely, a great instability of the system at the international scale may also be associated with an important stability of various subsystems at the national or regional scales.10 Moreover, as Le Bras remarks, factors that play a determining role in the spatial evolution of a phenomenon depend directly on the scale of the analysis.11 For instance, for projecting the demographic evolution at the scale of a continent, the natural growth of population is the key factor while immigration plays a marginal role, whereas, for projecting the demographic evolution at the scale a the various cities of a national urban system, natural growth usually is secondary, and immigration is the main factor. To be more specific, if Toronto outstripped

9. A gravity model conveys the idea that, ceteris paribus, the more people and activi-ties are located at two given locations and the smaller the distance is between those two points, the larger the number of interactions (trips, phone calls, e-mails, trade, exchanges, ideas, etc.) between two locations is likely to be. The impact of distance on the number of interactions varies through time and depending on geographical areas and the type of interactions. See about that: Pierre-Philippe Combes, Thierry Mayer , and Jacques-François Thisse, Économie géographique. L’intégration des régions et des nations (Paris , Economica, 2006); Audrey Bossuyt, Laurence Broze, and Victor Ginsburgh, “On invisible trade relations between Mesopotamian cities during the Third Millennium BC,” The Professional Geographer, 53 (2001): 374–383; Anne-Célia Disdier and Keath Head, “The Puzzling Persistence of the Distance Effect on Bilateral Trade,” Working Paper no. 186 (Milan : Centro Studi Luca d’Agliano, 2004); Ernesto Stein and Christian Daude, “Longitude Matters: Time Zones and the Location of Foreign Direct Investment,” mimeo (Washington : Inter-American Development Bank , 2002).

10. Jan de Vries , European Urbanization , 1500–1800 (London and Cambridge , Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 123.

11. Ibid., 6.


Introduction 9





Montreal in terms of population growth during the last sixty years, it is not because Torontonians have had more children; it is rather because Toronto attracted more immigrants. After having noted that, generally, different factors exert a major influence at different scales, Le Bras underlines that, ultimately, the only factor that plays a role at all scales is space and distance. This point of view underpins the argument throughout this book.

The search for spatial regularities requires resorting to different scales of analysis, various concepts of distance—sometimes network distance, some-times Euclidean distance—as well as using sometime different exponents of distance in the analysis of gravity fields. In sum, the search for regularity requires disparity—the incorporation of dissimilar theories is necessary to create a unified understanding. A range of conceptual tools will be used in this work to bring out consistencies, patterns, logics, and systems, and to explain them in a theoretically and historically coherent way.

Strangely enough, the main reason why geographical space has been less and less considered as a valid explanatory element of the world evolution is the fact that geographers themselves too often chose to present space as the main basis of the racial and cultural differences that, supposedly, ex plained history instead of seeing in space a factor that could, directly, determine the historical evolution. According to “moral” or “mesological” geography, environment and temperament have been associated. Cold climates fostered discipline, zeal for work, and self-control, whereas hot climates generated indolence, laziness, and indiscipline. This type of argument led to elaborate a racist geography that, for a long time, discredited any geographical approach to history, and prevented scholars from realizing that, far from offering a scien-tific basis to racism, geography could provide the bases for an under standing of history, which, completely, marginalizes the impact of races, and even cultures.

Today, the expressions “North” and “South” referring to developed and developing countries are a relic of “moral” geography. It is true that, up until the recent past, rich countries, in terms of per capita income, were to be found in the temperate zones, especially in the northern hemisphere, and the poor countries, in the tropical or semi-tropical zones. However, this is abso-lutely not a constant of history. Islam was for many centuries at the forefront of civilization when its heart, dominated by Damascus , Baghdad and Cairo , lay relatively to the south in zones surrounded with desert. Now, one of the world’s most dynamic economies, that of Singapore , is practically located at the equator. Singapore and Malaysia no more belong to the supposedly poor South, while many northern regions of the ex-USSR are getting poorer, and are less and less part of the rich North. In this book, the influence of geographical space on the historical evolution will refer to climate or physical geography in the wider sense.

* * *







Readers of this book, which stresses the major role of geographical space in the world’s evolution, may be surprised to learn that its writer is no geographer. He rather is an economist who came to space-economy through studies in urbanism. Actually, the classical education of an economist in North America makes no reference to the geographical dimension of economic develop ment. Most of the time, space-economy is considered by mainstream economists as an intellectual curiosity, and it is not included in the degree course of young economists.

Geographical space is not only a neglected variable in economics programs, but economic theory even suggests that it is not an important factor in the pursuit of economic development. In order to understand this point, one must go back to the very beginning of the liberal economic thought. Liberalism was born in France , during the eighteenth century, with the Physiocrats who were the first to call themselves “economists” and to propose a theoretical framework that opposed the then dominant mercantilism (or Colbertism ), which aimed to maximize national gold stocks by imposing protectionist measures in order to diminish imports.

The basic thesis of liberalism argues that the well-being of consumers as a whole is maximized if consumers are entirely free to consume whatever they want, if producers are absolutely free to produce whatever they want in the way they desire, and if trade between all economic agents is absolutely free, provided that pure and perfect competition prevails. This thesis purports to be universal. It pretends to hold true for economic agents of a given region, for those sets of regions within a country, as well as for all the nations of the world.

From a commercial point of view, this thesis amounts to saying “trade is better than no trade,” which is the accepted way of saying it. The theory of comparative advantages, first formulated by David Ricardo in 1817, proposes a mathematical model supporting that two countries that produce two dif-ferent goods with different levels of productivity are better off if they trade, and specialize in the production of the good for which they have a compara-tive (as opposed to an absolute) advantage. This may sound a little abstract. To explain it, let us take a simple example.

Instead of speaking of two countries, let us refer to two people, Joan and Mary, who work for a language school, and who can both teach French and type. The manager of the school has them pass two exams, one for teaching French, and the other for typing. Joan obtains the best results: she gets a grade of 90% in teaching French, and 80% in typing. As for Mary, she gets 75% in teaching French, and 70% in typing. According to the model of absolute advantage, the manager should attribute to Joan the two tasks, since she obtained the best results for the two subjects. Mary would then remain unemployed.


Introduction 11





Quickly, the manager realizes that such a distribution of the tasks on the basis of the absolute advantages is neither desirable nor efficient since it generates unemployment. He then decides to call upon Mary’s services, but he must face a difficult question: what task should Mary carry out given that she is less efficient than Joan in both. The theory of comparative advan-tages demonstrates that the best solution involving full employment is the one where Mary is given the task for which she is relatively less inefficient, the one for which she has a comparative advantage compared with Joan. In our example, she would be asked to type, since she obtained 87,5% of the Joan’s grade for typing while getting only 83,3% of Joan’s grade in French teaching. This solution ensures that there is full employment, that each person specializes in a given task, and that everybody benefits from the situation. In order to reconstitute David Ricardo ’s reasoning, it is simple enough to replace Joan with England , Mary with Portugal , French teaching with woolen cloth, and typing with wine on order to reach Ricardo’s conclusion that England should specialize in producing woolen cloth, and Portugal, in producing wine. According to the theory of comparative advantages, in a situation of world full employment, all the regions of the world must have a comparative advan-tage in some sector, and development is possible everywhere in all countries, wherever they are, for the best benefit of the whole humanity.

The theory of comparative advantages has had a huge effect on the evolution of modern societies. It favored free trade, industrial specialization, and economic development. However, it did not, and cannot fulfill all its promises. The liberalism it inspired did not lead to world full employment, and did not allow all the regions of the world to count on their respective comparative advantages to develop. Most liberal economists recognize this, but generally deny that the failures of the system are indeed the failures of prevailing economic liberal thinking. On the contrary, they point out that the present sub-optimal situation is due to the fact that the liberal recipe is not applied everywhere, appropriate macroeconomic policies are not adopted by all governments, and major obstacles still preclude the universal application of the liberal model. In their opinion, these obstacles radically impair the mobility of persons and know-how as well as, to a lesser extent, the mobility of capital and goods.

A spatial economy approach challenges some of the dogmas of the classical liberal economic theory. Among other things, the theory of spatial competition identifies cases where, instead of favoring the achievement of “social optimum” (that is the optimum for the whole society; such an optimum corresponds to the situation where consumers benefit the most from their money spending in terms of the quantity and quality of the goods and services they buy), competition actually prevents it, which invalidates the basic thesis of liberalism. Moreover, taking into account transportation costs







leads one to question the classical conclusions of the comparative advantages theory. Nevertheless, spatial economics has never pretended to shake the columns of the liberal temple, and the economist initiated to the mysteries of space-economy rarely attempts to contest traditional micro-economic and macro-economic models.

In September 1987, at a regional economics symposium that took place at Lisbon , some Belgian geographers presented two maps of Europe that profoundly disrupted the classical vision of economic development through space. The first map described the spatial distribution of values added, namely the value of the production of goods and services, of seventeen countries of Western Europe in 1980. The pattern of the production distribution was amazingly concentric, the density of production declining in all directions as it moved away from a center located somewhere around the point where the borders of Belgium , Netherlands and Germany meet. In itself, the reported regularity of the spatial distribution of production of so many different coun-tries, countries that have been so often at war during the previous century, was astonishing. What spatial or non-spatial economic theory could explain such a pattern? Was it possible to suggest, without laughing, that, by chance, all the governments of the countries located close to the said center had adopted judicious economic policies for decades while, far from the center, all the governments had been ill advised? Could the observed pattern be explained by the theory of comparative advantages or even by the traditional space-economic theories? Not really.

The observed spatial distribution questioned the very popular thesis formulated by Max Weber according to which Protestantism was more propi-tious to capitalism than Catholicism was. At the center mentioned above, the main towns contradicted Weber’s theory: Liege is mainly Catholic, Maastricht , Catholic in a traditionally Protestant country, and Aachen , mainly Protestant. The periphery included Protestant Finland, Sweden , Norway, Denmark , and Scotland as well as Catholic Portugal , Spain , Ireland , and southern Italy . Quite naturally, the observed spatial regularity of production presented by the Belgians called for further exploration on a level that surpassed the existing models of analysis, including the contributions or lack thereof of religious and cultural groups. It became crucial that states and macro-economic policies, predicated on an extremely powerful spatial logic, had to be looked into more seriously and differently by scholars.

The second map was equally fascinating. It presented the spatial distribution of the population over the same area. The population pattern differed somewhat from the production map. The latter showed an axis of the greatest densities amassing from the northwest to the southeast, and passing through the center of the production pattern. This axis corres ponded approximately to the “Blue Banana” extending from northern Italy to southern


Introduction 13





England along the Rhine river; the French often refer to the “Blue Banana” as the “Dorsale” or “Ridge”12), but also included regions outside of the Banana—the regions of Dublin and Manchester , to the northwest, and the regions of Naples and Athens , to the southeast. Both to the northeast and the southwest, population densities systematically decreased as the distance to the axis of the largest densities increased. That the production and population patterns had similarities was no surprise, but their systematic differences puzzled the observers. Why were the production gradients concentric when the population gradients were almost linear?

Moreover, extending the population axis to the east produced a stunning axis that went from England to the region where Netherlands , Belgium , Germany and France met, to Italy , Greece , Anatolia (Turkey ), Phoenicia (Syria and Lebanon), and Mesopotamia (Iraq ). Strangely enough, this axis was going back to the very historical sources of the Western civiliza-tion whose cradle lay in Mesopotamia, and whose evolution followed a long route through Phoenicia, Anatolia (under Persian influence), Greece, Rome , Venice , Paris , Amsterdam , and London . The axis of the maximum population densities seemed to be a trace, a furrow left behind by the historical evolution of the Western civilization for the last five thousand years. Had our civiliza-tion’s history a spatial coherence nobody ever suspected? And did similar spatial consistencies exist elsewhere, in the case of other civilizations?

What the two maps revealed was that at the continental and world scales, productions are spatially polarized, as Fernand Braudel correctly pointed out, and that the successive dominating economic poles formed some kind of spatial chain. Such a spatial coherence of economic history cannot be understood in the light of classical liberal economic theories. It even seems to question the comparative advantages theory.

One could attempt to reconcile the above with the concepts of absolute and comparative advantages in the following way. As is currently accepted, the free market generates economic cycles in which full employment and unemployment alternate. If one agrees that the closer the economy is to full employment, the more comparative advantages prevail, and that the greater the level of underemployment, the more absolute advantages determine the production spatial distribution, it is natural, through the influence of compar-ative advantages, for periods of full employment to favor even the peripheral regions having little or no absolute advantages. However, during periods of unemployment, the peripheral zones are affected immediately—the domi-nance of absolute advantages reappears and those zones having a great number of absolute advantages consolidate their domination.

12. Roger Brunet, ed., Les villes européennes (Paris : DATAR-Reclus, La Documentation française, 1989).







Thus, from one cycle to the next, the zones that benefit from absolute advantages succeed in maintaining their domination while the peripheral zones never make up for lost time and opportunity. In this dynamic process, the very first absolute advantage ends up being centrality in itself—much more so than natural resources, labor productivity or even capital. Consequently, the more economic development progresses under the liberal model, the more the world’s economic activities are polarized, and the more acute become the disparities between centers and peripheries. World full employment becomes increasingly difficult to attain, and the comparative advantages of the pe ripheral regions become even more illusive. The less full employment—the condition that justifies the comparative advantages theory and, consequently, liberalism itself—the less economic liberalism works.

Still, the cumulative process described above is not irreversible as dominating centers succeed one another through history. Such centers are very likely to eventually decline in the same way that, in their ascending phase, they tend to consolidate. Moreover, the process of succession of domi-nating centers can have its own spatial logic. It can give rise to true historical trajectories, as it happened, for instance, in Canada where the domination over the Canadian economy successively passed from Quebec City to Montreal and Toronto . The same may be observed in Eurasia where, to the west of the Persian Gulf, the main economic pole shifted from Babylon to Athens , Rome , Constantinople , Baghdad , Istanbul , Venice , Genoa , Antwerp , Amsterdam and, finally, London .

Three main historical trajectories will be identified in this book. They follow three circular topodynamic corridors. The circular form of the corridors requires some explanation. It may seem odd, but on a globe the circle is a natural normal geometrical figure. In fact, in theory, it is much easier to adjust a circle to a distribution of points located on a sphere than to adjust a straight line to a distribution of points located in a Euclidean plane. On a plane, the only way to adjust the line is by moving it, whereas, on a sphere, the adjust-ment can be done both by changing the radius of the circle, and by moving the circle. In practice, adjusting a circle to a distribution of points located on a sphere amounts to intersecting a plane with a sphere, and this can only be done through successive approximations, while adjusting a straight line to a distribution of points located in a Euclidean plane is done in a straightforward manner by calculating a linear regression.


Introduction 15





Asian Corridor Great Corridor Mongolo-American Corridor

Projection : Mercator

Projection : North Pole Orthographic

Projection : Robinson

Map 1The Three Topodynamic Corridors







The circular representation of the three topodynamic corridors must not obscure the geographical reality that underlies the corridors (see Map 1). Thus, between Ur and London , the Great Corridor is made of Euphrates and Tigris fluvial system, the Syrian Corridor, the ancient Royal Road of Persia (also known as the road of the Lydian Kings), the Aegean and Adriatic Seas, the fluvial network linking the Po, the Rhine, the Rhône, the Seine, the Escaut-Scheldt and the Meuse-Mass, and the Thames and Mersey system. To the east, between Ur and Tokyo , the Great Corridor includes the Persian Gulf, the Indus delta, the Ganges, the Xi River (Pearl River ), the Yangtze River , and the Western China Sea. The Great Corridor corresponds to the southern limit of a “chain of mountain ranges” made of the Yunnan Plateau, the Himalaya, the Karakoram, Sulaiman and Kirthar ranges, the Plateau of Iran , and the Zagros, Totos Daglari, Balkans and Alps mountains. Moreover, to a great extent, it coincides with the line of one hundred centimeters of annual rainfall. This may have contributed to the fact that agriculture expanded from Mesopotamia to Northern Europe mainly through the Great Corridor.

Similarly, the Indus Valley, the Silk Road , the Bian-Pien canals and the Great Imperial Canal of China , the Taiwan Strait, the Southern China Sea, the Strait of Malacca , the Indian Ocean, the Malabar Coast , and the Gulf of Cambay-Khambhat structure the Asian Corridor.

As for the Mongolo-American Corridor, it is constituted of the Gulf Stream , the fluvial complex made of the St. Lawrence River, the Hudson River, the Erie Canal and the Great Lakes, the Atlantic-Pacific -Santa Fe railway linking Kansas City to Los Angeles (which skirts round the Rockies by the south), the maritime route between Los Angeles and Tokyo through the Pacific, the Japan Sea, the Yellow Sea, the Trans-Siberian railroad, the German Mittellandkanal , and the Ruhr Valley. In North America , as in the Eurasian part of the Great Corridor , the Mongolo-American Corridor often coincides with the line of one hundred centimeters of annual rainfall.

The largest deviation between the geographical reality and the mathe-matically calculated central circles of the corridors is the Trans-Siberian , which follows a traditional natural trail that, at some points, gets eight hundred kilometers away from the central circle of the Mongolo-American Corridor. The layout of that corridor in Asia follows precisely the historical “steppes corridor” that passes through the Kirghiz Steppe, and served as the spinal column of Genghis Khan ’s Mongol Empire . Except for the Trans-Siberian, most of the above-mentioned elements lie within three hundred kilometers from the three corridors’ central circles.

If modern patterns of production spatial distributions are striking in their concentric character, tracing through time the evolution of these distribu-tion patterns leads one to think in terms of trajectories. The most documented case of topodynamic trajectory relates to the shift in the population gravity center of the United States. This centre has been on the move in a systematic


Introduction 17





way since at least 1790 (year of the oldest data)—when it was located around Philadelphia —towards the southwest and Los Angeles . The observed stabi-lity of this movement gave birth to the concept of “topodynamic inertia.”13 Such a phenomenon can be spotted at all levels. For instance, at the city level, topodynamic inertia is observed both in the centripetal process of annexation and domination of the suburbs by the center of the city, and in the centrifugal process of urban sprawl. Similarly, in the case of urban systems, inertia is present in the centripetal process of the assertion of a core as well as in the centrifugal process of the extension of the hinterland towards the periphery. Inertia also plays a worldwide role in the succession of the dominating world poles within the topodynamic corridors, and topodynamic evolutions are, for the most part, slow, which makes them a good basis for generating reliable projections.

Three topodynamic corridors have occupied a prominent place in the world evolution during the last six thousand years: the Great Corridor , which is the oldest, appearing with the very first urban system; the Asian or Silk Corridor, which is a little younger than the previous one, and the Mongolo-American Corridor, which has long interacted with the two first corridors, but ended up dominating the world as a result of the appearance of motorized transportation in 1825. It is the description and history of these three corridors as they interweave with the changes and events in world history over the past six millennia that is the specific focus of the argument found in this work.

The corridors are representative of spatial-economic routes that triumphed on a world scale because they led to other major routes, forming an interconnectedness, not a dead end. The axes that prevail are the most complex. For instance, the Rhine forms a system with the Po, the Rhône, the Saône, the Seine, the Thames, and the Danube . Similarly, the St. Lawrence River constitutes a network with the Hudson and the Mississippi River s in the same way that, very early on, the Persian Gulf, the Tigris, the Euphrates , the Syrian Corridor, the eastern part of the Mediterranean, and the Aegean Sea made up an integrated circulation system. Even the continental Silk Road is a crisscross of routes that form a complex system, though similarly inter-twined axes of circulation are rare. As will be seen, no topodynamic corridors are found in Africa , in Latin America , in Central America , nor in Oceania. In sum, topodynamic corridors correspond to major communication axes, that in themselves result from the integration on a world scale of complex sub-systems of communication.

13. See Luc-Normand Tellier and Claude Vertefeuille, “Understanding Spatial Inertia: Center of Gravity, Population Densities, the Weber Problem and Gravity Potential,” Journal of Regional Science, 35, 1 (February 1995): 155–164, and Luc-Normand Tellier and Martin Pinsonnault, “Further Understanding Spatial Inertia: A Reply,” Journal of Regional Science, 38, 3 (1998): 513–534.







Topodynamic corridors correspond to geographical realities, but, as a result, they are areas where world’s wealth and financial power concen-trates. For this reason, the corridors have been repeatedly invaded by masses of poor people (generally called “Barbarians”) who arrived as conquerors, as in the case of Huns or Germans , or as immigrants, like the Celts or the Slavs . Very often, for example, the Great and the Asian Corridors have been invaded by tribes that came from the Mongolo-American corridor until that last corridor itself triumphed, and started attracting people. The dominating corridors exert an irresistible attraction force on the rest of the world. That power is observed even in the field of religion. However, all of the sections of a dominating corridor don’t benefit from the same attractiveness. Within each corridor, certain poles dominate the other ones. Moreover, dominating poles are not eternal. They succeed one another, generally according to a foreseeable spatial logic marked by topodynamic inertia.

Some may argue that the three corridors are merely pedagogical tools, while others conceive of them as objective realities. This book sides with the latter, arguing forcefully and comprehensively that topodynamic corridors are as real as other structural trends such as economic cycles or historical political currents linked to democratization or socialism. The idea that no structural trend could prevail in geo-economic space while similar trends could well be recognized in a non-spatial socio-economic context seems absurd. This notwithstanding, if topodynamic corridors and trends are real, does it imply that a space-economic determinism exists, from which human societies cannot escape?

The answer to that question is complex. First, it must be stressed that, in the past, topodynamic trends have been stopped, and even reversed (though this is very rare). The fall of the Western Roman Empire is a good example. Secondly, new corridors can ascend. The Mongolo-American corridor just (relatively) briefly triumphed with the two Mongol Empire s. Despite that, today it dominates the world. Thirdly, certain decisions have a strong topo-dynamic impact. Building the Bian-Pien canals and the Great Imperial canal of China , or the Erie Canal in North America has had very important effects on topodynamic evolution. The decision made by the king and queen of Spain to send Christopher Columbus to the West in search for a route to India has had enormous topodynamic consequences.

Human societies do have an influence on topodynamic trends. However, those trends themselves have been, and will continue to be, much more structural than transitory. They are slow, strong and stable, and they influence the long run and even the remote future. Most generations perceive them as unavoidable inevitabilities, as something given, which cannot be easily changed, at least not during a human lifetime. Even in the case of the “new” North American continent, the southwestward trend in the movement


Introduction 19





of the population gravity center that prevails has been and still is perceived as something so powerful that neither world war, nor civil war is likely to radically change it.

Topodynamic trends are more predictable than any other economic phenomenon, infinitely more than any economic cycle. They constitute the most fundamental economic reality. One of the great errors of economic thought has been to ignore the impact that spatial concerns have had on eco-nomic outcomes. Topodynamic corridors have nothing to do with magic or mystery. They comprise interconnected communication routes, river and water-ways networks, integrated and competing railways, canals, natural corridors, maritime routes, and highway networks. They correspond to the main commercial routes that came to organize the economic flow of the world over a large expanse of time. The very concrete nature of topo dynamic corridors is linked to geography, but they have played their biggest role in history.

THE TOPODYNAMIC CORRIDORS INFERRED FROM THE PRESENT GRAVITY FIELDS

The layout of the three corridors can be mathematically inferred from an analysis of the present world gravity fields (see Luc-Normand Tellier , “Étude prospective topodynamique du positionne-ment de la grande région de Montréal dans le monde aux horizons 2012, 2027 et 2060,” research paper 18 of Études, matériaux et documents, Montreal , Department of urban studies and tourism, University of Quebec at Montreal, 2002, 108–116).

The Mongolo-American Corridor can be traced by means of an inverse-distance gravity model with an exponent of distance equal to 1, and by computing the gravity attraction vectors corre-sponding to the present world spatial distribution of values-added (productions). The gravity attrac-tion vector computed at a given point in space corresponds to the resultant of all the attractive forces exerted by the economic “masses” of all the urban regions of the world on an individual located at that point who considers migrating. The layout of the Mongolo-American Corridor is obtained by considering Central and North America as a single region, and Eurasia as another region. The gravity attraction vectors of South America are computed while taking into account the attractive force of North America, and those of Africa , while taking into account the attractive force of Eurasia. Then, all the vectors of the world are oriented towards the Mongolo-American Corridor.

By changing the exponent of distance for 2, and by treating the whole world as a single region, the Asian Corridor is obtained. In the northern part of corridor, vectors tend to follow the corridor. To the northwest of the corridor, the farther the vectors get from the corridor, the more they point towards the Mongolo-American Corridor, whereas, to the east of the northwestern part of the corridor, vectors are attracted by the Shanghai region.

As for the Great Corridor , to a great extent, it corresponds to the most important popula-tion densities of the planet, namely the highest densities of Europe, the Ganges valley, the lower Yangtze River valley, and Japan . Its layout can be derived from the spatial distribution of attraction gravity potentials based on population, and an inverse-distance gravity model with an exponent of distance equal to 2.


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