North beats South? | AskHistorians Archive Observer

So, I hope this doesn't need pointing out, but the notion is transparent nonsense. Nothing could be easier than falsifying the claim that more northern regions always win wars against more southern regions, even ignoring the obvious northern hemisphere bias that is baked into it. The Romans defeated the Cisalpine Gauls in 225 BC. The English crushed the Jacobite rising in 1745. Done.

More interesting than the statement itself is the chain of assumption underlying it: that wars are won by superior technology, that this technology is generated by people's desire to live in greater comfort, and that the extent of this desire is determined by climate. All of these assumptions are as patently false and easily falsifiable as the general law of history they implicitly support. Both warfare and human innovation are flattened to simple mechanical principles here, and these principles collapse under the slightest scrutiny (How do we explain victory when two sides have the same weapons? How does military technology help people cope with the cold?). They are evidently worthless assumptions for historical analysis. But they reflect a very particular view of the way the world works. This is a powerful mix of geographical and technological determinism: the idea that it is not people, but their environment and their technology that shape history.

Where does this philosophy of history come from?

Geographical determinism - cold climates make more innovative people who make better warfighters - is very old. I've written about its early traces in this older answer about a similarly silly modern attempt to formulate a law of history. Since the 5th century BC, some Greeks believed that people who came from hard lands (by which they generally meant arid and infertile rather than cold) were naturally better fighters than those who lived in an abundance of natural wealth. Scarcity supposedly made them tougher and more willing to bear deprivation, while those from milder climates were used to luxury and unwilling to give it up. The supposed result was a cycle of history in which "hard" people conquered nearby "soft" people, but turned soft themselves by exposure to the luxuries they'd conquered, only to fall victim to the next hard people themselves.

You'll notice that this Greek notion isn't interested in cardinal directions. The most likely origin of the definition of geographical determinism along a north-south divide is Max Weber's concept of the so-called Protestant work ethic. Weber, writing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, tried to explain why the north of Europe was more industrialised and wealthier than the south (or other parts of the globe), to the point that the preponderance of worldwide economic and military power was concentrated in the UK and Germany. His theory was that it all boiled down to the difference in outlook between Protestants (who dominated these countries as well as Scandinavia, the more developed parts of the Netherlands, and much of the US) and Catholics (who dominated much of Southern Europe). The latter supposedly counted on their eventual salvation and eternal bliss, and therefore mostly enjoyed themselves in life; the former, on the other hand, believed they had to earn their ticket to heaven through a life of labour, austerity and piety. Weber used this stereotyped characterisation to argue that it was no coincidence modern notions of private property, capitalist endeavour, industrialisation, and bourgeois culture had developed in Northern Europe.

Undoubtedly, both these theories are inherently racist, in that they rely on the assumption that people born in particular places have certain innate traits that they generally cannot rise above. To many Europeans, the expansion of their colonial empires in the 19th century would have greatly reinforced the notion that there was something that set them above people from regions further south, since it was Europeans that got to rule empires and Africans, Indians, and indigenous peoples of America and Australia that formed their subjects. Stereotypes about the supposed lack of civilization, industriousness, technological innovation, and advanced political organisation among non-Europeans (all typically false, but pervasive) were easily connected to the old Greek idea of "soft" peoples doomed to be conquered by their "hard" betters. Weber's theory that it was all down to a religiously inspired ethical culture only reinforced an already prevalent sense that people from certain parts of Europe were superior beings - smarter, more determined, more pragmatic, and effectively born to rule. The rest of the world was destined to be their subjects.

I hope that all of this sounds both implausible and abhorrent to anyone reading this. The theories mentioned here are hard to discredit only insofar as they are deliberately vague, slippery, and unspecific. Weber always argued that he was merely constructing "ideal types," models of interpretation against which to test historical cases, rather than actually writing the laws of history. But the power of these ideas lies in the fact that they instinctively feel true to a lot of people trying to make sense of the enormously complex canvas of human history. These are ideas that, especially in the age of European colonial empires, carried a great deal of truthiness - a truth that was sensed rather than reasoned through. For this reason it is important to stress that these theories - by shifting the agency of history from individual human beings to their geographical environment, culture, and technology - serve as apologia for imperialism, colonialism and racism. If Europeans conquered, oppressed and exploited much of the world, it is nobody's fault; it's just that they are born that way. Their domination is not a decision but an inevitability. Since Africa is warm and fertile, its people were always bound to be "soft," and its societies bound to become prey to the "hard," developed, expansionist peoples from the cold north.

Theories like these serve to erase the complexity of history and its grim reality, only to replace it with a simple scheme in which the only operative forces are beyond the influence of any individual. They are more natural than human laws. They are especially comforting to people living in northern countries that used to dominate peoples from further south, since they let these people tell themselves that it was simply the nature of things. All the better if there are a few well-known cases in which a northern political entity defeated a southern one without any additional ethnic dimensions, such as the American Civil War; they only add to the degree to which a notion like this can feel instinctively and comfortingly true.