Sometimes prosperity depends on the geography of the country (or continent) where you are born.

How comes?

Let me explain

Who lives in the modern world, as we do, sometimes tend to forget how good we have it. We have access to things people in the past couldn’t even imagine, not even the most famous, the richest, or most powerful among them. Basically, everybody can get or buy things right at their doorstep that in past centuries were nothing but a sort of magic.

People like Julius Caesar or Alexander the Great never drank coffee, for instance. That’s right, they did not watch films on television or travel by airplane either.

Telephones were unknown to them. They couldn’t look at their computer to check a fact.

Yet, today even schoolkids can find information about Rwanda or Peru on their mobile phone. Charlemagne didn’t even know these areas existed. That we know about Argentina and Namibia, drink tea and coffee, and can buy televisions, kiwi’s and tomatoes, is possible because of one thing; overseas trade.

The invention of cars and trains in the 19th century enabled transport on a scale never seen before.

And with transport, commerce flourished, benefiting most parts of the world, resulting in the phenomenon we call globalism.

Globalism

Here you can read the definition of globalism in Cambridge dictionary.

Globalism is not a new thing. Nero could eat ham from what is now called Belgium, drank Greek wine, and ate bread made from Egyptian wheat, dressed in Chinese Silke. So global trade was always around. But most luxury goods only reached the upper classes. The sheer scale of imports in the 19th century made prizes drop so low, that now the European, American, and to some extent Asia, the upcoming middle-classes could afford these items.

As always, progress came at a cost. Workers didn’t always get a fair wage, and cities were free into metropoles- metropoles with slums, where diseases could develop into epidemic proportions.

This brings me to this strange fact; cities appeared and/or grew all over the world.

Except in Africa. Why was this?

The answer is simple;

Geography.

Because for a city to be viable, you need a quite substantial and reliable river to supply water for its inhabitants. After all; No water, no people.

Besides a few, like the Nile, the Congo river, and the Niger river (and some rivers in South Africa), Africa did not have enough rivers to sustain urbanization. Other geographical features didn’t help the economic development of the continent either. For instance, mainland Africa does not have many natural harbors, because it is quite high. These disadvantages were only overcome when airplanes could carry bulk freight. But by then Africa had a serious, almost unsurmountable, economic problem. Because it was way behind the rest of the industrialized world.

Now, this is of course not the only explanation why many of the poorest countries are to be found in Africa. There are many, many other reasons. But the lack of African harbors those days is a factor that can’t be underestimated; the richest industrialized, western countries also have long coastlines, with many rivers, estuaries, and natural harbors, which enabled overseas trade.

Now you know why prosperity depends on geography. In other words, now you know why prosperity is sometimes just the result of a banal thing like geography.

Check our items that are coming from overseas here!. THANK YOU