North American Carrying Capacity and the Northern European Agricultural Tradition
View this QuickTime movie of world crop cover since 1700 for evidence that Northern European “immigrants” to North America pulled their weight by increasing the carrying capacity. This increase in carrying capacity is something necessary (but insufficient) to justify foreign immigration and it is something no other immigrant group has approached since. With the exception of trade in African slaves by the southern plantations—plantations best seen as a part of the Central and South American tradition of centralized land ownership where slave trade was part of the practice—the US and Canada were built by Protestants deriving their yeoman farmer tradition from pre-theocratic northern European agricultural practices.
Posted by William Smith on Fri, 30 Dec 2005 02:50 | #
Let’s not be rediculous here. America and Canada were not economic and agricultural wonders because of Protestantism, but rather because it was settled by Anglo-Saxons! I can’t stand all the stupid yammering about “protestant work ethic”, as if the native racial intelligence of the northern European were dependant upon the religious speculatings of some fat German who lusted after nuns.
Max Weber was simply unaware of the genetic information that we have today. It is no coincidence that the mechanical clock was invented by medieval English monks, industrialization and capitalism were invented by British citizens, and England currently has the second greatest number of Nobel Prizes in the hard sciences. No other nation in the history of the world has given the world so much good. The Anglo-Saxons make it look easy, but you better believe it isn’t.