Schism

Preview - R.F.H. Chapter 2 Ending Poverty part 2

ONE STEP FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK

Put yourself back in time again and imagine that your small plot of land is destroyed by a storm or perhaps a fire.  Your family escapes alive, but you are left with no food, no other belongings.  Luckily, there is a place you can turn, your local church.  From the earliest days of written history, most religions have tried to instruct people to share what they have with those less fortunate.  Also, the donations, or tithes, that people paid enabled churches to give aid directly to those in need.

Unfortunately, while you may receive a few meals for your family and some clothing, it will not be enough to really lift you out of poverty.  Even if your neighbors take some of their precious time to help you rebuild your home, the assistance will only get you so far because there are so many other elements stacked against you.  Your land may have been located in a place that is prone to bad weather or pests.  A simple infection might take another member of your family and leave you with less help, or an invading army might claim all your land.  And while the charity of your church and neighbors helps you in the short term, there isn’t enough stable economic growth to pull you out of poverty for good.  For thousands of years, we lived either in situations like this, so close to the edge of extreme poverty that it was impossible to climb out. 

In Europe, the path out of poverty in the Middle Ages and Renaissance was blocked repeatedly by multiple wars, famines and plagues.  After the fall of Rome in the 5th century, there was an almost constant series of wars that lasted over a thousand years, but even put together these western conflicts were small in comparison to the damage done to Asia and Eastern Europe by the Mongol Empire in the thirteenth century.

Blood was the only thing that flowed over the ground outside of Baghdad in February, 1258.  The canals that had watered the crops there for hundreds of years had been destroyed by the invading Mongol army.  When the city’s defenders failed, some citizens tried to run, but had no luck.  Hundreds of thousands were killed in one day as they attempted to flee or hide.  In the aftermath of the battle, what little prosperity the common people held was destroyed and with no social infrastructure left to help them, they were forced into terrible poverty.

In 1229 a three year famine struck Japan that was so severe that the government made it legal to sell children for food.  Though the law stipulated that the buyer had to have enough food left to provide for the child, the arrangement almost assuredly led to a life of servitude and poverty for the young boy or girl.

Trying to describe thousands of years of history like this as a cycle of poverty is greatly inadequate as it implies that there were periods where people started to climb up or at least peeked out of the hole they were trapped in.  A more apt metaphor is to say that the people living in the pit of poverty continuously had more dirt thrown down on them as disaster followed disaster.

And this continual shoveling of misery went on, all over the world, until the 1700s, when our unlikely hero very slowly started to come to the front.

ACCIDENTAL CONSEQUENCES

At first, the changes came slowly.  The first major invention of the eighteenth century was a wheeled cart with several wooden hoppers that held grain.  Blades in front of the hoppers would cut a groove in the soil for seeds to fall into and then blades at the back would cover the seeds with a layer of dirt.  This “seed drill” was a dramatic improvement over scattering seeds by hand onto a plowed field and it resulted in better germination and harvests with less waste.

Further inventions followed, and by the 1800s, a major invention or discovery was announced nearly every year and the industrial revolution was going full throttle.  Some inventions were focused on agriculture: the thresher or the cotton gin, and others like the flying shuttle or the power loom were used in the textile industry.  The steam engine led to the locomotive and steam boats that made travel quicker and allowed for goods to be transported more efficiently.  Samuel Morse invented the telegraph and people became more connected than ever before.