What Maps Can Say

I read something interesting the other day. It was contained in a brief synopsis of a book, 'Origins', by astro-biologist Lewis Dartnell .....

Our Origins Are The Subject To Much Discussion Study And Debate.

The book is concerned with how the geography of the planet, has influenced human social and economic development, even up to and including today.

An example of this being quoted was looking at a map of where ancient civilisations started. A lot seem to have started in areas of the earth where there are strong tectonic boundaries e.g. Mesopotamia ....

Mesopotamia In A Tectonic Trench ....

.... which is the land bounded between the Tigris and the Euphrates rivers in the Middle East. This area is also a tectonic trough between Arabia and Eurasia, which has forced the two great rivers to deposit sediments in a localised area for millions of years, and which made it ideal for agriculture to start.

But it was the other more 'modern' example that caught my attention .... on how the election of Donald Trump has highlighted an interesting factor in the US elections. Apparently the book has illustrated the connection between the local soil, and electoral voting patterns in the South East of the US.

If you look at a political map of the South East region of the US, it’s largely a Republican red, but if you look closely at county level, rather than at state level results, there is a very distinct crescent shape of Democrat blue voting areas, hidden within the sea of red.

The Democratic Crescent - Cotton And Slaves.

So why is this linked to the geological map? Well if you look at the soil and topography underneath that crescent of Democrat-voting counties, there is in fact a stratum of thick, fertile sea mud that dates back 60-70 million years .... this, as it turns out is ideal land for growing cotton and other labour intensive crops. So in the 1640's, and progressively through to the 1860's, Black slaves were used to grow and harvest cotton in North America.

In point of side fact, this snippet reminded me that of course it was indentured British people who were originally used for cropping, well before the influx of slaves. The first indentured servants arrived in America in the decade following the settlement of Jamestown by the Virginia Company in 1607. They would work under harsh conditions, for an average of seven years, but under a contract, that often offered them a reward such as 25 acres of land, a new set of clothes, and a mule. But as demands for farming labour grew, in 1619 the first black Africans came to Virginia. However with no slave laws in place, they were initially treated as indentured servants with the the same opportunities for freedom dues as the British servants.

As the cost of the indentured servants rose many landowners began feeling threatened by the newly freed indentured servants (both black and white), and their legal demands for land when they finished their terms of contract. So the colonial elite soon turned to the idea of making the black workers slaves, by removing the idea that they were indentured workers, and so slave laws were passed in Massachusetts in 1641 and Virginia in 1661.

The landowners had created a system that had turned African indentured workers into slaves and into a far more profitable and ever-renewable source of labour ..... now, more than 150 years later, the descendants of those African slaves still live in those same localities as their forefathers, and their continued poor socio-economic background and circumstances, makes them more likely to be voting Democrat, rather than Republican.

Hence the  blue crescent in the voting map of the South East of the USA .... I thought this was all very interesting, and hopefully someone else reading this will as well.