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The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier (2007)

Catching up is about radically raising growth in the countries now at the bottom…This book sets out an [aid] agenda for the G8 that would be effective.
(The Bottom Billion, pages 12 and 13)

Sir Paul Collier, Commander of the British Empire (CBE) and Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) is a British development economist who is currently Professor of Economics and Public Policy in the Blavatnik School of Government in Oxford. He’s the author of nine books tackling big global issues like migration, refugees and the future of capitalism.

The Bottom Billion was his second book, written expressly to inform and advise politicians attending the 2007 G8 meeting in Germany, which is why the final chapter is titled ‘An agenda for action’ (pages 175 to 192).

Collier asserts that while a billion or so people live in developed countries, and 5 or so billion live in developing countries many of which have flourished in the 1980s and 90s, a hard core of impoverished people live in countries whose economies have stubbornly refused to grow, despite western aid, loans and advice. He reckons there are about 58 of these countries (p.7), home to 980 million people or, by the time we’re reading his book, over a billion (p.6). If everyone else is doing relatively OK then, if the G8’s ambition is to ‘abolish poverty’, it is to these 60 or so failing countries and ‘the bottom billion’ that attention needs to be focused.

To help do this Collier has developed the theory that these countries are being held back by a number of key development traps and these are what need to be addressed. Collier claims there are four of these:

1. The Conflict Trap

Contrary to received opinion, Collier thinks that civil wars do not correlate with rebel grievances, political repression, ethnic strife or colonial legacy. Instead he finds strong links to: low income, low growth and reliance on the export of primary commodities.

Civil wars last a long time: the average international war lasts six months, civil wars last at least ten times as long, and are likely to recur or break out again. This is because the longer a civil conflict drags on, the more deeply established the players become that profit from the conflict, making them harder and harder to end. Only about half the countries which resolve a civil war manage to go a decade without conflict breaking out again (p.27).

A typical civil war costs its country and its neighbours $64 billion. After civil wars conclude homicide rates generally increase as people inured to violence carry it out unilaterally.

It’s not just civil wars, coups are also correlated with low income and low growth (p.36).

2. The Natural Resources Trap

Countries that are rich in natural resources are paradoxically usually worse off than countries that are not, for a number of reasons:

governments that rely on extractive resources (oil, gas, gold, diamonds, iron, copper) tend to become anti-democratic rentier states
being home to abundant natural resources can lead to Dutch disease, where reliance on one resource leads to neglect of all other aspects of the economy, a failure to diversity and develop their economies which results, long term, in low or zero growth (p.39)
because rentier governments make most of their income from (often corrupt) deals with western multinational corporations, they have little need for taxes from the general population, and so the taxation-with-representation model which underpins most western nations simply doesn’t apply; rich governments can afford to ignore their populations
an accompaniment of responsible government is checks and balances; these tend to be absent in resource-rich, low growth countries
in other words, resource-rich poor countries tend to evolve terrible governments of kleptocrats, Angola, Congo, Nigeria

3. Landlocked with Bad Neighbours

Around 30% of Africa’s population lives in landlocked, resources-scarce countries (p.57).

Countries with coastlines can trade with the world, while landlocked countries can only trade with their neighbours, and that depends on having decent transport infrastructure. Landlocked countries with poor infrastructure connections to their neighbours therefore have a limited market for their goods. And they may have bad i.e. predatory or unco-operative governments. What can a poor landlocked country do?

Increase neighbourhood growth spillovers
Improve neighbours’ economic policies
Improve coastal access
Become a haven for the region
Don’t be air-locked or e-locked
Encourage remittances
Create a transparent and investor-friendly environment for resource prospecting
Rural development – the single biggest problem is here is the subsidies the West and Japan pay their farmers
Try to attract aid

4. Bad Governance in a Small Country

The kind of terrible governance which has characterised so many African nations since independence can destroy an economy with alarming speed. Think of the ruination of Congo by Mobutu. It’s doubtful if economic growth anywhere can exceed 10%. But someone like Robert Mugabe can run his country into the ground in under a decade. The smaller the population, the less inertia there is to prevent ruinous plans.

This chapter is highly technical with Collier explaining and defining criteria he uses to create technical reports on, among other things, what he calls ‘failing states’ (p.68) then defining what ‘turnaround’ would mean and what ‘sustained’ would mean (at least five years’ improvement; p.70). All these chapters read like summaries of pretty technical academic papers because that’s often exactly what they are.

Their study showed that a country was more likely to achieve a sustained turnaround: 1) the larger its population 2) the better educated its population 3) if it had recently emerged from a civil war.

Disappointingly whether it was or wasn’t a democracy seemed immaterial.

Solutions

Let me clear: we cannot rescue them. The societies of the bottom billion can only be rescued from within. (p.96)

Each of these countries contains honest, educated people working for reform and improvement. Collier calls them ‘heroes’. We need to help these heroes by clearing away the obstacles to their work. At our end this will require:

aid ministries in Western countries to be given much more importance and money
aid policies to be better co-ordinated across all government departments
Western governments to work more closely together to produce a co-ordinated Western approach to making poverty history

But then he moves on to four specific areas of improvement, many of which easy to state but will require entrenched institutions such as aid agencies and government departments, to change established practices and assumptions. Each of them gets a chapter explaining in detail:

Aid To The Rescue

He marshals pretty sceptical arguments and data about aid, lots of stories of aid’s ineffectiveness, corruption, theft, the uselessness of aid agencies and so on. He says things are improving, which is what they always say. Above 16% of GDP aid stops being effective. There are numerous different types of foreign aid. He considers in particular aid as incentive, aid as skills and aid as reinforcement.

Aid agencies should be concentrated in the most difficult environments and accept more risk p.116 the sequence

Military Intervention

Despite the terrible reputation Western military intervention has acquired because of Iraq, Collier still believes it has a role to play in improving the lot of the Bottom Billion, in fact three roles: restoration of order, maintaining postconflict peace and preventing coups (p.124).

On the whole appropriate military interventions, such as the quick, cheap, effective British one in Sierra Leone, should be encouraged, especially to guarantee democratic governments against coups (so we should back military intervention in Niger).

If only the European Union was prepared to use the Rapid Reaction Force it has set up with such a fanfare it might be possible to ‘make coups history’ by intervening quickly and decisively to reverse them, certainly easier than ‘making poverty history’ (p.131).

External forces are needed to keep the peace in postconflict situations because high government spending on the military is associated with greater risk of war breaking out again. External forces will have to come in and keep the peace for at least 10 years (p.133).

Laws and Charters

International charters are needed to encourage good governance and provide examples. Collier proposes five:

A charter for natural resource revenues: a very persuasive call for international charters to set standards of transparency, especially in the extractive industries
A charter for democracy: ‘Elections determine who is in power, but they do not determine how power is used’ (p.147). Actual elections are the showbiz side of democracy but much more important is the introduction of democratic checks and balances into corrupt countries. This takes time, planning and support.
A charter for budget transparency: the story of Emmanuel Tumusiime-Mutebile and alerting the local media (p.150)
A charter for postconflict situations
A charter for investment

Trade Policy: Western trade policy needs to encourage free trade and give preferential access to exports from Bottom Billion countries

Academic disputes

The uninitiated might think that academics are paid to find answers to problems and establish the truth. But the academic world, now more than ever, puts academics under tremendous pressure to compete, to publish scads of papers and books, to continually come up with something new, in order to justify their tenure and their research grants. And the best way to do this is not to come up with solutions but to continually problematise issues, finding new things to disagree about.

Hence why in History each new historian has to establish their reputation by rubbishing everyone who came before them and claiming to have found the real reason why X happened, or for the first time the true story can be told, or, in one of the clichés of our time, to be giving voices to the previously unheard, overlooked, suppressed etc.

Hence why in Literary Studies, every single work of literature from the last two and a half thousand years has to be reread and reinterpreted in light of the newish frameworks of feminism and race, post-colonial studies and, the newest kid on the block, queer studies.

Which is why second-wave feminism of the 1960s (white, horribly middle-class) had to be refuted by the 1990s generation of third-wave feminists, who claimed to be reclaiming feminism for non-white and working class people. Who were themselves supplanted around 2009 by fourth-wave feminists, who make much more agile use of digital technology i.e. social media, while insisting all previous feminism didn’t take into account modern ideas of gender fluidity.

The four waves of feminism

And so it goes on, wave after wave of thinkers claiming that their new interpretation is the right one, the revelation, the radical new discovery – until the next wave comes along and proves it wasn’t inclusive or diverse enough. Same in the language arts, the performing arts, the visual arts: in all the humanities academia is a kind of machine for generating ever-new waves of ideology and discourse.

Academic disputes in the aid sector

Anyway, when we come to Development Economics, to the world of development aid and foreign aid and aid policy, exactly the same thing applies. This is that, instead of there being broad agreement about what needs to be done, there is, instead, a surprising amount of disagreement about what should be done.

Why? Because academics are paid to disagree; they make their names and careers by rebutting, disputing and overthrowing previously accepted nostrums, the old ideas which have so signally failed, proposing new solutions based on new evidence, new studies etc etc.

And this lack of disagreement is, of course, notoriously endemic in the field of economics which, unlike art criticism or literary theory, directly affects the fate of nations and the wellbeing or otherwise of hundreds of millions of people who suffer the consequences of economists’ bickering and misrule.

The American economist J.K. Galbraith was a fund of witty criticisms of his own field of study. ‘If you laid all the economists in the world in a straight line, head to toe, they still wouldn’t reach a conclusion’ was one of his gags, although his best one might be: ‘The only purpose of economic forecasting is to make astrology look respectable.’

Which is why, arguably, the most interesting part of Collier’s book is not the ostensible Key Points, outlined above, which could be conveyed in five or six PowerPoint slides. It’s the sidelights and sideswipes, in which Collier defends his position against his opponents in a range of debates I didn’t even know existed.

These shed light on the tangled undergrowth of development economic thinking and begin to explain why leaders of Western countries do not give it the prominence Collier, naturally enough, wants his field to have. Why would they, when the so-called experts can barely agree among themselves?

Academic disputes about ‘growth’

Take the simple idea of growth. What could be more uncontroversial than the idea that the world’s poorest nations need to grow their way out of poverty by developing their economies. And yet in a couple of pages, before his book has really got started (pages 11 and 12), Collier sketches out the profound disagreements development economist have about this.

He tells us that many non-governmental organisations (NGOs) are deeply unhappy with the entire concept of ‘growth’, presumably (although he isn’t explicit about this) because they associate it with unbridled capitalism, the Washington Consensus, the creation of a third world middle class and the ongoing abandonment of the poor.

This, he explains, is why nowadays organisations put adjectives before the word ‘growth’, things like ‘sustainable pro-poor growth’ to distinguish their kind of growth from naughty nasty capitalist growth (p.11).

Collier has no time for this. He enjoys telling us that while he was directing the World Bank’s Research Department (swank) the most controversial paper they published was titled ‘Growth Is Good For The Poor’. To you and me that might appear a pretty uncontroversial statement but NGOs’ hated it and the president of the World Bank rang up to express his concern.

What emerges is that Collier sees himself sitting in the middle of a spectrum of beliefs. To the left of him are often quite left-wing development charities which are ‘suspicious’ (p.11) of talk about growth because of its red-blooded, Thatcherite connotations. The ‘sustainable pro-poor’ guys. In the world of economic theory, the leading figure of this wing is American economist Jeffrey Sachs, a strong proponent of large-scale aid to the developing world.

To the right of Collier are the aid sceptics, right-wingers who think well-meaning foreign intervention often makes things worse. Countries have to sort themselves out and find their own way. The American economist William Easterly is, apparently, the leading figure on this wing, as the title of his book ‘The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good’ (2006), makes abundantly clear.

Easterly’s arguments are repeated and updated by someone like Dambisa Moyo and her 2010 book ‘Dead Aid: Why aid is not working and how there is another way for Africa’. Moyo is black and a woman so scores double on the diversity-counter and has been showered with praise by the worried white establishment (in 2022 she was awarded a life peerage, becoming Baroness Moyo of Knightsbridge). But, at the end of the day, she is yet one more American-educated development economist to enter the endless battlefield of development economics.

Anyway, amid all this argumentation, Collier is at pains to position himself in a nominal ‘centre’: definitely rejecting left-wing beliefs (he is scathing about anyone who offers Cuba as a model for other developing countries to follow) but at the same time rejecting the All Aid Is Bad school (p.191).

Early on he offers a common sense summary of what he’s aiming for, a goal he hopes everyone can rally round:

To my mind, development is about giving hope to ordinary people that their children will live in a society that has caught up with the rest of the world. (p.12)

Reading this book made me realise that feel-good sentiments like that are so common in this area, and drop so glibly from the lips of politicians, precisely because they don’t really say anything. Because as soon as you start to be more specific, the squabbling starts.

Supporting girls and women

This atmosphere of continual argument and debate in development economics explains why the debate has moved away from ‘growth’ (wrongly, in Colliers view) towards more ‘safe’ subjects. This, for example, explains why all the squabbling parties can be brought back together around uncontroversial rallying cries such as ‘helping girls and women in the developing world’.

Who could possibly disagree? Who would dare to disagree? It’s a worthy cause, of course, as Collier emphasises (p.11) but also one which papers over the yawning cracks which divide development economists. Framing the debate in terms of helping ‘vulnerable women’ and ‘supporting girls’ etc is all very admirable:

But continues to evade the much harder discussion about the best way to provide foreign aid, or, as per Easterly and Moyo, whether the West should give aid at all.

Academic in tone

The Bottom Billion is very academic in tone, in the bad sense. Chapter 1 is about ‘conflict’, which you might have thought would be a big juicy topic. Instead Collier focuses in on the minutiae of a research paper he did with one of his graduate students, Anke Hoeffler.

He explains that they decided to take a very narrow approach and see if they could measure whether the outbreak of civil wars was related to income and GDP. They were quickly presented with the problem of how to define a civil war so, he explains, they adopted the definition of ‘civil war’ developed by scholars at the University of Michigan, which is an expert in this field.

Then, of course, there are problems with getting reliable data about GDP, average income and so on from the poorest countries which are, by definition, often in a state of chaos.

And then he complains that some fellow academics objected to this entire data-driven analysis. These critics come from the left, from ‘the politicised end of the academic world’ (p.19), who Collier has taken the time to criticise half a dozen times by just page 19.

Not all theorists of civil war have based their work on empirical data. Some social scientists, particularly the most politically engaged, know what they want to see in civil war and duly see it. (p.20)

See what I mean by ‘academic’?

1) Instead of treating the subject in a broad and insightful way, he is instead effectively summarising one very specific paper he co-authored.

2) He tells you as much about fellow academics who objected to his approach as he does about the results.

3) And his summary is littered with snarky jibes against Western Marxists, left-wing NGOs, the politically correct media and so on, sarcastic asides which I quickly came to dislike.

(For example, Collier attributes the over-emphasis on the urgency of the West giving aid entirely to ‘the left’ and its narrative of atoning for the sins of colonialism, in what he considers a blinkered, moralistic view which actively hampers the kind of aid and support we can and ought to give, p.123.)

Economic statistics

As an economist Collier prides himself on eschewing historical, political or sociological explanations for poverty or war. The trouble is that, as he explains how he and his post-grad assistants beavered away to define the data and stats they needed to generate their conclusions, the more artificial and contingent they appear. By the time he gets to the conclusions he’s so proud of, I found them unconvincing and also weirdly irrelevant.

For example, after a lot of number crunching, he tells us that poor countries are more likely to see civil wars which we could have worked out for ourselves. But then that a typical low-income country faces a 14% risk of civil war in any given five-year period. Each percentage of economic growth knocks a percentage off the risk, so a country with a growth rate of 3% has a risk of civil war of 14% – 3% = 11%.

This is just the first of many mentions of projects his graduate students are working on or that he collaborated on with his peers. An awful lot of the book consists of summaries of research undertaken by Collier or his research students or colleagues (Lisa Chauvet, Anke Hoeffler, Stefan Dercon, Steve O’Connell, Catherine Pattillo, Jan Gunning, David Dollar, Tony Venables) and there is an appendix at the end devoted to just these research papers, titled ‘Research on which this book is based’.

Underpinning the book are a mass of technical papers published in professional journals. (Preface, p.xii)

Collier’s unique selling point is that, once he has defined his problem, he works with students and colleagues to find ways to try to apply measurable data to them. He shares his working out with us because that’s how a good academic operates. It allows others to critique his methodology or results with precision.

In addition, Collier explicitly states in his Preface that he goes into such detail about who he worked with and how they developed the concepts and definitions for their research because the book has an aim over and above framing issues and recommendations for development aid: it is to give us lay readers a sense of what it’s like to do development economics, a sense of the buzz you get from framing questions then figuring out ways to answer them:

Although this is not a book about research, I hope that along the way you will get some of the flavour of how modern research is done, and a sense of the thrill that comes from cracking intractable questions. (Preface, p.xiii)

But as well as often being pretty boring, it gives an unfortunate impression of being very, well, narrow. Instead of ranging across the whole field it reads more like the annual summary of research done by a particular department at a particular university. It feels oddly parochial.

Reasons not to be cheerful

For a guy who’s trying to come up with practical solutions, Collier shares a lot of very gloomy conclusions to his research.

– Assuming even an optimistic rate of economic growth, he estimates that ruined countries like the Congo will take something like fifty years to get back to the standard of living they enjoyed at independence in 1960.

– Resource-poor landlocked countries are going to be reliant on aid for a very, very long time. He is so pessimistic about their prospects that twice he says they should never really have been created as separate countries. Mali, Niger, Chad, Central African Republic – these countries are going to be dirt poor forever (p.107).

– Capital flight. He and his team researched long and hard to uncover the headline fact that in 1998, after decades of military rule, some $100 billion had been smuggled out of Africa by its elite and was held abroad, money which should, of course, have been used to invest in infrastructure, agriculture and so on, but had simply been stolen by its rulers. Instead of investing in their own countries, rich Africans invest their money abroad.

– Paralleling capital flight is human capital flight. Educated people leave poor countries because they have better life chances abroad. And the better your qualifications the more likely you can enter a Western country. And once one of you is in, you can bring other family members. Thus human flight disproportionately impacts the educated classes, which obviously keeps poor nations stuck in the poverty trap.

The countries of the bottom billion are already desperately short of qualified people and the situation is likely to get worse. (p.94)

– A really big reason for gloom is that his research shows that the main way to grow your economy is to attract inward commercial investment. The way to do that is to be a large country with political stability and a reasonably well educated workforce. These are the reasons why first China then India dragged themselves out of poverty in the 1990s and 2000s.

China in particular grew at an incredible rate partly because of what economists call ‘economies of agglomeration’ (p.82) meaning that you build up a well-enough educated workforce that can move easily between different firms or factories in the same sector. There are tens of thousands of foreign firms in China and tens of millions of workers educated and experienced enough to move between them.

Compare the economies of agglomeration in China with the bottom billion countries where a) there are few if any foreign firms and so b) an entire generation of workers with no experience of what is required to work in a foreign-owned factory or warehouse e.g. be clean, turn up on time day after day, literate enough to do the work, prepared to put in the hours.

So who wants to be the first Western investor to risk investing millions in a country with no educated workforce, no transport infrastructure, and corrupt rulers who are likely to overthrow each other in a chaos-creating coup at the drop of a hat? See the recent upset among the rulers of Sudan. Nobody.

Critiques

William Easterly’s criticism

William Easterly is another development economist but this time from the right-wing of the political spectrum and a deep-dyed aid sceptic. This explains why his most famous book is titled ‘The White Man’s Burden: Why the West’s Efforts to Aid the Rest Have Done So Much Ill and So Little Good’ (2006) and explains why Easterly makes numerous criticisms of Collier. He starts by claiming that Collier’s strategy of attributing the poverty of the poorest countries to just four causes or ‘traps’ is completely inadequate. The world is much more complicated than that.

Easterly says Collier doesn’t take into account a number of other pretty obvious factors – such as the colonial legacy i.e. the template of the elite rule of land, resources and government which post-independence local rulers simply copied; or the disruptive impact of tribalism. He adds many others and develops his critique of Collier from there.

Lies, damned lies and statistics

All Collier’s conclusions derive from data and statistical analysis and the trouble with data and statistics is, notoriously, that you can make them mean anything you want to. Even an utterly honest, unbiased attempt to use data faces a host of problems which Collier, to give him his due, owns up to and describes in detail. These include:

sourcing the data in the first place: it rarely presents itself clean and complete as you wish, but has to be hunted down, sought in different organisations, or formats, or with different taxonomies, or purposes so that you have to manipulate it, ‘clean’ it, repurpose it
or it’s just not available and has to be guessed or ‘extrapolated’ from similar datasets elsewhere
Collier repeatedly explains how they had to choose how to define concepts such as ‘success’, ‘turnaround’, even ‘civil war’ and ‘growth’; the more he does so, the more contingent and – not quite arbitrary, but – flaky many of his central premises come to seem

Collier, to his great credit, shows all his working out, but the more he explains, the more rickety and bodged together his working appears. I’m sure he and all his collaborators did the best possible job but his candour about the challenges they faced getting hold of and then working with the data on which his entire approach relies, slowly undermines your trust in many of his findings. And since the entire edifice is based on these findings, well…

Fifteen years later

History doesn’t stop, Time marches on. Has poverty been abolished? Have we made poverty history? Have we lifted the bottom billion out of poverty? No, no and no.

Also, ‘Events, dear boy’. Since this book was published in 2008 we’ve had the financial crash of 2008 leading to a decade of austerity, the huge political disruption caused by Brexit, the COVID lockdowns, and now the war in Ukraine. All good excuses for focusing our energies elsewhere.

I don’t know whether Collier’s recommendations were adopted by the G8 or the British government or the UN, but I doubt it and I doubt they ever will be. Look at the umpteen reports about climate change, overflowing with recommendations. Some policies are being implemented in Western and developing nations, but is it enough? No. The sample of reviews of the book I’ve read all say it was ‘very influential’ and it may well have changed a lot of thinking and speeches and papers and research and so on in the vast papermill and huge bureaucracy of the aid industry.

But were any of his policies actually implemented? It would be lovely if Collier wrote another book (or article) assessing the book 15 years on: telling us which policies, if any, were adopted, and by whom, and what difference they made, if any. Come on, Paul.

TED talk

Sir Paul gave a TED talk summarising his book:

Credit

The Bottom Billion: Why the Poorest Countries are Failing and What Can Be Done About It by Paul Collier was published as an Oxford University Press paperback in 2008.

More Africa reviews

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A Brief History of Superheroes by Brian J. Robb (2014)

Robb has previously written biographies of Leonardo DiCaprio, Johnny Depp and Brad Pitt. This volume is one of a series titled ‘A brief guide to [or A history of] …’ which includes guides to Stephen King, ghost-hunting, the Roman Empire, Star Wars and any other topics they thought would sell. Written for a popular audience, then.

No illustrations

At 340 pages, including notes and index, it’s quite a long book, but its most obvious feature is that there are no illustrations, none, nada, zip – which is a big drawback seeing as comic books are a largely visual medium. When it gives descriptions of the early artwork for Superman, or how Batman’s look was refined over time, or the visual makeover of many comic book heroes in the 1960s, the reader is crying out for illustrations to show what he’s talking about. But you have to turn to the internet to do your own research…

So the book is solely prose, made up of thumbnail profiles of the writers, artists and publishers who created comic book superheroes, along with a dense account of how they developed and evolved over time.

Superman 1938

Comic Superhero history starts in May 1938 when Superman made his first appearance in Action Comics #1. In other words, Superman is 80 years old this year, in fact this month!

He was the creation of two schoolfriends from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel (writer) and Joe Shuster (artist). Everything before this date is the pre-history of superhero comics; everything afterwards is the complex unfolding of superhero comic history.

Cultural forebears of superheroes

The prehistory is entertaining because Robb (like many others writing on the subject) feels compelled to give a brisk popular history of the wide-ranging role of ‘the hero’ in myth, legend, history and folklore (the word ‘hero’ is itself of Greek derivation).

Thus a man gifted with magic powers to protect his people can be made to include Moses and Aaron and the Biblical hero Samson. It can include the pantheon of Greek gods and mortal heroes like Heracles, Perseus and Theseus. Robb quotes Joseph Campbell on the importance of ‘the Journey’ in numerous ancient stories about heroes, and references the Epic of Gilgamesh, the Odyssey and the Mahabharata as cultural forebears of Batman and Robin. This is both fun and a little pompous.

Folklore forebears of superheroes

More persuasive is the notion of a lineage from more folklore elements of ‘the hero’ through to the popular fictions of the late 19th century. Robin Hood and Dick Turpin are two prime examples. Robin Hood is not only an epitome of schoolboy morality (stealing from the rich to give to the poor) but he wears an early version of the superhero costume: tights and a distinctive cap, all in bright primary colours (Lincoln green with some red thrown in). Dick Turpin concealed his face behind a neckerchief and a pulled-down hat, and wore a cloak or cape.

Pop culture forebears of superheroes

But in fact, historians have no idea what Robin Hood or Dick Turpin wore. The images I’ve described above derive from movies, and it is Hollywood which is probably the prime factor in the origin of the superhero look.

Superheroes didn’t derive from scholarly study of ancient mythology and folklore: they came out of the extraordinary rich, bubbling swamp of popular and pulp culture of the 1920s. If Jerry and Joe knew about Sherlock Holmes or the Scarlet Pimpernel it wasn’t from reading the books about them (Sherlock had debuted in 1887, the Pimpernel in 1905). It was from paying a few cents to sit in the cheap seats of the local movie house, chomping on popcorn and watching the adventure films of a movie star like Douglas Fairbanks, who starred in a movie about Zorro (created 1919, turned into a movie in 1920), Robin Hood (1922) or the Black Pirate (1926).

In a sense superheroes began in the movies before, in our time, returning to the movies.

Like other historians of the subject, Robb pays special attention to characters with dual identities, a standard feature of most comic book superheroes – the classic example being Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.

(Although if you stop and think about it for a moment, a dual identity is a basic element of almost all detective, spy and crime fiction of the kind that was growing more and more popular at the end of the 19th century and start of the 20th. Many thousands of detective stories take their time working up to the grand ‘reveal’ of the ‘true identity’ of the criminal, of the dope dealer or jewel thief or murderer etc caught by Sherlock Holmes or any one of the hundreds of copycat detectives invented in the 1890s and 1900s. (See my review of The Shadows of Sherlock Holmes a collection of stories about fictional detectives inspired by Holmes.) Spy stories, are by their very nature, about people concealing their true task and intentions.

Anyway, Robb’s book becomes really interesting when it gets to the extraordinarily dense jungle of popular culture which flowered in the 1890s and then just got denser and denser in the decades that followed, proliferating in penny dreadfuls, shilling shockers, pulp magazines, newspaper supplements and then in the new format of moving pictures and related magazines and merchandising.

Robb dwells on two Edwardian doers of good deeds who hid their true identity:

the Scarlet Pimpernel (real name Sir Percy Blakeney) who rescues aristocrats from the guillotine, leaving a calling card with a picture of the pimpernel flower
Zorro, who wears a black face mask and cape, protects the poor of California, and leaves a distinctive ‘Z’ carved into various objects with his stylish swordplay

Just as important for a superhero is the fiendish villain, and these were prefigured by – among many – Holmes’s opponent, the ‘Napoleon of crime’, Professor Moriarty, or the diabolical criminal mastermind Fu Manchu (1913).

British hero fiction included John Buchan’s hero Richard Hannay who debuted in 1915, followed by the more thuggish Bulldog Drummond, who appeared in 1920. Lesley Charteris’s crime-fighting hero, the Saint, first appeared in 1928. Biggles the heroic fighter pilot first appeared in 1932. All these heroes were morally unambiguous fighters against Crime and Fiendish Plots.

In America the spread of radio gave rise to a florid variety of heroic fighters against crime: the Shadow, a masked crime-fighting vigilante (1930), the Spider (1933) and Doc Savage (1933), a kind of ‘peak human’, reared to have perfect abilities, who had a base in mid-town Manhattan and a rich armoury of state-of-the-art gadgets, funded by money from a secret Mayan goldmine, to help him fight crime.

In 1936 the Green Hornet, another crime-fighting, masked vigilante was created specially for radio. Also in 1936 appeared The Phantom, who wore a skin-tight bodysuit and a ‘domino’ eye-mask to fight crime.

Off in another part of the rich jungle of popular and pulp culture which exploded around the time of the Great War, was the more unrestrained world of science fiction and fantasy. Important forebears were John Carter of Mars (1912) and Tarzan (1912), both created by Edgar Rice Burroughs, Philip Francis Nowlan’s hero Buck Rogers (1928) and Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian (1932), soon joined by Alex Raymond’s newspaper strip hero Flash Gordon (1934).

What these numerous figures have in common is that they are modern, pulp versions of ‘the hero’, who always outwit their fiendish opponents after a string of exciting adventures, and that they appear in series or serials: once invented they can appear in almost limitless numbers of adventures (as Conan Doyle, who came to hate his invention, Sherlock Holmes, knew all too well).

By now you might share the feeling I had that the first appearance of Superman in 1938 was maybe not quite the dazzling innovation I thought it was; in fact reading about this proliferation of heroes might make you wonder why it took quite so long to come up with what seems to be the logical conclusion of all these trends.

Robb tells the story of how two teenagers from Cleveland conceived the idea, developed it over many years, were repeatedly rejected by newspapers and comic publishers, and were forced to work on other characters and projects, until finally given their big break in 1938.

I found the two most interesting things about Superman were:

1. His descent not so much from all these detectives and crime fighters, but from the Victorian circus strongman. These popular performers generally wore tights and pants, a figure-hugging suit to highlight their musculature which was strapped in with an impressive belt, and often stylised boots.

A Victorian circus strongman, whose shiny boots, tight pants, utility belt and stylised vest all anticipate the ‘superhero look’

2. Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster sold the exclusive rights to their then-new character, Superman to DC (short for Detective Comics) Publishing for just $130 (split between the two of them). Superman was an instant hit and not only went on to generate hundreds of millions of dollars for the publisher and the film company that eventually bought it, but to inspire an entire genre of superhero fiction across all media.

As they watched this happen Siegel and Shuster continued to work as a comic book writer and illustrator, respectively, but made repeated attempts to sue for a share of the vast revenue generated by their invention. In fact their heirs are still locked in litigation with DC’s parent company, Time Warner, to this day.

The development of the comic strip

Robb gives a brief and fascinating recap of how the comic strip itself evolved. As far back as the record stretches, human beings have always told stories. Bas-relief carvings on Greek and Indian temples capture moments from religious or legendary narratives. (Robb doesn’t mention it but I’d have thought the 12 Stations of the Cross which appear in tens of thousands of Catholic churches are an early example of a story told through snapshots of key moments.) He does mention the use of ‘scroll speech’ in medieval and Renaissance art work, where a scroll unfolds from a figure’s mouth, containing their speech (something I’m familiar with from my readings of the British Civil Wars).

17th century Civil War cartoon with speech scroll

Robb says the next step forward was marked by the popular engravings of the 18th century artist William Hogarth, famous for the series of pictures which depict The Rake’s Progress and A Harlot’s Progress. These popular engravings showed the decline of the eponymous rake and harlot with plenty of humorous detail. They gave rise to similar pictorial sequences by Rodolphe Töpfler later in the century, and by the Victorian artist Gustave Doré, among others. Throughout the 19th century Punch in Britain and similar magazines across the Continent used cartoons, often with speech captions, to convey narratives with punch lines.

Capitalist competition creates comics

But all these sometimes dubious historical antecedents are there simply to pave the way for the real start of popular comic books which, as with most things American, came out of ferocious competition to make money.

Starting in 1887 a newspaper war was waged between Joseph Pulitzer and William Randolph Hearst’s newspaper empires. One among many fronts in this war was the innovation of cartoon strips with catchy titles and populist characters. In 1892 The Little Bears was created by Jimmy Swinnerton for Hearst’s San Francisco Examiner, probably the first cartoon strip anywhere which featured regularly recurring characters.

In 1895 Pulitzer debuted a strip titled The Yellow Kid for his paper The New York World, drawn by Richard Felton Outcault, which pioneered the use of speech text to indicate dialogue. In 1897 the paper added a supplement featuring just Outcault’s strips and expanding it to describe an array of characters from the yellow kid’s neighbourhood – titled McFadden’s Row of Flats – and a new term, ‘comic book’, was invented to describe it.

As a direct response to all this, Hearst’s New York Journal commissioned their own strip, The Katzenjammer Kids, created by Rudolph Dirks. Dirks developed Outcault’s device of speech balloons and invented the ‘thought balloon’, indicated by a series of bubbles leading up to the text balloon itself. The same year saw the first use of colour printing (as the name, The Yellow Kid, indicates).

These kind of narrative cartoons featuring recurring characters proved tremendously popular (nicer, after all, than reading the depressing news) and spread like wildfire to every other newspaper which could find a decent illustrator. By 1912 Hearst was devoting an entire page of the New York Daily Journal to comic strips, a feature which became known as the ‘funny pages’, the ‘funny papers’, or simply ‘the funnies’.

It was quickly realised that the strips which appeared during the week could be repackaged into a bumper weekend supplement. Rather than broadsheet size, it made financial and practical sense to publish them in magazine format, which was easier for readers to handle and read. The comic book was born.

Superhero history

So much for the multi-stranded prehistory of the comic superhero.

The publication of Superman in 1938 transformed the landscape, inventing a whole new genre of superhero. From this point onwards Robb’s book becomes a dense and fascinating account of how numerous newspapers and publishers sought to cash in on the fad by creating their own superheroes. He describes the complicated evolution of the two publishing houses which would eventually become known as Marvel and DC, and reading his book gives you a good sense of the difference between them.

Basically, DC owned Superman (1938) and Batman (1939) who spawned hundreds of imitators but managed to remain ahead of the pack. Through the war years the superheroes performed their patriotic duty with a strong sideline in film noir-style violence against all manner of crime or fantasy baddies.

In the 1950s there was a moral backlash against comics, with a nationwide panic in America that they were one of many influences turning teenagers into ‘juvenile delinquents’. This resulted in 1954 in the establishment of The Comics Code Authority (CCA) which forced comic books to abandon much violence and all references to drugs and sex, tending to replace hard 1940s stories with softer, romance elements.

Marvel began existence in 1939 as ‘Timely Publications’, and by the early 1950s was generally known as Atlas Comics. The Marvel branding began 1961 with a rack of superhero titles created by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko and others. Robb describes the period 1961-62 as a kind of annus mirabilis, during which Lee oversaw the creation of The Fantastic Four and their nemesis Dr Doom (November 1961), Ant-Man (January 1962), the Incredible Hulk (May 1962), Spider-Man (August 1962), the Mighty Thor (August 1962), Iron Man (March 1963), the Avengers (September 1963) and the X-men (1963).

Even if you think comic books are rubbish, this is by any measure still an incredible outpouring of creativity, the creation of characters which would go on to have multi-billion dollar futures in popular culture.

Although other artists and writers were involved, Stan Lee is commonly associated with this outburst of imagination and the key element of it seems to have been his conviction that superheroes must be flawed – realistic characters who often struggle with their own superpowers. Thus Spider-Man is deeply confused about how to use his skills, the X-Men bicker amongst themselves, the Fantastic Four are riven by rivalries, and the Hulk considers committing suicide he is so upset by the scientific accident which has turned him into a monster.

It was this troubled psychology which set them completely apart from DC’s untroubled hero Superman and made them feel more contemporary than their older cousins (although, admittedly, DC’s Batman is a much darker creation).

In a second nod to contemporary concerns, Lee’s Marvel creations were nearly all connected to contemporary paranoia about the atom bomb and atomic energy. It is radioactivity which messes up the DNA of almost all these superheroes, a paranoia about the potentially damaging impact of modern science which remains relevant right down to the present day.

It is this more ‘modern’ way of conceiving superhero psychology, as well as the more modern concerns about science, which possibly account for the relative success of the Marvel characters in the movies, and the rather staid, static quality of the DC movies.

The difference between the Superman era and the Fantastic Four era is recognised by comic book historians who have divided the past eighty years into a series of ‘ages’.

The golden age of comic books was from 1938 to about 1950, when waning interest in superheroes was capped by the baleful influence of the Comics Code Authority.

The silver age of comic books is dated from DC Comics’ new character Flash, introduced in Showcase #4 in October 1956. This led up to the Marvel outburst in the early 1960s which spawned a great sprawling cast not only of heroes but of baddies and enemies. This era also another important Marvel innovation, which was introducing one set of heroes into the adventures or ‘universe’ of another set. As the 1960s progressed, the interactions of heroes from different narratives became not only more complex in itself, but led to the notion of parallel worlds in which the various characters might have different superpowers, fight each other and even die.

The bronze age of comic books runs from about 1970 to 1985. The bright, Pop optimism of the 1960s turned into a nitty-gritty concern with social ‘issues’, such as the environment, feminism, racism and drugs, along with more realistic depictions of alcoholism, addiction, urban decay and so on.

Alongside the two giants of Marvel and DC there arose a new wave of independent comic book publishers who took a whole new approach to the superhero genre. This was crystallised in the epoch-making Watchmen, written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons, which set out to deconstruct the entire mythos of superheroes.

Superheroes in movies

Although Robb doesn’t quite make this point, his book ends where it began, with the movies. Not with the distant antecedents of Gilgamesh or Robin Hood, but with the fact that Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster loved the movies and were influenced by what they saw, by the sight of Douglas Fairbanks swashbuckling his way across the screen and that now, we in our time, queue up to watch the Amazing Spiderman, Thor and Iron Man swing across our multiplex 3D screens.

Poster for Douglas Fairbanks in The Mask of Zorro (1920)

Radio Robb’s last few chapters give a bewilderingly dense account of the way superheroes were adapted to other media beyond comic books. Radio was the first, and it’s interesting to learn that radio developed catchphrases, plot lines and even new characters, which hadn’t existed in the original comics but which the comics then co-opted.

Television From the 1950s various television series portrayed superheroes, probably the most memorable being the camp classic Batman of the 1960s.

Animations Movies were slower to adapt superheroes because of the technical challenges of portraying superhero action. It was easier to do this in animations, so there have been scores of animated TV shows and movies about superheroes.

The Modern Age of Superhero Movies starts with Christopher Reeve’s portrayal of Superman in the film of the same name, directed by Richard Donner in 1978. Although the special effects look creaky to the modern eye, they were a quantum step up from all previous attempts and made superhero film-making a real possibility. Three sequels were released, in 1980, 1983 and 1987.

The next benchmark was the pair of Batman movies directed by Tim Burton and starring Michael Keaton. Robb is great on the showbusiness gossip and behind-the-scenes manoeuvring which accompanied these films, for example the way that Keaton, previously known mainly for light comic roles, was widely opposed by comicbook fans, who mounted a campaign to prevent him taking the role. In the event, Burton’s two Batman movies (Batman, 1989 and Batman Returns 1992) were widely seen as a triumph, and made stacks of money ($411 million and $266 million, respectively).

Robb details the ongoing attempts to stage other superhero movies during the 1980s and 90s, which met with mixed success, and a fair share of dazzling flops. Along with most fans he considers the last two Reeve Superman movies (Superman III, 1983 and Superman IV, 1987) and the Val Kilmer and George Clooney Batmen (Batman Forever, 1995, and Batman and Robin, 1997) to be disasters.

The modern age of superhero movies

The Current Age of Superhero Movies was launched with the X-Men directed by Bryan Singer and released in 2000. With an intelligent script, the steadying presence of two top-class British actors (Patrick Stewart and Ian McKellen) and state-of-the-art, computer-generated graphics, X-Men inaugurated the modern age.

It cost a lot to make, but it:

a) made a fortune ($296 million)
b) spawned a host of sequels (there are now no fewer than 10 films in the X-Men series)
c) and led to a number of successful television spin-off series

The X-Men movies played an important role in creating the superhero cultural, film and TV universe that we now inhabit.

This is a list of the main superhero movies of the last 18 years, excluding various flops and failures, with an indication of their costs and revenues.

2000 X-Men ($296 million gross on $75 million budget)
2002 Spider-Man ($821 million on $139 million)
2003 Daredevil ($179 million on $78 million)
2003 X-Men 2 ($407 million on $125 million)
2004 Fantastic Four ($330 million on $100 million)
2004 Spider-Man 2 ($783 million on $200 million)
2005 Batman Begins ($374 million / $150 million)
2006 Superman Returns ($223 million / $223 million)
2006 X-Men: The Last Stand ($459 million / $210 million)
2007 Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer ($290 million / $130 million)
2007 Spider-Man 3 ($890 million / $258 million)
2008 Batman: The Dark Knight ($1 BILLION / $185 million)
2008 Iron Man 1 ($585 million / $140 million)
2008 The Incredible Hulk ($263 million / $150 million)
2009 Watchmen ($185 million / $138 million)
2009 X-Men Origins: Wolverine ($373 million / $150 million)
2010 Iron Man 2 ($624 million / $200 million)

2011 Thor ($449 million / $150 million)
2011 X-Men: First Class ($353 million / $160 million)
2011 Captain America: The First Avenger ($370 million / $140 million)
2012 The Amazing Spider-Man ($757 million / $230 million)
2012 Batman: The Dark Knight Rises ($1.08 BILLION / $300 million)
2012 Marvel’s The Avengers ($1.5 BILLION / $220 million)
2013 Iron Man 3 ($1.2 BILLION / $200 million)
2013 Man of Steel ($668 million / $225 million)
2013 Thor: The Dark World ($645 million / $170 million)
2013 The Wolverine ($414 million / $120 million)
2014 The Amazing Spider-Man 2 ($709 million / $293 million)
2014 Captain America: The Winter Soldier ($714 million / $177 million)
2014 Guardians of the Galaxy ($773 million / $232 million)
2014 X-Men: Days of Future Past ($747 million / £205 million)
2015 Ant-Man ($519 million / $142 million)
2015 Avengers: Age of Ultron ($1.4 BILLION / $444 million)
2015 Fantastic Four ($168 million / $155 million)
2016 Captain America: Civil War ($1.15 BILLION / $250 million)
2016 Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice ($874 million / $300 million)
2016 Deadpool ($783 million / $58 million)
2016 Doctor Strange ($678 milllion / $165 million)
2016 X-Men: Apocalypse ($544 million / $178 million)
2017 Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2 ($864 million / $200 million)
2017 Superman: Justice League ($658 million / $300 million)
2017 Spider-Man: Homecoming ($880 million / $175 million)
2017 Thor: Ragnarok ($854 million / $180 million)
2017 Logan ($619 million / $127 million)
2018 Ant-Man and the Wasp
2018 Avengers: Infinity War
2018 Black Panther ($1.334 BILLION / $210 million)
2018 Deadpool 2

Quite a few, aren’t there?

The first superhero movie to gross over a billion dollars was Christopher Nolan’s Batman: The Dark Knight, and six other superhero movies have grossed over a billion since then.

The X-Men movies between them have generated $5 billion.

In 2010 Marvel produced the first in a carefully planned sequence of movies designed to maximise revenue from their stable of characters, and which has become known as the Marvel Cinematic Universe or MCU. This is divided into ‘phases’ of six movies each, the first five of each phase devoted to individual Marvel heroes, the sixth bringing the previous five altogether into a grand finale which ties together plotlines from the previous movies.

As I write we are approaching the end of Phase Three, which has just seen the phenomenal success of Black Panther (phase 3, movie 5) which grossed over $1.3 billion, and paved the way for the sixth in this phase, Avengers: Infinity War which has just opened in the States to the usual mass marketing and hype.

Summary

Despite having no illustrations at all, Robb’s book is an eminently readable and very enjoyable overview of the entire history of the superhero comic book phenomenon, which puts it in the context of expanding popular culture, twentieth century history, and the evolving media of radio, TV and film – all told in a light, accessible prose style with a sure sense of the interesting anecdote and fascinating fact.

Great fun, and a very useful introduction to a cultural phenomenon which is bigger than ever, and set to dominate our movie and TV screens for the foreseeable future.