Trajectories of Development: A Further Test

Abstract

Following publication of our paper, Trajectories of Development: A Test of Ecological-Evolutionary Theory, (Social Forces, September 1984), we received a letter from Pierre van den Berghe in which he suggested that we may have misclassified Haiti in our original analysis and thus have lost an opportunity to obtain an added check of our basic conclusions. Readers of that paper may recall that our study of Third World nations showed that those which had a tradition of plow agriculture have been much more successful in adapting to the modern industrial era than those which had a tradition of hoe or digging stick horticulture. However, because of the concentration of the latter in sub-Saharan Africa, it was not clear whether the mode of production or the geographical locale of these societies was responsible for the striking differences we found. In an effort to resolve this dilemma, we examined as a special test case Papua New Guinea, which lies on the other side of the globe from Africa, but which has employed horticulture as its primary mode of production. As we reported, the data on this society much more closely approximates data on the average industrializing horticultural society than data on the average industrializing agrarian society. This supported our contention, based on ecological-evolutionary theory, that the mode of production, rather than the African locale, was the critical factor responsible for our findings. Van den Berghe's letter led us to undertake a closer inspection of Haiti, since it promised to be a second critical test case. Our review of relevant literature (Kurian; Lundahl; Zuvekas) supports his contention that Haiti was misclassified in our original analysis. Its technoeconomic heritage, like that of Papua New Guinea, is indeed primarily horticultural, and since it is well outside the continent of Africa it provides another opportunity to see if our results were due primarily to the horticultural heritage which Haiti shares with all the societies we labeled industrializ-