Maybe something by Thomas Sowell?
I don’t think so but Sowell touches on many of the same thoughts in his book, “Race, Culture and Equality” as quoted below:
“A network of rivers in Western Europe flow gently through vast plains, connecting wide areas economically and culturally. The rivers of tropical Africa plunge a thousand feet or more on their way to the sea, with cascades and waterfalls making them navigable only for stretches between these natural barriers--and the coastal plain in Africa averages just 20 miles. Regular rainfall and melting snows keep the rivers of Western Europe flowing throughout the year but African rivers have neither--and so rise and fall dramatically with the seasons, further limiting their usefulness. The two continents are at least as dramatically different when it comes to natural harbors. Although Africa is more than twice the size of Europe, it has a shorter coastline. That is because the European coastline continually twists and turns, creating innumerable harbors, while the African coastline is smooth, with few harbors. How surprising is it that international commerce has played a much smaller role in the economic history of Africa than in that of Europe in general and Western Europe in particular?
Nothing so intractably conflicts with our desires for equality as geography. Yet the physical settings in which races, nations, and civilizations have evolved have had major impacts on the cultures developed within those settings. At its simplest and crudest, the peoples of the Himalayas have not had an equal opportunity to acquire seafaring skills. Nor have Eskimos had an equal opportunity to acquire knowledge and experience in growing pineapples or other tropical crops.
Too often the influence of geography on wealth is thought of narrowly, in terms of natural resources that directly translate into wealth, such as oil in the Middle East or gold in South Africa. But, important as such differences in natural wealth are, geography influences even more profound cultural differences among the people themselves.
Where geography isolates people, whether in mountain valleys or on small islands scattered across a vast sea, there the cultural exposures of those people to the outside world are very limited and so, typically, is their technological advancement. While the rest of the world exchanges goods, knowledge, and innovations from a vast cultural universe, isolated peoples have been largely limited to what they alone have been able to develop.
Few, if any, of the great advances in human civilization have come from isolated peoples. As the eminent French historian Fernand Braudel put it, the mountains almost always lag behind the plains--even if the races in the two places are the same. Potatoes and the English language both reached the Scottish lowlands before they reached the highlands. Islam reached North Africa's Rif mountains long after the people in the plains had become Moslems.
Geographically imposed cultural isolation takes many forms and exists in many degrees. Cities have long been in the vanguard of human progress, all over the world, but cities do not arise randomly in all geographic settings. Most of the great cities of the world have developed on navigable waterways--rivers or harbors--but such waterways are by no means equally or randomly distributed around the world. They are very common in Western Europe and very rare in sub-Saharan Africa. Urbanization has long been correspondingly common in Western Europe and correspondingly rare in sub-Saharan Africa. One-third of the land mass of Europe consists of islands and peninsulas but only one percent of the land mass of South America consists of islands and peninsulas.
Navigable waterways have been economically crucial, especially during the millennia of human history before the development of railroads, trucks, and airplanes. Before the transcontinental railroad was built, it was both faster and cheaper to reach San Francisco from a port in China than from Saint Louis. People in the city of Tbilisi bought their kerosene from Texas--8,000 miles away across water--rather than from the Baku oil fields, less than 400 miles away across land.
Such vast differences in costs between water transport and land transport affect what can be transported and how far. Gold or diamonds can repay the costs of transport across thousands of miles of land, but grain or coal cannot. More important, the size of a people's cultural universe depends on how far they can reach out to other peoples and other cultures. No great civilization has developed in isolation. Geography in general and navigable waterways in particular set the limits of a people's cultural universe, broadly or narrowly. But these limits are by no means set equally for all peoples or all civilization.
For example, when the British first crossed the Atlantic and confronted the Iroquois on the eastern seaboard of what is today the United States, they were able to steer across that ocean in the first place because they used rudders invented in China, they could navigate on the open seas with the help of trigonometry invented in Egypt, their calculations were done with numbers invented in India, and their general knowledge was preserved in letters invented by the Romans. But the Iroquois could not draw upon the knowledge of the Aztecs or the Incas, whose very existence they had no way of knowing. The clash was not between the culture created by the British versus the culture created by the Iroquois. It was a clash between cultural developments drawn from vast regions of the world versus cultural developments from a much more circumscribed area. The cultural opportunities were unequal and the outcomes were unequal. Geography has never been egalitarian.
A network of rivers in Western Europe flow gently through vast plains, connecting wide areas economically and culturally. The rivers of tropical Africa plunge a thousand feet or more on their way to the sea, with cascades and waterfalls making them navigable only for stretches between these natural barriers--and the coastal plain in Africa averages just 20 miles. Regular rainfall and melting snows keep the rivers of Western Europe flowing throughout the year but African rivers have neither--and so rise and fall dramatically with the seasons, further limiting their usefulness. The two continents are at least as dramatically different when it comes to natural harbors. Although Africa is more than twice the size of Europe, it has a shorter coastline. That is because the European coastline continually twists and turns, creating innumerable harbors, while the African coastline is smooth, with few harbors. How surprising is it that international commerce has played a much smaller role in the economic history of Africa than in that of Europe in general and Western Europe in particular?
These particular geographic disparities are by no means exhaustive. But they are suggestive of some of the many ways in which physical settings have expanded or constricted the size of the cultural universe available to different peoples. One revealing indication of cultural fragmentation is that African peoples are 10 percent of the world's population but have one-third of the world's languages.”
