2025-09-12 23:20:17
160 years after the end of the Civil War, the US South is more poor, sick, uneducated, mentally distressed, crime-prone, incarcerated, unemployed, religious, socially disconnected… Why? Is it a consequence of the Civil War, or something else?
In the first article in this series, we saw how climate caused the US Civil War. In the second, how climate also meant the North was more developed, setting it up to it to win the war. We are still experiencing the consequences of that clash today.
For decades, the North spent its capital building railroads, trains, canals, ships, machines, cities, industries… It automated farm work, which allowed laborers to leave the farm and go to the city, where they worked in industries and benefited from cities’ agglomeration effects: Indeed, cities generate more money per person than farmland.
Meanwhile, the South invested all that capital in buying slaves.1
From Climate Predetermined the Outcome of the US Civil War:
40% of Southern wealth was locked in slaves around 1860, and their value exceeded the invested value of all US railroads, factories, and banks combined!
So, very early on, the North and South diverged: The North developed an industrialized economy, while the South went down the path of a resource extraction economy (extracting value from slaves). A bit like a European vs a Caribbean economy. These trajectories take incredible amounts of time to curb, which is one reason why nearly every European country today is richer than nearly every Caribbean country.
Then, the War tore down the South, destroying what little industry it had. Between government spending, physical destruction, loss of human capital, decline in consumption, emancipation, and the effect on cotton prices, the Civil War was over 4x more destructive for the South than the North.
Once it ended, all the capital locked into slaves vanished. Of course this was the right outcome: In effect, it meant ex-slaves would no longer be abused as much, and that they had to be paid fair wages. Financially though, it meant that the upfront, fixed capital to secure years of practically unpaid work2 had vanished, and instead, workers had to be paid a monthly, variable amount.
This also destroyed the profits of Southern plantations. Many became unprofitable and closed. This was beneficial in the long term, because more productive enterprises could take over the worst ones. But in the short term, it meant a financial shock for the South.
When we looked at Asia’s development, we saw that the first step was always land reform, so that farmers owned their land and the fruit of their work. This usually meant that the winners of the war obliterated the incumbent establishment: This happened in Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. Alas, the plan to allocate land to freed slaves in the US South was reversed after Lincoln was shot and Andrew Johnson became US President.
Instead, sharecropping appeared: White plantation owners still owned most of the land, which laborers would farm in exchange for a share of the crop. The drawback was that, between the land, the fertilizer, the seeds, the machinery, and all other things laborers needed, they ended up keeping very little of the fruits of their work. One of the reasons was that they didn’t know the system well, so plantation owners would take advantage of them and keep most of the benefits. And the natural trend of land ownership is toward more concentration anyway, since after every bad harvest, small landowners would have to sell their land to bigger owners that had more of a buffer. In effect, all this maintained the former slaveowners’ rentier status.3
This was not the only way this aristocracy of landowners was maintained: By disenfranchising former slaves (and poor Whites), the Southern White Elite prevented them from voting, so it controlled the politics of the US South for decades after the Civil War. This control turned the system to their advantage. For example:
Prisoners (mostly Black) were de facto slaves, used as plantation workers.
Anti-enticement laws prevented laborers from finding the best employer.
The controlling Elite kept taxes low (they would have been the ones taxed) and thus didn’t invest in infrastructure for the region.
Jim Crow Laws maintained segregation in the South, making access to services like healthcare or education nearly impossible for Blacks.
Unsurprisingly, Blacks eventually decided to leave.
Most Blacks remained in the South after the Civil War, as they didn’t have many options outside it, nor connections or savings to get them out. This changed in the early 20th century.
WW1 was especially beneficial for Blacks in that it offered incredible professional opportunities:
Lots of Northern workers had to support the war effort, through both the war industries and military service in Europe.
European immigration dropped by 75% between 1914 and 1915.
Wages in the North could be 2x those in the South, so Blacks moved there en masse.
The Great Migration started around 1910 and lasted until the 1970s.
The result is that the Black share of population in the South halved!
This had several effects on the respective economies of North and South:
The South’s economy shrunk proportionately to the number of Black people it lost.
The North’s economy benefited from more workers.
Most newcomers went to cities, where they were more productive than on farmland, thus further enriching the local economy.
So now, the South suffered, on top of everything else, a loss of population and workers. And as a result, wages had to rise to attract other workers, further compressing the profits of local companies and causing inflation.
Of course, we should add to all these problems the endemic malaria, yellow fever, and hookworm we discussed in Climate Caused the US Civil War.
The result of all these factors was that the South’s economy stayed weak and small for decades after the Civil War.
In summary, climate caused the economic divergence of North vs South, it caused the Civil War, it made the South lose the War, and for a century afterwards, the South was unable to reverse the resulting economic depression. Luckily, over the last few decades, it has.
2025-09-10 18:31:03
We covered why the US’s geography is so overpowered in the previous article. How does it compare to China?
Both have a continent-scale country surrounded by oceans and mountains, with a massive heartland plain, criss-crossed by rivers that make it highly fertile. But when you get into the details, the differences become stark.
For starters, China and the US are broadly similar in size:
Both are continent-sized superpowers.
China’s east and west are protected by the sea. The rest is protected by a series of mountains:
Most of China’s border with India is protected by Tibet, the most elevated plateau in the world, which ends in the Himalayas, the tallest mountain range in the world. Absolutely impassable. This is very much why China annexed Tibet in 1951, in a move quite similar to how the US co-opted Texas in the mid 1800s to protect against Mexico.
If that wasn’t enough, there are also the states of Nepal and Bhutan that serve as buffers between them—which India and China fight to co-opt:
The southern part, the border between China and Vietnam / Laos / Thailand / Myanmar, also has mountains, but they include another barrier: some of the densest jungle in the world.
To the west, Xinjiang is big, mountainous, and desertic.
This is what it looks like:
To its north, it has lower mountains but also steppes that are sparsely populated. Farther north, the even less populated Siberia:
To give you orders of magnitude, Mongolia has just 3.5M people, to China’s ~1,400M.
As we discussed in Putin’s Mindset on Russia, if anyone is going to do some invading here, it’s China in Siberia, not the other way around.
Finally, the only land border it has to its east is with North Korea, a vassal state.
You can see the parallels with the US:
Continent-sized
Seas, mountains, and deserts protecting its borders
In addition, it has buffer states to protect it (Bhutan, Nepal, Mongolia, North Korea, and in Central Asia it has influence over the Central Asian republics).
But when you get into the details, you can see how much flimsier China’s protections are compared to the US’s.
There are many, starting with the seas.
China’s coast is so littered with enemies aligned with the US that we can call them a sea barrier. China can’t actually access the Pacific Ocean without passing one of these barriers. If the US really wanted, it could choke China’s passage here.
And this is not theoretical: Western powers arrived in China from the sea in the 1800s and triggered the Opium Wars:
They subdued China, kick-starting its century of humiliation.
Japan followed Western Powers, and conquered a huge chunk of China:
Later, the US supported South Korea’s independence from North Korea through naval operations.1
All of this to say: China might have a big coast, but it’s nothing like the US’s Pacific and Atlantic Coasts, which are completely safe from seaborne threats.
To its south, Vietnam is somewhat comparable to Mexico. Their populations are 100M and 130M respectively, and most of the border is impassable. But unlike the Mexico–US border, the Vietnam–China border has a huge opening.
Northern Vietnam is basically the Red River Basin. That basin has an opening to China that is only a few hundred feet / meters high. That border has jungle, but it’s reasonably well populated and built out too, making logistics quite easy.
This is why China has invaded Vietnam maybe a dozen times2 in its history, the last one just 50 years ago. If invasions go in one direction, they generally can go in the other. And yet Vietnam has proven it can’t be easily conquered. It could not invade China, but it could definitely hurt it if an international armed conflict emerged in the region.
If you go to the west, of course there’s India, the most populated country in the world. Thankfully for both countries, they’re protected from each other by the Himalayas and Tibet, but still, this proximity of two behemoths is not a very stable situation.
If it were only India, maybe it could be manageable. But China is the country with the most neighbors!3 And most of them are on the western border: Vietnam, Laos, Burma, India, Bhutan, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Kazakhstan.
China’s enemies only need to co-opt a few of these Chinese neighbors to make China nervous. The result is that China needs to constantly manage a host of them to make sure they don’t turn against it. And of course, this is not easy work since this is the most populated region in the world.
Continuing our clockwise trip, the western parts of China might have deserts and mountains, but the Silk Road was still able to cross this region.
There are several passes that allow for people (and hence the military) to cross this.
China knows this, and it’s why it has continuously expanded westward, to create as big a buffer as it can. This is why it has worked so hard in history to conquer this region:
It’s also why it has recently worked to sinicize Xinjiang. The buffer in this region is now large enough to protect China, but not because it’s impassable; because it’s big.
And then there’s the north. It is not a huge threat today, but the existence of the Great Wall of China illustrates how this was no pacific region in the past.
On the map:
Mongols attacked China hundreds of times, with maybe a dozen real invasions, half of which were successful! These include Genghis Khan’s invasion, and the Manchurian one, which deposed the Ming and became the last Chinese Dynasty, the Qing. Mongolia doesn’t have the power to do this anymore, but Russia is another matter.
All this shows that, unlike the US, China is in a much more precarious position defensively speaking.
Like the US, China has a very productive heartland.
2025-09-05 05:26:37
Never Bet Against America—Warren Buffett.
The US is the richest country on Earth.
This is due to two reasons. First, the US systematically attracted more immigrants than any other developed country:
Second, its GDP per capita is the highest in the world for big countries. It passed all other empires sometime in the late 1800s:
In fact, the US has followed an uncanny trend of nearly 2% growth in GDP per capita for over two centuries:
Why is the US so rich?
Some believe it’s due to factors like democracy, the rule of law, the US dollar, its strong military, entrepreneurial culture…
But what if these factors are threatened, as many believe they are now? Will the US then keep growing? Or will it fall due to mismanagement? Is China going to surpass it?
Fortunately for the US, it has the best geography in the world. This is not changing anytime soon, so its power and growth will likely continue in the coming decades.
Can you tell how geography makes the US so powerful?
The US is the 4th largest country by surface area. It spans an entire continent, reaches two oceans, and is big enough to be a geographic heavyweight in the world.
China, Russia, and Canada are bigger. But as we’re going to see, Canada is directly neutralized, and China and Russia indirectly. Much of Canada and Russia are unproductive, and the US has a series of advantages that China could only dream of. Just two maps are enough to highlight this luck. The first one explains its impregnability:
The second map explains the US’s wealth.
The Mississippi Basin is the 4th largest drainage basin in the world and occupies 40% of the contiguous 48 US states,1 touching 32 of the US’s 50 states. 11 US states directly take their name from it.2
And it’s caused by the incredible funnel effect caused by the Sierra Nevada / Rockies to the west and the Appalachians to the east.
How is this so useful? Because it’s unbelievably fertile.
This whole region is naturally well irrigated.
It’s also super flat.
This makes the Mississippi Basin the world's largest contiguous piece of farmland.
Because of this, the US is the 3rd biggest producer of food worldwide,3 and the biggest exporter.
This huge, flat river basin also has many navigable rivers.4 Together, they give the US more navigable internal waterways than the rest of the world combined. Here’s one awe-inspiring fact: The head of navigation of the Mississippi (the farthest you can navigate upstream) is Minneapolis, which is a brutal 3,000 km (~1,800 mi) inland.
This is extremely useful because, as many of you already know, moving goods over water is 10-30x cheaper than overland.5
As a reminder, halving transportation costs can increase trade by 16x!
Cheap transportation is why Rome, Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, Japan, Germany, France, the UK, and the US got rich and created empires. Conversely, even in modern times, it is common for Russian and Kazakh crops to occasionally rot before they can reach market due to high transportation costs: long, unreliable connections and poor infrastructure because it’s so expensive. It is not unusual for a significant portion of the Russian grain crop—millions of hectares in some years—to remain unharvested!
Most countries require massive investments in transportation networks to reach their full potential, but not the US’s Greater Mississippi Basin. The vast majority of
prime agricultural lands are within 200 km of a stretch of navigable river. Road and rail are still used for collection, but nearly omnipresent river ports allow for the entirety of the basin’s farmers to easily and cheaply ship their products to markets, not just in North America but all over the world.
Rivers are more useful than coastlines because:
Navigable rivers service twice the land area of a coastline (rivers have two banks, coasts only one).
Rivers are not subject to tidal forces, greatly easing the construction and maintenance of supporting infrastructure.
Storm surges often accompany oceanic storms, forcing the evacuation of oceanic ports.
In summary, the Mississippi Basin has the best farmland in the world and the best way to transport crops, making the region fabulously rich.
Because the center of Europe is mountainous, it has many rivers flowing in different directions. Each river system created different societies that became the individual nationalities we know today.
Now look at the rivers in the US, and compare the Mississippi with the Atlantic Seaboard to the east.
Because the Appalachians Mountains are parallel to the US Atlantic Coast, rivers flow from the mountains to the coast and seldom cross each other. Each river developed its own economy, its own hinterland, its own port city on the coast. This was one of the reasons why there were 13 pretty independent colonies on the US East Coast, and without this division, the US Civil War would have been much less likely.6
Meanwhile, the Mississippi is one big system, which makes political integration easy. All of the peoples of the basin are part of the same economic system, ensuring constant contact and common interests. Regional proclivities obviously still arise, but this is not Northern Europe.
We could see this as early as the 1700s, when the entire basin was claimed by Spain and France.
Incredibly, despite the Mississippi’s vast length of over 3,000 km, it barely slopes 200 m. This makes its water slow—and hence navigable. But it also gives it another boon: It’s navigable until just a few miles from the Great Lakes!
The US has the largest freshwater lake system in the world, the Great Lakes. Its de facto capital, Chicago, became so huge because it’s the hinge between the Mississippi and the Great Lakes.
This means the huge Mississippi Basin and the Great Lakes are seamlessly integrated through cheap water transportation—which became even better after the canals were built in the area—and both have access to the ocean. Dozens of major inland US cities like Milwaukee, Detroit, or Cleveland are virtual seaports! US goods again get a permanent advantage.
Unlike the Greater Mississippi Basin, the Great Lakes are not naturally navigable due to winter freezes and obstacles such as Niagara Falls. However, over the past 200 years, extensive hydrological engineering has been completed—mostly by Canada—to allow for full navigation of the lakes. Since 1960, the Great Lakes have provided a secondary water transport system that has opened up even more lands for productive use and provided even greater capacity for North American capital generation. The benefits of this system are reaped mainly by the warmer lands of the United States rather than the colder Canada, but since the Great Lakes constitute Canada’s only maritime transport option for reaching the ocean, it still financed it.
But that’s not all!
Ships can travel from Boston to Mexico barely touching open seas, instead protected by chains of islands that cover nearly all of the US’ Atlantic coast.
This is what it looks like when you zoom into one of these intracoastal waterways:
The rivers of the Mississippi basin and the intracoastal waterways amount to more internal navigable waterways than in the rest of the world combined! What?!
In addition to serving as a sort of oceanic river, the island chain’s proximity to the Mississippi Delta is like an extension of Mississippi shipping, supporting political and economic unification of the Mississippi Basin with the eastern coastal plain.
This is why most of the US’s biggest ports are in the Mississippi Basin or on the Gulf of Mexico. But not all.
The East Coast also has many huge natural ports, thanks to the rivers flowing from the Appalachians, which form big estuaries ideal for protecting ports from tides and storms:
The same is true on the West Coast, with the San Francisco Bay and Seattle’s Puget Sound:
These ports have allowed heavy trade with limited investment in port infrastructure, and hence cheap transportation costs. A great way to get rich!
So the Mississippi Basin is the continent’s core, and whoever controls it will dominate the East Coast and Great Lakes, easily producing lots of food and other goods, which it could trade anywhere in the world cheaply and fast, making it a world superpower.
But in the 20th and 21st centuries, a superpower also needs power. It needs energy to dominate. Luckily, the US has plenty.
The US is the #1 producer of both oil and gas in the world!
This production comes from the exploitation of huge oil and gas resources: The US has the 4th largest number of gas reserves in the world and the 9th largest of oil.
And how come the US has such incredible hydrocarbon resources?
Because it used to have a shallow inland sea! Such seas are ideal for breeding life, as nutrients can’t fall too deep and thereby remain accessible to sealife. Their corpses eventually do fall, pile up, and become oil and gas a few million years later.
With perfect farms and inland navigable waterways and ports and fuel reserves, the US geography is ideally positioned to produce wealth. Luckily, it’s also ideally positioned to defend itself: The US is an impregnable fortress.
The US sits between the world’s two largest oceans. This makes any invasion by sea virtually impossible. Germany couldn't invade Britain across 15 mi of the English Channel during WW2; the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans are massive >2,000 mile barriers.
Does history disprove this?
Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, in Hawaii.
The UK’s navy led two wars to US soil, the War of Independence and the War of 1812.
But Japan attacked Pearl Harbor because it couldn’t reach farther, and it was only an aerial attack. It would have been impossible to put boots on the ground across such a long distance. Even the US has had a hard time in operations like the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, given these distances.
The same is true on the Atlantic side. The UK did carry out two attacks on the US, including blockades that starved the local economy. But at the time, the UK was the most powerful country in the world, with the strongest navy, yet it still couldn’t beat a very weak and fledgling US. Not only that, but the US was limited to the East Coast, and most battles stayed close to that coast.
Why?
To the east, the Appalachians are not too high (~max 6,700 ft / 2000 m), and yet they were enough to stop the Brits. A zoom-in shows why:
This means the East Coast is exposed to seaborne attacks, and that’s one of the big reasons why the US expanded westward: To utilize the buffer of the coast and Appalachians against any naval attack.
To the west, the enormous Sierra Nevada and Rockies are both high and dry; anyone getting a foothold on the West Coast would still never be able to control them, and would have been repelled soon after.
This is why a scenario like in The Man in the High Castle would have been impossible.
The US has 8x more population than Canada because most of Canada is an ice desert. On top of that, its soil is very bad because of the Canadian Shield, which means its agricultural potential is limited, and with that, its independence. The result of all this is that 80% of its population is spread across three regions, all of which are disconnected from each other but highly connected to the much more economically fruitful US.
Which, in turn, makes Canada exceptionally exposed to the US and makes hostility from Canada toward the US impossible.7
Despite this, most of the border between the US and Canada is made of lakes and forests: hard to pass, easy to defend. The US is very safe from Canada.
Mexico is not Canada. It has a population of 130M people, it was as rich per capita as the US before the Industrial Revolution, and it used to be a mere 150 km away from the US’s keystone: New Orleans. The country that controls New Orleans controls the Mississippi, and with it the heartland of the US.
Not only that: New Orleans is swampy—which makes it hard for maintaining an army—whereas neighboring Texas is made up of forested plains and hills—ideal for hosting a foreign army.
Some US statesmen probably thought: “If the border were only a bit farther south, it would be very convenient for us: It would be narrower, even more desertic, and farther from the key port of New Orleans”.
And that’s a major reason why the US supported English-speaking people settling in Texas, before then fostering a revolution there against Mexico, and finally incorporating Texas as a US state.
The US–Mexico War didn’t just bring Texas to the union, but it snatched 55% of Mexico’s size, including land reaching to the Pacific, and creating an even greater buffer with its southern neighbor. As we saw in the series about Mexico, that country is now neutralized as a potential threat:
What is now Mexico lacks even a single navigable river of any size. Its agricultural zones are disconnected and it boasts few good natural ports. Mexico’s north is too dry while its south is too wet—and both are too mountainous—to support major population centers or robust agricultural activities. Additionally, the terrain is just rugged enough—making transport just expensive enough—to make it difficult for the central government to enforce its writ. The result is the near lawlessness of the cartel lands in the north and the irregular spasms of secessionist activity in the south.—Stratfor
The US didn’t stop its defense at its borders. At the end of WW2, it deftly expanded it to a global magnitude:
With the Monroe Doctrine, it claimed that no colonial power could set foot in the Americas—and largely succeeded.
With NATO, it created a buffer to its east against Russia.
With its alliances with Japan and South Korea, and the purchase of Alaska, it made a buffer to its west against Russia.8
This buffer expands southward to contain China, by including Taiwan, the Philippines, Australia, and New Zealand.
These countries are not just allies. They have been modeled on the US system, so even under a stupidly antagonistic regime like Trump’s, they will remain firmly aligned with the US.
The US has:
Some of the best farmland in the world
The best naturally navigable waterways in the world
Amazing natural ports
All of these connect US regions to each other, uniting them politically
It also has some of the best oil and gas resources to fuel its economy
And it has several layers of defense to protect all this wealth, starting with the two largest oceans, one on each side
After the oceans, it has two insurmountable mountain barriers that further defend its heartland
Its neighbor to the north is sparsely populated because it’s too cold and infertile
Its neighbor to the south is weaker and separated by a narrow mountainous desert
The US has managed to extend its model to countries across the world, creating buffers that repel all the other natural superpowers, Russia, China, and India
In a world that sees China climbing, and witnesses how the US shoots itself in the foot with stupid policies like tariffs, it’s easy to fear the US might be set aside as a have-been. But its geography makes it impossible: It will always be rich, and it will be impossible to physically threaten.
I would personally never bet against the US.
3.2M km2 or 1.2M mi2
The Missouri, Ohio, Tennessee, Kansas, Wisconsin, Illinois, Kentucky, Iowa, Minnesota, and Arkansas are all affluents of the Mississippi. These 11 rivers thus take their name from the Mississippi basin.
The main ones are the Missouri, Arkansas, Red, Ohio, Tennessee and, of course, the Mississippi. But they’re not the only ones.
The specific ratio depends on the tech of the time. It used to be much cheaper, but as trains appeared, this gap shrunk.
If the rivers crossing the Carolinas, Virginia, Tennessee, and Georgia all reached the Atlantic through, say, Baltimore on the Chesapeake Bay, all these states would have been much more integrated, and their cash crops of cotton and tobacco would have been transported and traded through Baltimore. How on Earth could they have seceded in such a world?
Historically, there have been three wars between what are now the US and Canada:
In the 7-Year War in the mid-1700s, the British overwhelmed the French, thanks mostly to the much bigger population in British colonies.
In the War of Independence, Canadian forces had very little impact. The Revolution included an American invasion of Quebec in 1775–76. It failed, partly because French Canadians didn’t rise up against the British.
In the War of 1812, which the US basically launched to conquer Canada, the US couldn’t beat the Canadian + British forces, even though the British were entangled in European wars.
Japan’s constitution was written by the US, and Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan are true liberal democracies.
2025-08-29 05:00:41
In the previous article, we explored how climate predestined the North and South of the United States to go to war. But the climate’s influence went beyond that: It had predetermined the outcome, even before the war began.
Wars are mainly won by soldiers, logistics, and weapons.
These, in turn, are determined by demographics, industrialization, and money.
…
2025-08-27 05:01:34
The story people know about the US Civil War is that the South had slavery and the North was free. As each side expanded westward, they feared that the other side would prevail and force their solution on the other, and eventually they went to war over it.
That, right there, should give you pause: North and South? Westward expansion? Did geography have something to do with the Civil War? More than that: I think geography caused the Civil War. How?
Because of climate, the North farmed crops like wheat and barley that required very little work, and that work was easy to automate. This tended to make farmers independent, incentivize industrialization for the machinery, and push settlers west very fast, as they weren’t as limited by labor needs.
Conversely, the crops grown in the south—mainly cotton, tobacco, sugarcane, and rice—all require substantially more work, so getting lots of workers at the lowest possible cost made or broke fortunes. This is why slavery emerged here, why it was fundamental to the South’s economy, and why Southerners went to war to continue it.
Why does all this matter? It’s not just a crucial fact of US history. This has dramatic consequences today, from the roots of racial inequality, to where the Democratic party wins elections, and the relative poverty of the US South.
So let’s dive in: How exactly did climate cause the Civil War, and what are the consequences of that today?
For decades, the rush westward had been fueled by one clause of the US Constitution:
The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each State.
If one side has 50% or more of senators,1 it can block any legislation it dislikes,2 including the most controversial one at the time: slavery.
This is the evolution of free vs slave states between 1789 and the eve of the Civil War in 1861:
When the US became a country, it had more slave states than free states. But over the following decades, the northern population and its expansion accelerated. By 1820, there were the same number of slave vs free states. A bigger population in the North meant it controlled the House, but as long as the number of free and slave states was the same, the public mandate would not clearly support abolition, and Northerners wouldn’t have a majority to impose it, as Southerners could block any anti-slavery legislation in the Senate.
In 1820, Missouri wanted to become a (slave) state, but that would have upended the balance, so the Missouri Compromise was reached: The US would also accept Maine as a state, keeping the balance, and from thereon free vs slave statehood would be determined based on the 36º30’ parallel, north of which states would be free.
This bought some time, but cemented the idea that each side had to rush westwards as fast as possible to create new states for their camp, lest it lose the senate balance.3 And the South saw the writing on the wall:
The Northern population grew faster than the Southern one. The result was this population density map on the eve of the Civil War:
The Southerners dreaded the arrival of each new census: They feared this population imbalance meant the North was going to make new states faster, threatening slavery. They were right.
By 1860, the North had three more states than the South. Lincoln campaigned for the 1860 election on an anti-slavery platform:
We deny the authority of Congress, of a territorial legislature, or of any individuals, to give legal existence to slavery in any Territory of the United States.—Platform Adopted by the National Republican Convention, held in Chicago, May 17, 1860. Library of Congress.
As soon as Lincoln won, and before he was even inaugurated, Southern states started seceding.4
All of this shows that the single most important cause of the Civil War was slavery, and it came to a head when the North’s population outgrew the South’s.
But hold on, why was the Northern population growing faster than the South’s?
Most immigrants went to the North.
Nearly 90% of foreign immigrants settled in free states.
Then they had children, and those had children, and the population of the north grew faster. I spot-checked the share of population that was either foreign or had a foreign parent, and this is what it looked like:
Northern states tended to have a much higher share of foreigners than Southern states because they received much more immigration.
It wasn’t just foreigners coming to the US; there was also massive internal migration of Americans moving westward: Around 1850, nearly 50% of Americans had moved from their state of birth!5 But they tended to choose Northern states over Southern ones.6
So now we know the Civil War was caused by the disagreement over slavery, that it erupted when the North outgrew the South, and that this happened because foreigners and Americans moved to the North en masse.
But why did immigrants go to the North?
About 90% of immigrants7 went to the North, a majority to work in farms:
The South had slaves, which depressed labor costs, and wages in the South were lower.
The North made it easier for immigrants to own land and reap what they sowed.
The industry in the North was more diversified, so workers had options beyond farming.
Mortality was higher in the South.
And why is all this the case?
This is a map of crops in 1860, just before the US Civil War (1861-65):
The drier and cooler North grew mostly wheat, barley, and oats.8
The warmer and more humid South grew mostly cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice.
This is actually not that different today. These are the traditional northern crops:
And for the South:
This sounds like a small difference, but it’s so momentous that we can consider it the single biggest driver of the Civil War. Why? Because wheat, barley, and corn grow in northern climates and happen to require much less work than cotton, tobacco, sugar, and rice, which grow in southern climates. This led to families taking care of small independent farms in the North and big landowners setting up plantations worked by slaves in the South.
Raising crops generally entails three phases:
Preparing the soil and seeding
Harvesting
Post-processing.
For northern crops, these processes were easy,9 and tools (and later, machines) made it even easier.
For example, preparing the soil for wheat or oats required plowing and harrowing fields, and sowing, which took about 13 hours per acre (13 h/a).
Then came reaping season, which could be done in one pass of cutting the wheat, aligning it, bundling it, and putting the bundles upright to dry. This took about 14 h/a.
Finally, you had to thresh: Extract the grain from the stalks, and then from the husk. This took about 8 h/a,10 for a total of about 33 h/a.
Luckily, each one of these steps was easy to mechanize:
Mechanization was happening through the 19th century, and shrunk the work to produce wheat from 33 h/a in 1839 to 11 h/a in 1910.11 As an example, by 1860, a threshing machine could thresh 12 times as much grain per hour as could six men: That’s a 70x improvement in productivity per hour! On average, in 1840, wheat took 33 h/a, oats 31 h/a, and corn 61 h/a.12
That was not the case in the South. Consider cotton, which accounted for over 60% of US exports in 1860.
Cotton took about 130 h/a of work!13
An acre of cotton required 4x the work as an acre of wheat.
What?!
How is this possible?
Cotton requires about 70 h/a of field preparation, and about 60 h/a of harvesting,14 so each step took much more work than the entire wheat cycle!
To prepare the land, the woody cotton stalks must first be cut, or they jam the plow. Then, since cotton likes humidity but doesn’t like the ground to be waterlogged, it must be plowed once, and then ridges need to be made to plant the cotton above the rest of the ground. Then, the ridges must be somewhat leveled so that the cotton seeds don’t fall too deep. Then, planting must be done accurately, so that the distance between plants is ideal for pickers to optimally run between them. The seed is small so it must be planted carefully near the surface. Later, as there are plenty of seeds, you get overseeding, so too many plants grow. Some need to be cut early. And finally, since it’s warm and humid, a lot of weeds grow, so fields need to be constantly weeded.
That’s just the soil and sowing work! The picking also took much longer than wheat because:
Wheat (and oats, barley, and corn) is a strong grain, but cotton is a delicate boll that must be hand-picked.
Cotton bolls don’t open at the same time, and they need to be harvested as they open, so cotton requires multiple harvest passes! While wheat, corn, oats, and barley can all be harvested together.
Also, a lot of this work could not be easily automated, because the bolls were delicate, the plants all differed in opening times, the soil was wet and uneven… Mechanization of cotton has taken much longer than wheat.15
This is the case for cotton, but as we saw, rice requires 2x more work than wheat. And that’s the easy one. Tobacco and sugarcane required an overwhelming amount of work: around 250 h/a for sugarcane16 and 300-900 h/a for tobacco,17 or 10x to 30x more than wheat! Why?
Tobacco exhausted soil quickly, after just a handful of seasons, so new farmland had to be bought and the workers had to move all the time. Then, tobacco needs to be grown in a nursery before being transplanted. Huh? Tobacco seeds are like dust, with thousands of seeds per gram. They need a very fine, weed-free, moist surface to germinate. If you broadcast them onto a plowed field, most would be buried too deep, dry out, or be swamped by weeds.
Tobacco must then be grown with precise spacing for airflow, disease control, leaf development, and picking ease.
The leaves must remain intact, so they have to be picked by hand. Then, they have to be carried to barns to cure.
Sugar cane was another highly complex crop. For example, the soil had to be plowed deep, and needed straight furrows; what you plant is last year’s cane stalks, which are bulky and heavy and must be placed one by one. Sugarcane has to be cut and then immediately crushed and boiled in sugar mills on-site, which meant you couldn’t harvest everything at once, and needed lots of coordination.
This is the result:
In the North, a single family in a homestead was enough to handle a big farm. At most, families could live in villages to help each other, but they remained fiercely independent. They preferred owning their farm so they could improve it and invest in machinery to cultivate more land and improve yields with less work. This led to freedom, entrepreneurship, and the ability to grow rich through wit and grind. Of course people flooded to the north!
This economic path didn’t require slaves: Slavery is actually expensive because you need a management layer to coerce the slaves, and even then, slaves work against their will. Entrepreneurship and freedom remove this inefficiency, so by 1830, Northern states had virtually abolished slavery.
Meanwhile, in the south, crops needed massive amounts of work. This meant that the biggest share of costs was human labor. There was a huge incentive to lower that cost, and slavery was the answer: With paid labor, these cash crops would have been uncompetitive in the world market. A natural approach to this would have been to automate the work as much as possible, but this was impossible at the time given the requirements of these crops.18 So White landowners turned to the horrible solution that was actually available to them at the time—slavery.
In the 19th century, slaves were 2-5x cheaper than wage workers, and were probably more productive,19 so the Southern White farmers who could afford it bought land, slaves, and created plantations, as they had existed in the region and the wider Caribbean for centuries.
By the time of the Civil War, the productivity of these crops had improved enough, and the cost of slaves increased enough, that cultivating these crops with paid workers was possible. But by then, the system was locked in: The Southern farmers didn’t want to lose their massive investments in slaves and juicy profits! Their entire economy depended on these slaves, and they were willing to go to war to keep them.
There was another reason why immigrants shunned the south: the bad air, or malaria.
Mortality was likely lowest in New England and rose as the latitude moved further south.—The Urban Mortality Transition in the United States, 1800-1940, Michael R. Haines
Malaria was pervasive in the South, because it’s hot and humid, and mosquitoes thrive there.
A child with malaria, if not killed outright, suffers stunted growth, lethargy, and decreased cognitive development. An adult with chronic malarial infection is often listless and weak.—How four once common diseases were eliminated from the American South, Margaret Humphreys
The impact can be seen by the fact that malaria eradication raised income in the “malaria-free” generation born in the next decade by 15%. Going back to the Mason-Dixon line that originally separated Free and Slave States:
Below it the Plasmodium parasite [that causes malaria] could live, and above it, the vector mosquitoes would survive, but the Plasmodium inside them would die.
Malaria was not the only disease in the region: Yellow fever and hookworm also festered there.20 White immigrants didn’t want to go there to die, especially since this was before the discovery of quinine, which allowed Europeans to move to tropical regions.
Meanwhile, Black Africans had more natural immunity to malaria specifically, and also some of these other diseases, or they had suffered some of these diseases in the past and had stronger immunity against them. So Black slaves were a better choice than Whites for working these crops in the South: They died less and had fewer down days.
Imagine you are a European descendant living in 1850, a hard and cruel world, but also a world full of discoveries and economic opportunities. Where would you rather go:
To the North, where you can get your own land and become rich by yourself through grinding and mechanizing your farm, or work in industries for higher wages than in your homeland?
Or to the South, where you could die of disease, and your main job option was to compete with slaves to grow crops that are hard to mechanize?
Early immigrants to the US knew this and went North. This tipped the balance of population towards the North, where slavery was not economically necessary, so it was abolished. Then, as the Northern population grew and their abolitionary stance strengthened, they pushed for imposing abolition of this abhorrent economic system on the South, who depended on it.
If you track the entire chain of causality, this is what it looks like:
And this is how climate caused the US North and South to enter into Civil War.
Why does all this matter? Why does GeoHistory matter, more broadly?
Because for centuries, humans have been fighting each other, blaming each other for their past behaviors and their grievances and what they are owed. Yes, slavery is absolutely abhorrent. What was done is terrible. But if instead, we see history as a mechanism, as the result of massive, hidden forces like climate and crops and economics, we can stop blaming each other for people’s terrible past deeds, and try instead to understand these mechanisms to steer humanity in the right direction, together. That’s what Uncharted Territories is about.
In fact, you can go farther: This is also why, before the Civil War, its outcome was already determined. And not only that, but the future development of the US North vs South for the following decades was also determined. For the 160 years since the US Civil War, the South has been catching up with the North due to the hindrance of its economic model, determined by climate. This is what we’re going to explore in the upcoming articles.
Since the US is bicameral, which means it has the House and the Senate, and both need to agree to approve a law. With filibustering, even fewer senators are necessary to block some types of legislation.
Bills need to be approved by the House and the Senate. The House represents population, and the Senate represents land (states). If one side has a majority in the House, but not in the Senate, its legislation can’t pass. In the Senate, a 50-50 split could be broken with the vice-president’s vote, and for some legislation, it’s a majority of 60+ that’s needed to pass the Senate.
Another push westwards in the South was the huge global cotton boom triggered by the cotton industrial revolution around Manchester, in England. But this pushed for settlement westward, not for incorporation into states.
The conflict between states on slavery had been heightening for decades: the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, personal liberty laws, the Kansas–Nebraska Act that effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise, Bleeding Kansas (a kind of dress rehearsal of the Civil War), the caning of Abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner, the Dred Scott vs Sanford case that ruled that African Americans couldn’t be US citizens, the raids and execution of John Brown…
And 75% of working age males disappeared from their communities to move elsewhere!
This is why between the Missouri Compromise and 1860, only Florida, Arkansas, and Texas became slave states, whereas in the Midwest, Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, and Iowa became states, on top of Oregon and California of course. While Texas became a state because of the war the US won against Mexico.
More Whites than Blacks, and more males than women.
Corn is more mixed. It tended (and tends) to be farmed more in the north, but could also grow south of the standard North-South line.
For wheat and oats, the first phase included plowing the field, harrowing (breaking up soil clods, leveling the field, and uprooting weeds), and sowing. The second phase included reaping, raking (aligning), binding, and shocking (putting the wheat bundles (shocks) upright to dry). The third phase included threshing (separating wheat grains from their husks and stalks) and shelling (removing the protective husks).
From this paper: Preparing the soil and sowing went from 13.6 h/a to 5.5 h/a; reaping and preparing the stalks from 13.9 h/a to 2.4 h/a. Every acre went from producing 11.3 bushels per acre (b/a) to 14 b/a, and the processing of every bushel went from 0.73 h/b to 0.2 h/b, for a total of this third step of 2.8 h/a.
From the same paper. Corn took much more time because, although farmers didn’t need to work on the ear as much (the bundle of yellow grains), preparing the land was much more time-consuming. It required field preparation, planting, cultivating, and hoeing, which took 61 h/a.
This is actually quite hard to find. The data comes from here, but different breakdowns of the tasks give different numbers. This makes sense, as there are differences in regions, in soil quality, in weather, in productivity, in varietals, in data quality… For this purpose, we don’t care exactly how many hours or work per acre were required, only why, and orders of magnitude of how much more work they involved compared to Northern crops.
After the invention of the cotton gin, working the cotton to extract the useful fiber became much easier, (so cheaper, as fewer hours were needed), so the processing went from extremely laborious to very fast and easy. This is, in fact, what allowed the cotton boom, as suddenly the cost of processing became low enough that a mass market could afford cotton clothes. This then triggered a big part of the English Industrial Revolution.
A lot of the automation in cotton farming actually happened in the 20th century. For example, forcing the blooming at the same time required breeding specific varieties of cotton and using defoliant, and it took hundreds of iterations for machines to be able to pick cotton. All these innovations converged around the 1940s, 80 years after the Civil War.
I count 32 person-days per acre, or 256 h/a, from this paper. This doesn’t include mule time.
To say nothing of the fact that automation and optimization only kick in once you’re already producing at scale.
From this paper. The paper doesn’t quote the gap between free workers and slaves, but you can eyeball the graph to get orders of magnitude. It also mentions how slaves were not less productive than free workers, and might have been more productive. Also this paper’s abstract corroborates it.
Some could also be found in the North, but the prevalence was much lower. The Mason-Dixon Line, an early Free-Slave demarcation line, was also a malaria demarcation line: North of it, malaria didn’t prevail.
2025-08-22 20:03:14
Between my articles on Russia (1, 2) and those on Moscow (3, 4), a picture emerged on how Putin thinks about Ukraine and Russia. I shared many of the relevant facts in articles 3 and 4. Now, I’m adding the final ones, along with the consequences I take of all these facts on Putin’s mindset:
Russia is a colonial empire
Will China take over Siberia?
Why Russia, and not China, took over Siberia
Why Mongolia exists
Why the capital moved from Moscow to St Petersburg and back again
Why Russia believes it’s the heir of the Roman Empire
Why Putin’s vision of Russia is distorted
This stood out as I was researching this article: Russia is the last remaining colonial empire!
Russia expanded east just as Western European countries were expanding globally, in the 1500s and 1600s!
Like Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and Britain, Russia had its homeland in Europe (Moscow) and expanded into other continents (Asia in this case).
The superior agriculture in Europe allowed for much bigger populations, which translated into the manpower needed to conquer other lands. This was true for Russia, too.
All these powers used modern military technology to conquer other lands, especially gunpowder.
Like in America after Spanish conquest, many natives died from disease after Russia’s invasion. It looks like a majority of Siberian populations died this way!
Like for France in New France—what’s now Canada—the primary impetus for Russian colonization was the fur trade!
Like with Spain and Portugal, religion was a strong colonizing force. Orthodox missions built churches, baptized locals, and tied them to the Russian legal order. Catholic missions did the same for Spain and Portugal, often in parallel with military conquest.
Expansion fueled more expansion: The more land was conquered, the more wealth it produced, financing even more conquest. This was true of Siberia and its furs, as well as Caribbean islands and their tobacco or sugar productions.
First contact usually involved trade alliances, and later military subjugation.
Military outposts doubled as trade hubs. In Russia, small forts on rivers served as both military garrisons and fur-collection points. Presidios in New Spain, or forts in New France, guarded trade posts and enforced tax/tribute. Portugal’s trading posts were coastal forts.
Like in Spanish or Portuguese colonies, there was no attempt in Russia to industrialize native economies; the focus was fur, later some minerals.
Cossacks built reputations and wealth through raids, tribute collection, and exploration. They were often pardoned for past crimes if they served on the frontier. Conquistadors could earn titles, land, and wealth. Famously, Hernán Cortés, conqueror of Mexico, was a fugitive.
The question becomes: Why didn’t Russia decolonize?
No sea. When there’s a sea, other powers can intervene, blockade you, destroy your ships… It’s much harder to do that with a massive landmass like Siberia. Nobody has the logistics to feed an army marching in Siberia.
Siberia was sparsely populated, and became more so after the conquest. There was little native population to rise up and demand independence.
European Russians spread across Asia, replacing local ethnicities in many areas. This is more reminiscent of the UK’s Canadian and Australian colonies rather than those in the US or India. It’s not a coincidence that Canada and Australia stayed much closer to the motherland for longer.
With poor soil and worse transportation, trade was not viable, so wealth accumulation was difficult, too.
Today, you can see some aspects of colonial rule by Moscow over the rest of Russia:
Moscow underfunds regional authorities and vets who can participate in their regional elections
All subsoil resources are federal, so Moscow controls the oil, gas, and mining revenue
Most of the investment is linked to resource extraction rather than local industry development
Moscow is cracking down on minority languages
Moscow grinds “the others” in its war against Ukraine
In essence, the only moment of decolonization was the fall of the Soviet Union. Which brings the question: Will there ever be a second decolonization in Russia? Will Russia lose Siberia?
This is the most surprising map:
The Russian heartland is very far away from Siberia.
China’s is much closer.
The Russian side of the Siberian border is empty.
The Chinese side is packed.
China is also quite angry because Russia took its access to the Sea of Japan at the end of WW2.
China now calls itself a near-Arctic state. What do you think is their intent?
Also, this:
And this:
And this:
Here’s my take on this: China is biding its time.
It has nearly 4000 years of history. It was first united over 2000 years ago. It knows things come and go. Meanwhile, Russia is a young state. It’s just a few centuries old, and the Siberian colonies are an overstretch.
China is interested in this region, but it won’t take it over immediately. It will wait for the right moment, when Russia is weak and China is strong and there’s a very good reason for China to move on that landmass.
All of this makes me wonder: Why didn’t China conquer Siberia to begin with?
