In Guns, Germs and Steel, author Jared Diamond talks about how environment can play a significant, often unyielding, hand in a civilization’s progress. Factors like temperature, the availability of domesticable livestock and the presence or absence of disease, among other things, combine to create natural honeypots for fledgling civilizations, such that peoples in Europe have developed at much quicker rates than their brothers in Africa, or South Asia.
Consider the fact that, of all the equatorial nations, there is not a single one that you could currently describe as "developed." The sole exception would be Singapore, although the nation from which it was borne, Malaysia, is hardly first-world. (Singapore is singular proof that technology can prevail over environmentally-related drawbacks.)
What’s the difference? In many cases, it boils down to temperature (pun intended). Tropical environments are patently difficult to cultivate, for one thing. The sun bakes a tropical landscape for the better part of a year, and rain is unpredictable, both in volume and in frequency. Most civilizations that grew within these environments were hunter-gatherers, because rudimentary farming was nearly impossible to pull off. The consequence was that most groups became nomadic (they were forced to move from place to place as food sources were expended). Their population was also smaller, due both to the fact that food was difficult to come by, and having infants to carry around made them less agile. More importantly though, hunter-gatherers could not diversify their individual roles within a tribe as much as a farming society could, i.e., every member was often focused purely on food acquisition. This slowed the emergence of important concepts such as hierarchical leadership or military units or (later) scholars, which were all key to the rapid growth of farmer groups (being able to predict food availability and having superior food storage allowed some members to focus on other aspects of living).
High temperatures are also conducive to insects and disease, which can be doubly devastating when you consider that hunter-gatherer groups are already poorly equipped to deal with illness.
One of my favorite anecdotes from Guns, Germs relates to the Aboriginal Australians, who are widely acknowledged to be one of the oldest civilizations on Earth. Inhabiting the continent of Australia for over 40,000 years, these groups were theorized to have travelled over land bridges from New Guinea or by boat across the Timor Sea. Unfortunately, Australia wasn’t exactly the easiest kind of landmass to cultivate and the aborigines were almost exclusively hunter-gatherers. Their tools included wooden spears and the signature boomerangs, and they were expert fishermen. The only problem was: they were still in this prototypal state in 1780 (!), when the British began to colonise the continent. To put this into perspective: halfway across the world, at roughly the same time, Benjamin Franklin was coming up with the idea of Daylight Savings Time in France, the Society of Gentlemen in Scotland were busy publishing the Encyclopaedia Britannica, and American politicians were eating ice cream in Philadelphia.
The result was, as one would expect, fairly lopsided. The natives were driven out of their lands, or enslaved outright, and their population declined from about a million strong, to less than ninety thousand in the space of one and a half centuries. This stark contrast between the aborigines and their new caucasian bunkmates is the same thing that has happened all over the world, with European colonisers making huge scientific strides and subjugating other, less adept civilizations with superior technology.
Diamond’s book is a great eye-opener in that it postulates why pre-history (and subsequently, modern history) unfolded the way it did. I’m about 60% of the way through so I have yet to see if he proposes any solutions to the problem (if solutions to rectify the inherent imbalances are even really possible at this point in time). His writing style can be a bit technical at some points, particularly speaking of botany and animal biology, but overall it’s been a fascinating read. Check it out here.