The Veldtgeist

Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History, Johan Fourie, 2021.

Ernest Mancoba, Untitled, 1951.

I was apprehensive about Johan Fourie’s Our Long Walk to Economic Freedom: Lessons from 100,000 Years of Human History. The title, I thought, is evocative of misjudged Cato Institutive apologia; while the subtitle, with its invocation of ‘lessons’ and ‘100,000 years’ of human history, dredged up some shudder-inducing memories of Yuval Harari’s Sapiens. I am also instinctually wary of the ‘little history of the world’ genre, a wariness that has rarely let me down.

However, Johan Fourie’s Our Long Walk is neither distastefully libertarian, nor fairly compared to anything Harari has written. Accessible and wide-ranging, Fourie’s book is halfway between an economic history of the world, and one of South Africa. In the former capacity, Our Long Walk is an entertaining introduction to global economic history. The triumphalist tone is perhaps akin to the similarly recent ‘introduction to global economy history’ course-to-book How the World Became Rich, by Jared Rubin & Mark Koyama - which, I must admit, I have as yet been unable to bring myself to read, due to the grimace-inducing title. This contrasts with the more ambiguous (if still mainstream) story of Brad DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia. Unlike the latter, there is no hint of any Polanyian ‘double movement’ in Fourie. There is instead a virtuous cycle of economic freedoms (read: growth, property rights, and functioning markets), with the political freedoms Nelson Mandela made his long walk for. Although this may be a little grating to the New Left Review appreciating reader, Our Long Walk does not let any whiggish tone get in the way of a masterful synopsis of the state of economic history. However, many economic historians could have written such a narrative. If that was all there Our Long Walk contained, there wouldn’t be too much to write home about.

But what makes Fourie’s story of economic progress special is that it centres the very continent which is so often set aside as an exception: Africa. This is remarkably refreshing - I am yet to hear of another popular economic history book that answers the question of why isiXhosa has clicks. More importantly, bringing Africa inside the triumphalist account is subversive, not only of the conventions of the genre, but of the many pessimistic accounts that make up most ‘Africa-in-popular-history’ writing; with whom Fourie has many axes to grind. Of course, spinning the ‘bright African future’ narrative is easier when South Africa is centred, rather than Chad, or South Sudan. Serious issues arise from Fourie’s near-unalloyed optimism, particularly in light of climate breakdown. But his approach is unquestionably original and engaging.

Before I discuss the economic history of South Africa - which is where Fourie really shines - it is worth briefly going over the ‘global’ part of Our Long Walk. For a short book, the breadth of history Fourie tackles is impressive. Chapters hit all the essential notes: the agricultural transition, feudalism, and the great divergence; as well as more esoteric topics, such as the Bantu Migration, and Idi Amin’s Uganda. In broad interpretative terms, Fourie takes a balanced line between institutions and geography. He stays in line with modern economic history research, without veering into either Guns, Germs, and Steel or Why Nations Fail territory - which is a good thing! That said, he has a tendency to give airtime to theories that emphasise very, very long run factors behind economic development. These I struggle to get behind. For example, the chapter on the neolithic revolution champions two papers by Ola Olsson and Christopher Paik. The first argues Northern Europeans are more ‘individualistic’ than their Southern counterparts because they converted to agriculture earlier, and the second that this is responsible for differences in long-run economic growth. At first, I almost believed these were parodies written by bitter opponents of Daron Acemoglu’s (in)famous settler mortality paper. This is how the second paper summarises its argument:

Early transition to agriculture > Extractive institutions > Weak current economic performance

Late transition to agriculture > Inclusive institutions > Strong current economic performance¹

Now, I think this is laughable, and reading through the papers didn’t give me much reason to believe otherwise. However, the argument is novel, thought-provoking, and worth taking seriously. I get why Fourie wanted to include it. But the problem is that this argument takes up most of his (admittedly brief) chapter about the neolithic revolution. One has to ask: is Olsson and Paik’s argument really that important? Although this is the clearest example, this kind of issue is a recurring one in Our Long Walk. It is perhaps an inevitable byproduct of Fourie’s ambition. When writing a global economic history in miniature, it would be easy to rehash basic, uncontroversial arguments. No one would accuse Fourie of doing this. However, it is hard to tie brevity to originality without a little glibness seeping in.

When Fourie writes about Africa, however, his merger of brevity and novelty pays off. This is an amusing inversion of the typical pattern where historians wax lyrical about Europe for hundreds of pages, with a half-baked addendum on Africa attached near the end. The discussion and prompt dismissal of the economic ‘Out of Africa’ hypothesis - that idea that differences in population genetic diversity have impacted economic growth - at the books’ beginning works well (although I would have appreciated if some of Fourie’s skepticism shown here might have been extended to Olsson and Paik!). The chapter on pre-colonial economic systems in Africa is great, and the section on the long run consequences of the slave trade effectively summarises, contextualises, and critiques an extensive literature. But my favourite chapters are those on the economics of apartheid and South African industrialisation.

For the first half of the twentieth century, South African industrialisation had been premised on a state-led development strategy that depended on taxing the mining sector, and in turn, on the supply of cheap (black) labour to the mines. Skilled and semi-skilled jobs were reserved for whites; who in turn demanded high wages. From a growth perspective, this system functioned well enough - as long as the mines could import and abuse black labour from Mozambique and Malawi, and as long as the work required was relatively menial. But after 1950, when Apartheid was entering full swing, this economic model began to break, just as the racist imperatives of the South African National Party tried to ossify it. Economic development hit a human capital barrier - it turns out that refusing to educate the majority of your population presents problems for economic growth! But rather than dismantling apartheid, lifting restrictions on skilled labour, or making investments into black education, the state doubled down; and in the 70’s tried to lure unskilled industries to the borders of Bantustans with a sort of SEZ policy, offering tax and wage incentives. Not only was this largely a failure, it did not last. Most of these ‘border industries’ collapsed in the 90’s. In the end, the major economic consequence of apartheid was that by making skilled labour artificially expensive, it promoted capital-intensive growth across the South African economy that hit profitability and has left South Africa with persistently high levels of unemployment. For Fourie, it is these structural economic failures which ultimately put an end to apartheid. Sanctions, he argues, only prolonged it.

There is one issue with Our Long Walk I cannot ignore: the deafening absence of climate change. I do not think all broad economic histories must centre the great acceleration. Adam Tooze’s critique of Slouching Towards Utopia for not doing so I felt to be a bit harsh, as I wrote when I reviewed that book. DeLong makes a reasonable periodisation when he makes the climate a defining issue of the twenty-first century. But Fourie does not have this excuse, for he is not writing a history of the twentieth-century, but a book which is highly future-oriented; filled with ‘lessons’, and an overt focus on Africa’s future. And if one is planning on making the claim that Africa’s future is ‘bright’, climate change is an iceberg that cannot be sailed past. Which other continent faces climate risks so acutely? Nothing makes Africa’s growth prospects look more fragile than the droughts, floods, and shifting rainfall patterns even a relatively mild climate shock would entail. Fourie’s conclusion, titled ‘Predicting the Future’, mostly waxes on about the prospects of the fourth industrial revolution and economic participation for Africa. Climate appears only in a single paragraph, wherein Fourie advocates for a global carbon tax and says no more. The issue is the bull African bush elephant in the room. I cannot understand why Fourie chose to largely ignore it.

Even for those well-acquainted with economic history, this variety of ‘intro to global economic history’ book is worth reading. But doing so can be tiresome, given that it necessarily involves telling a familiar series of narratives, around a familiar assortment of stylised facts. But this is where Fourie absolutely has succeeded in breaking the mould: Our Long Walk is neither tiresome to read, nor lacking in accessibility. To my mind, that is quite an achievement. It is all too easy to be cynical, given the scope and simplifications these books entail. I am certainly guilty of this. But Our Long Walk made me realise cynicism can also be unfair. Fourie has encouraged me to get over myself and finally tackle How The World Became Rich. That, I think, is a success in itself.

1. Olson and Paik, 2020, 7.