My favorite books about creating civilization

McCullough’s last book is about the history of pioneers in the Northwest Territory. It is the same place and period as my novel. The first tool McCullough shows pioneers using is a saw to cut lumber. The first business, my book's main character, Tom Beard knows he needs to attract and does is a lumber mill. When McCullough iterates the goods available from the first trading post the largest supply they have is of whiskey. The second business Beard attracts, and knows he must to build population is a distillery. McCullough and I are telling the same story it’s just that he’s a historian and I’m a novelist. I think the story of people's needs wants and ambitions are more interesting than a simple iteration of facts.

In Accidental Superpower, Zeihan primary thesis is “stuff is hard to move; stuff is easier to move by water than land. And then he explains that the natural wealth, not just in soil, but in the river flow allowing traffic from Pittsburgh to New Orleans and the world enabled farmers coming to the Illinois prairie to get a plow in the ground immediately, without having to spend years clearing a forest, and then get the crops down river to markets within the same year. That nowhere in the history of the world had it been so easy to develop a marketable surplus and get it to market. All very interesting facts. But I think novelizing the frontier, watch men struggle against the wilderness to create wealth with exactly these conditions is far more interesting than a mere recitation. Zeihan and I tell the same story but in very different ways.

Michener’s fifty-year-old novel focuses on a natural spring that becomes a tell – one civilization stacked on top of another from the beginning of time. It is the spring that makes life. If it is life that creates civilization and then destroys it and then comes back to the water to create yet another. The eternal and lasting thing is the water. Michener makes a beautiful story of the civilizations that come and go and stack on top of one another. 

The town is a new civilization created, the founder believes, from wilderness. But it is not so. The spot he choose was previously occupied by indigenous natives and they took it from the natives there before them. How could I not love Michener’s story? It is the same as mine just 5,000 years earlier.

Friedman is perhaps America’s preeminent geopolitical thinker. And like his field of study, it is his position that it is geography that creates the political and cultural decisions that drive any societies choices. Trade required two things – a surplus of product to sell and a means of getting the product to market. So he had to pick a spot on a river with access to markets and it had to be a place with soil rich enough to create agricultural surpluses. The rich prairie of Illinois created the one and the Illinois River traced as far upstream as steady traffic could travel created the other. I think George Friedman, author of The Next Hundred Years would have both admired and agreed with everyone of my hero’s choices. But it’s way more interesting to see those choices played out in a novel format than an academic one.

Michener starts his novel with a vision of the Arapahoe culture along the Platte River in what is now Colorado. His tale unwinds over time and allows his readers to follow the conquest of the land by whites, the development of a rich city based on mineral wealth and river trade, and the decline of that city until wealth has departed. It is the only other book I know that follows precisely the same pattern as my book. How could I not love it?