It makes sense that such theories like the continental axis hypothesis may turn out to play some role, but not be a single cause-and-effect. Earth is a pretty complex system, after all.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/wiki/historians_views...

Diamond, unlike Foucault, is damn near airport departure lounge fodder; historians and sociologists generally encounter general members of the public who are uncritically fans of Diamond and near venerate the GG&S book for radically changing their world view, etc.

It's that association that grates after a while .. it can be as relentless as those who approach mathematicians with their novel proofs for squaring a circle.

To apply that to Foucault and and Diamond, Foucault explored complex ideas obtusely and Diamond explores dumb ideas simply.

Sure, the academy has a bias towards complexity. It is slightly self-justifying. But let's not be black and white thinkers and assume that the opposite is true, and that airport reading by somebody with no historical credentials must be some secret truth the academy doesn't want you to now. It might just be popular bunk.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foucault%27s_Pendulum

If you believe that critiquing the prison-industrial complex is fashionable non-sense, then I think I know where you lie politically.

We should probably just go back to Rhene Thom and Morphogenesis, except that even that theory has lost face. A hundred years of denying the importance of Hegel's Logic has led to a significant loss in the progress of human civilization.

I haven't read Diamond, but I could understand, if you're a liberal academic and you see a text, almost like Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals, that just says that the strong always conquer the weak because of totally contingent conditions, it will seem horrifying because, as a liberal, you genuinely believe in personal agency and social justice and all that fun stuff. But go back and actually read Marx, go and read all your favorite Frankfurt school thinkers: they will say, the conditions that we have been placed in are a real illusion of nature: even if the so-called nature of things is a construction, it is one where the reality of it is undeniable for us. Therefore, the goal of critique, even in that Marxian, Kantian sense, is to raise consciousness to shatter that real illusion precisely by illuminating this so-called "natural" process.

For Marx, revolution is a natural result of the development of Capitalism, but Capitalism also dissolved history, and temporality, so the naturality of revolution must be immanent in every moment of its development: its like Walter Benjamin said, we must bring about a real catastrophe, as opposed to the constant "accidents" of human suffering under the system that come about with almost mechanical regularity.

In any case, I don't remember Marx ever being either an academic, or particularly hard to read in most cases, even if a thorough familiarity with German Idealism is a great help to understanding him more deeply. Even Foucault was technically an academic, but only because he helped organize a nearly successful revolutionary movement that managed to extract the concession of an entire university (Paris VIII) out of the government which he then ran, and is still being run by his students and colleagues to this day.

In general, if you want an actual "start" to studying any modern philosophy, you've got to go with Kant's Critique of Pure Reason (go with the NK Smith or Guyer-Woods translations, though I prefer the former). Then you can start reading forward, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, then, of course, Marx's Capital, vol 1. Then from there, I think you would do well to read Nietzsche's Geneaology of Morals and/or Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and after that really you should read Freud, at the very least the Interpretation of Dreams, and Heidegger, either the Origin of the Work of Art or The Question Concerning Technology. And from there, you can basically just read whatever you want and you'll understand it.

My only further advice is to study all those texts first, before trying anything else, otherwise you'll end up like the people in this comments section.

[0]https://www.sfu.ca/~andrewf/CONCEPT2.html [1]https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/benjamin.pdf

On the first point in particular: there's a general thesis of anthropology which is properly termed unilineal model (and in more colloquial terms, Civilization-style tech tree), which views civilizations as existing on a spectrum from less to more advanced. In essence, GG&S reduces the question of "why did Europe conquer the New World and not the other way around" as "because Europe was more advanced" (and then go on to try to explore why Europe was more advanced), but never trying that hard to justify why "was more advanced" was the answer to the first question. By contrast, the consensus view of modern anthropology is that technological development is heavily adapted to the context of its culture, so that (for example) the Incans don't develop carts because carts are useless in their mountainous environment.

Once you go beyond the idea that "more advanced" is a qualitatively useful metric of comparison and actually start demanding to see the causal links in how specific technologies are necessary to achieve the claimed outcomes, it starts to become clear just how badly Diamond whiffs it. Literacy is a fun example: Diamond has to work around the fact that the conquistadors were largely illiterate, and they were facing bureaucratic, administrative imperial states that ran on record keeping, requiring at least proto-writing [1]; really, how different were the two empires in terms of literacy? Another fun example I like to bring up is comparing Tenochtitlan (the Aztec capital) to Toledo (the Spanish one). Tenochtitlan had over 100,000 inhabitants, universal primary education (for both boys and girls, even!), running water, and public amenities like zoos and history museums; the Spaniards had... none of that.

[1] And there's a case to be made that Incan quipu were an honest-to-god writing system.

If technological development is "heavily adapted to the context of its culture", and that context is mostly geography ("mountainous environments") then isn't Diamond right?

Seems like the alternative is, "That's just the way it turned out," which is not very satisfying.

And I'm pretty sure that's just the way it turned out.

They went at least as far as the Roman Empire and Africa.

https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-...

> The difference between the experiences of Europe and China were economic and cultural rather than technological. As the voyages of Cheng Ho demonstrate, the Chinese certainly possessed the maritime technology and expertise to undertake long voyages of discovery.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages

> In 1435, when the Xuande Emperor died, the civil officials started to gain power as the new emperor, the Zhengtong Emperor, was only eight years old when he ascended the throne and could be influenced.[186] They seized this opportunity to permanently dismantle the voyages.

By his telling, Chinese bureaucrats buried the knowledge of large fleets because it was a more expensive way to project power than simply going over land.

To give up counterfactuals is to surrender causality and to truly make the past "one damn thing after another," i.e. chronicle rather than history. The historical profession as we know it is all about making arguments, not merely cataloging events, so it would cease to exist without counterfactuals.

This chapter is preceded, though, by 800 pages of detailed history. You have to earn your big conclusions. And the bigger your conclusion is (say, here is why/how Europe colonized the world) you'd better have a lot of evidence.

Sure, but I feel many academic historians have a bit of a double standard here. Did Foucault muster up mounds of evidence for his totalizing theories of power and social structure? Not really, he gestured at a few facts and then built an elaborate structure of theory on that very wobbly foundation. Yet he continues to be taken seriously in academia, whereas Diamond never has been.

I think that's partly because he was a "serious thinker" and Diamond is an "airport read," and also partly because theories like Focuault's are so flexible that it becomes a fun hammer you can apply to any nail ("social media is a panopticon!"), whereas Diamond's argument is specific to a particular historical arc, and partly because Foucault accords with the prejudices of the academy (there are hidden structures of power woven throughout society that oppress the weak) and Diamond doesn't (X determinism is bad, everything is "contingent.").

Plenty of academics hate Foucault. Ask an analytic philosopher what they think of him. And yet, those people still get to be part of the academy. Are some people shut out unfairly? Sure. Are many people shut out fairly because they aren't interested in rigor, they are only interested in exposure? Well, ok, academia has a lot of those. But at least it doesn't have Jared Diamond.

That seems like a weird (pointless?) thing to say when a lot of what we know about the conquest comes from letters Cortez constantly sent to Charles V to inform him on his progress. Yes, some Conquistadors were illiterate, so what?

> how different were the two empires in terms of literacy?

Massively. Usage on of writing for bookkeeping specifically (though pretty much everything else as well) in Europe by 1500 was on a whole other level. It’s not even comparable. Are you really saying there was hardly any difference between quipu/etc. and double entry bookkeeping? Based on what we know bureaucratically/administratively European states were much more complex at the time than the Aztec empire (which was more like a hegemonic confederation, possibly because they did not have the administrative capacity to administer the areas they subjugated directly).

> Tenochtitlan had over 100,000 inhabitants, universal primary education (for both boys and girls, even!), running water, and public amenities like zoos and history museums;

Rome and Constantinople had most of those things too. Doesn’t mean that Spain ~1500 AD wasn’t more advanced technologically than Rome in ~100 AD in almost every way. Also what are your sources on on universal education? And I don’t really think that most houses had direct access to running water (and many Medieval cities, albeit usually on a much smaller scale had functioning water distribution systems*, e.g Barcelona still had a functioning systems from the Roman period).

Bronze and pre-Bronze ages civilizations in the old world also had very complex societies, large cities (and from what we can tell) more advanced writing systems. The most advanced American civilizations were overall about on the same (or slightly below) level technologically. So yeah in that sense they were about 3000-4000 years behind the Spanish and other Europeans.

* https://fakehistoryhunter.net/2023/07/29/list-of-medieval-to...

Which I guess is reasonable, if you’re a real historian deeply specialized in a specific field seeing someone gloss over or outright ignore very important details and/or new findings/theories might be hard to stomach.

Do economists hate Freakonomics? I know some who liked it. I think the objection is not to popular content but to misleading popular content.

Do they? Still? Color me skeptical.

This FAQ is mostly ideologically-driven and, at the very least, willfully misinterprets what Diamond says in his books in a way that I think is impossible to explain by accidental misreading or even misunderstanding; only by intentional misinterpretation driven by an agenda. I've read Diamond, then many years later this FAQ, then the above response; then cross-referenced all 3 to see who's lying.

I used to say all modern humanities are worthless garbage, except history. After that exercise, assuming AskHistorians crowd is representative, I'm not so sure about history...

https://correlatesofwar.org/ https://www.jessicamaves.com/forge.html https://www.csac.org.uk/dataset/ etc

You cannot, in practice, establish empirical adequacy of such models. (Making, imv, much of social "science" better regarded as semi-empirical speculation).

> The Weirdest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous

https://www.amazon.com/triumph-West-J-M-Roberts/dp/076070850...

It's been a long time since I read it, but as I recall the theses were that individual rights and freedoms coupled with things like the scientific method is what resulted in triumph.

I think the most relevant book on the west’s success is called complexity: a guided tour

Also by preventing proper analysis, one prevents the discovery of cultural defects and repairs, preventing liberating change and effectively kicking away the ladder of progress, a deeply colonial act.

It's definitely "sitcom science", especially compared with Guns, Germs, and Steel (I've read both). I found it engaging (check!), and appreciated the earlier chapters that literally start by describing that single-celled organisms + billions of years == some other new form of life (way larger scale? check!)

The comforting nihilistic internal response to that book was "doesn't matter if we nuclear war or death by solar flare, or whatever... a billion trillion years from now, it's intimately necessary that something would go from single-cell organism to multi-cell organism".

Time marches on, even if we do not.

Alternatively, I was just too young to realise and appreciate that. It's been a while since I read it.

In that regard, it's like a precursor to GG&S which is "smarts + politics forward" vs a lighthearted approach to "which multi-cell organism has the right conditions to evolve limbs" (and presumably intelligence).

...or just chill out and accept that a world full of mushroom and fungus is just as intelligent and terraforming as humans can be.

Simply saying that Africa didn't have domesticable animals isn't good enough because, certainly, they could have imported them along with other technology from Europe.

The continental axis hypothesis is his answer to this. He says crops (and later animals) could be more easily moved east to west rather than north to south because the climate will change less. In his mind, this explains why Africans didn't adopt European advancements in agriculture and animal domestication.

You don't need a study to debunk this theory within the context of Diamond's overall hypnosis; you need a globe and some measuring tape. Africa's east-west axis (4600m) is only 8% smaller than its north-south axis (5000m), which in turn is almost identical to Eur-Asia's (4,900m). The only time this isn't true is on a distorted map like the Mercator projection he uses in the book.

Sub-Saharan Africa is not some wasteland that couldn't support these animals and crops. And this is obvious when you consider that colonial empires brought their crops to Africa without the need to fundamentally change them for the climate. Colonial holdings in Africa often produced a good chunk of the grain for their empires as a whole.

Axis theories aside, Diamond is just factually wrong about the origins and timelines of domestication. Many of the crops and animals that supposedly helped Europe dominate the world were widely present in Africa centuries before European invasions.

Romans explored into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1st century BC; Turks and Arabs had established trade routes deep into Africa by the 6th century AD; the Indian Ocean, including the coast of Africa was continually interconnected through trade going back to the bronze age at least, and trade caravans across the Sahara have been recorded in ancient Egyptian records.

This is covered well in Diamond in the Rough: Reflections on Guns, Germs, and Steel https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707701

You could fill a book disproving his theories, but I'll point out one last thing: trying to explain European conquest through the lens of continents is super weird. Africa, let alone any other 'continent,' is a vast and diverse place. The idea of continents in and of itself makes less and less sense the more we learn about geography. You could as reasonably draw continental boundaries in dozens of other ways that would make more sense than the ones Diamond presents in his books.

There are boats (in Denmark no less) that are 10000 years old. Drawing of trade boats in Egypt are 6000 years old. I'd be surprised if travel and trade by boat wasn't common at the earliest stages of agricultural civilization.

> Colonial holdings in Africa often produced a good chunk of the grain for their empires as a whole.

Only Egypt, nowhere else.

> Africa, which was in constant contact with Europe

does the parent believe this was the case for Sub-Saharan Africa, BC?

from the parent:

>Romans explored into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1st century BC; Turks and Arabs >had established trade routes deep into Africa by the 6th century AD; the Indian >Ocean, including the coast of Africa was continually interconnected through >trade going back to the bronze age at least, and trade caravans across the >Sahara have been recorded in ancient Egyptian records.

>This is covered well in Diamond in the Rough: Reflections on Guns, Germs, and >Steel https://www.jstor.org/stable/24707701

Unless my search is broken, I found no mention of Romans, Turks, or Arabs in the article the parent referenced. Also the initial contact dates the parent mentions seem to be too late for the argument being made.

from the parent:

>You could fill a book disproving his theories,

How about we start with a comment doing the same first? Let's try to strive for a little modesty, um, CSMastermind.

In Africa there were all sorts of parasites and microbes that played havoc with attempts to grow European animals outside these lucky spots.

The Americas were too isolated and recent; Africa was too connected and old.

Surely Eurasia is around twice than that? You don't need a distorted map to see that the distance between Portugal and Japan is far greater than the distance between Senegal and Somalia.

Africa and Eur-Asia measure almost identically North to South

And there's not much room for useful exchange of crops or livestock between Indians engaged in tropical farming and Sami engaged in reindeer pastoralism on the tundra.

Sort of, but it wasn’t exactly direct and straightforward, the Sahara was close to impassable and following the Atlantic coast was infeasible until the ~1500. And there were pretty complex civilizations in Ethiopia, Mali etc. in later periods when trade/travel become more feasible.

You also have the climate in sub-Saharan Africa which is generally not very hospitable and there are far enough to the South didn’t really have much contact with Eurasia at all.

> Romans explored into Sub-Saharan Africa in the 1st century BC; Turks and Arabs had established trade routes deep into Africa by the 6th century AD; the Indian Ocean, including the coast of Africa was continually interconnected through trade going back to the bronze age at least, and trade caravans across the Sahara have been recorded in ancient Egyptian records.

I confused. I assumed that you were talking about much earlier periods, are you saying that there weren’t complex civilizations in sub-Saharan Africa during those times? And yes while the Romans could get past the Sahara (like the Carthaginians allegedly were able to reach the Souther hemisphere or even sail around Africa) it was hard, expensive and rarely worth the effort so there was very little direct contact.

> You don't need a study to debunk this theory within the context of Diamond's overall hypnosis; you need a globe and some measuring tape. Africa's east-west axis (4600m) is only 8% smaller than its north-south axis (5000m), which in turn is almost identical to Eur-Asia's (4,900m). The only time this isn't true is on a distorted map like the Mercator projection he uses in the book.

Why is that a refutation? Diamond says that Eurasia's east-west axis is much longer than Africa's east-west axis. You're responding that Africa's east-west axis is almost as long as Africa's north-south axis. So what?

(Your following paragraphs make sense as refutations of Diamond, but I don't see how that one does.)

I hear this myth quite often, but apart from it not being a good hypothesis, it simply isn’t true, like at all.

But all that is to the side, that I really really hate the question of European domination. I honestly wished the people would stop asking that question, and instead focus on the damage and horrors Europe inflicted on the world with their colonial mania.

And to be clear, if you refuse to even contemplate questions like these, you just cede ground to people who will gleefully answer them for you with answers such as "because they are white, duh".

(To be clear, I don't hold high opinion of Diamond's work, either.)

> The fact that Europeans curb-stomped every other civilization on the globe

This is not a historical fact. And supposing it to be true is a prototypical example of euro-centrism. Yes Europe did engage in a brutal colonial campaign, causing horrors on a scale previously unheard of. But so did the Mongol empire, the Japanese imperial army, the Huns, Alexander the Great, etc.

Yes Europe colonized on a larger scale then before (but did so over a longer time period), but they didn’t colonize the entire world. There were other colonial ambitions which coexisted with Europe’s. For example, the Imperial Japan even won colonial wars against a European power, with colonial holdings (and border disputes) persisting to this day.

The question of how Europe did this, attributes something unique to Europe, and ignores the times when non-european powers were equally criminal. And you can see how this line of argument starts to break down by reading other posts in this thread. When you try to find what this is that makes Europe unique (Diamond argues environmental conditions) it most likely turns out either not be unique or otherwise completely irrelevant.

Euro-centrism has fallen out of favor among historians. We don’t study history anymore by presupposing there is something special about Europe.

All those other examples that you have listed are precisely why the question arises in the first place. E.g. Mongol Empire was a comparable project in intent, and wildly successful at the time (I hail from one of the places that were colonized by it). It also predated the European project. So, why aren't we living in a Mongol-dominated world today? Why did I have to learn English and not Mongol as my second language? Why did I have to emigrate to US and not to Mongolia to get paid more?

You seem to be responding from the assumption that I'm trying to push some kind of "white Europeans are superior" agenda, but this perspective is fundamentally wrong starting with the basic premise that the ability to dominate other cultures is a mark of superiority. I don't believe that it is; quite the opposite. But that doesn't negate the question of why Europeans are so much more successful at dominating than any of their competitors.

I’m sorry that I did that. That wasn’t my intention.

I actually hail from a country which was colonized by a European country for centuries (albeit a fellow European country) but the cultural dominance of the Americans and the British (who didn’t colonize the country; but did occupy it for a brief period) are much greater than that of the the colonizers (they still make us learn Danish is school though).

So, yeah, I guess I see your point there.

I’m actually not gonna raise a counterpoint here, because I haven’t read the book and whatever I say is doomed to be misinformed. I still believe his work and the question is euro-centric though (and many critics seem to agree with me on that).

There were horses, at least, not tremendously different morphologically from Asian species, but which (most likely) had not inherited an instinctual fear of humans.

My point is, I guess, it’s hard to know and counterfactuals with hypothetical species are probably not definitive.

- Africa, Australia: continuous habitation; no suitable creatures.

- Europe, Asia: continuous habitation; suitable creatures.

- South America: recent habitation; no suitable creatures (discounting cameloids).

- North America: recent habitation; ???.

It's a tantalizing, permanent un-known that just invites speculation! Nothing wrong with indulging imagination a bit, so long as we recognize that's what we're doing.

So I think we're now getting back to the point. The idea that this all had a meaningful, let alone critical, impact on the overall evolution and competence of civilizations just seems quite irrational without some sort of major missing link that nobody seems to be able to provide.

FWIW I don't know if I buy this particular argument from Diamond myself in a sense that all those animals aren't possible to domesticate in principle. What is undeniable, though, is that horses and oxen are very efficient as beasts of burden. Which means that a single farmer can produce more surplus food to feed people doing other things (like say going to foreign lands to conquer them). And militarily, horses give you cavalry, of course, but perhaps even more importantly, they make military logistics that much more effective - and for pre-modern armies the logistics is often what defines their limits.

And food, in general, is not particularly difficult to produce at scale. During the voyage his crew would have eaten nothing more than what the Aztecs would have had available - salted meats, dried carbs, and light alcohol. His primary advantage came from technology - metal working, gunpowder, weapons development, and so on. And all of these technologies were fully available to everybody in most of every part of the world, yet they failed to discover them. And that's ultimately what decided the winners and the losers in history.

So it seems to me that his argument must be boil down to horses causally lead to gunpowder and metal works. And one can try to argue such, but it's quite clearly contradicted not only by the obviously rather tenuous logic there, but also by the endless examples of civilizations which had one yet not the other, in both directions.

With respect to food in general, it's not that it's difficult to produce at scale. But your ability to produce food is inherently limited by three factors - the land, the people to work that land, and the tech those people use. Now, pretty much any agricultural society can produce enough food to feed all the people who produce the food (and all other basic necessities besides). Everything past that point is surplus, which can then be spend to feed people who are not producing food. Which is first and foremost the rulers and the priests - and thus you start getting social stratification - but then also artisans (who make tools) and soldiers (who go and conquer more land to farm and subjugate more people to farm it). And, at some point, a portion of those elites - who have enough calories and enough leisure time to waste on "frivolous" activities not having to do with immediate survival - uses that time to do research that eventually translates to better tools. Furthermore, if their society is in a constant state of war with neighbors - as was the case in Europe for most of its history - those tools are likely to be better weapons specifically.

Horses are clearly not the single definitive factor here, but I don't see why it couldn't be a significant one. This whole setup I just described is clearly a positive feedback loop, so even relatively minor factors introduced early can compound massively over time. And if horses meant that a single European farmer could produce, say, as much food as two Incan farmers, that's a lot more resources that can be spent on waging war and on figuring out how to do it more efficiently.

I should note that the above is not a rehash of Diamond, but rather my own thoughts on this matter. Speaking for myself, I think that it's really the non-stop warfare in Europe, where no single entity managed to unify the entire continent and make it stick for long enough, that was the defining factor in pushing Europe ahead in military science specifically (and other things more or less incidental to that). And then its relatively small size meant that much of this aggressive potential was directed outside of the continent - as military tech progresses, wars of conquest against peer-level neighboring states become less and less lucrative, because you have to spend considerably more resources to conquer the same amount of land and population. Much easier to take all that tech you already have and go curb-stomp some civilization that doesn't have it yet.

I also have to add that many of the advances we're talking about are not things that require any sort of special preconditions. I can setup a furnace capable of creating and forming steel in my backyard out of clay, straw, wood, and perhaps some leather if I really want to go all out and add a billows. Similarly I can even make gunpowder in my backyard - straw, wood/charcoal, sulfur, urine, and you're good to go! One curious and experimental individual is all it takes to reshape a people.

At least if they're willing to be reshaped. There's a lot of weird things in history. For instance the Zulu were a warlike people, yet their traditional shield was made of cowhide! And it was "real" - not just ceremonial/ornamental. Obviously they were aware of the possibility of making one out of thin wood, which might be a bit heavier yet orders of magnitude more protective - yet they chose not to. Similarly they preferred to fight near naked, as opposed to wearing cowhides - which again, I think it goes without saying they were aware of the possibility of.

Even simple things like fortifications seem to largely have not been a thing in much of the world in spite of never-ending wars. Simple wooden defenses, moats, etc are utterly trivial to construct, and that sets you almost immediately down the technological path towards the massive spiraling castles that would end up dotting the European landscape. But most of these other cultures simply failed to create such things.

----

EDIT: You know, thinking about this some more - I can even see this weirdness in our own cultures today. For instance everybody knows that fertility rates are plummeting to the point that most Western societies stand a large risk of simply dying off. Yet most people simply shrug. It may be that the first 'grand reshaping' of Earth was technology, but the second may simply be fertility. And an anthropologist looking back find himself struggling to answer why it was that people simply didn't adapt when the answer was right in front of them. And living through this, perhaps there is no answer - certainly no neat and tidy one.

[1] - https://sci-hub.se/https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-01... (short and highly readable)

They don't actually have to. The reason why that is the case is because agricultural societies very quickly stratify - which happens because it is very profitable to be on the top in such society, since there's so much more surplus wealth produced by people under you that you can forcibly take away. Hunter-gatherer societies only see that at the richest end of their scale (again, the Salish were a good example of that), and even then the stratification is fairly meager by agriculturalist standards.

And so the farmers end up working more, because forcing them to work more means more surplus to take from them. But without that - i.e. if the farmer only has to feed themselves and their family - they do in fact have more leisure time than a hunter-gatherer would, simply because it takes less time to farm the same amount of calories.

> I also have to add that many of the advances we're talking about are not things that require any sort of special preconditions. I can setup a furnace capable of creating and forming steel in my backyard out of clay, straw, wood, and perhaps some leather if I really want to go all out and add a billows. Similarly I can even make gunpowder in my backyard - straw, wood/charcoal, sulfur, urine, and you're good to go!

If you already know how (and why) to make either, absolutely. But technological development itself is highly path-dependent. A person who is not familiar with the concept of smelting is not going to set up a furnace with billows out of the blue, because, well, why would they bother doing something as complicated as that with no good reason?

> For instance the Zulu were a warlike people, yet their traditional shield was made of cowhide! And it was "real" - not just ceremonial/ornamental. Obviously they were aware of the possibility of making one out of thin wood, which might be a bit heavier yet orders of magnitude more protective - yet they chose not to. Similarly they preferred to fight near naked, as opposed to wearing cowhides - which again, I think it goes without saying they were aware of the possibility of.

Yes, and many Polynesians similarly eschewed the bow for warfare despite knowing of them and even using them for sports.

But this seems to be an unstable arrangement that is easily upset. For example, Maori were also in the same boat wrt bows. But after Europeans came to New Zealand and Maori chiefs saw just how powerful guns are, a few decided that, whatever the custom is, they need to acquire some for themselves. And so they did, leading to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Musket_Wars, in which many traditionalist iwi were nearly wiped out, and most of them also adopted firearms out of necessity. And note that this wasn't the case of Europeans pushing the guns onto the natives - no, Hongi Hika actually organized a mission to UK to see for himself how those warlike British people live, and to obtain the same arms (he exchanged the gifts received in UK for muskets and gunpowder in Australia on his way back).

And those who refuse to change - or change in the way that makes them intentionally less competitive in warfare - end up like the Moriori...

> Even simple things like fortifications seem to largely have not been a thing in much of the world in spite of never-ending wars. Simple wooden defenses, moats, etc are utterly trivial to construct, and that sets you almost immediately down the technological path towards the massive spiraling castles that would end up dotting the European landscape. But most of these other cultures simply failed to create such things.

Did they, though? Looking at Maori again, during their earlier, more peaceful period (when their population size was small enough that living off the land could easily sustain everyone with no need to fight for resources), they didn't have fortifications. But once that was no longer the case and their culture became dominated by war, their villages very quickly turned into fortified pā.

---

On the invention aspect, it seems that metal working is a pretty logical and natural path for an experimental mind. Like when you were a child and first got to play with firecrackers, didn't you do all the typical things? Place one in a bottle and see what happens. Place one under a bucket and see what happens. Bury one and see what happens. And so on. Similarly when playing with fire.

And when people early people were experimenting with fire they no doubt realized that fire has an ability to do very different things, at different heats, to different substances. Heat wood and make charcoal, heat food and its flavor and texture changes, heat dried grass or straw and it's effectively disintegrated. Heat metals and...? All you need to imagine is that perhaps you might need a hotter fire, which is far from difficult when many metals start to change color and consistency even at relatively low heats. And the knowledge that fires fed 'air' grow hotter is something that is also trivial to discover. Things like billows and ever more sophisticated setups follow relatively naturally.

Jared Diamond's argument is that for an animal to be domesticated it needs to have a very specific collection of traits—tameability and ability to breed in captivity being two important ones—and that there weren't any sufficiently good candidates for domestication in the Americas, Africa, or Australia (besides the llama in South America, which they did domesticate).

With which part of this argument do you disagree? What candidates would you propose for domestication in non-Eurasian continents?

There are also large wild populations.

And it does seem rather obvious on its face that animals exhibiting certain kinds of social behavior, for example, would more readily adapt to a symbiotic relationship with humans than others.

Also, North America had buffalo. I fail to see anything inherent in the North American buffalo which would prevent it from being bred to plow a field the same way that the Water Buffalo in Asia was bred.

Most likely the agricultural practices and warfare was different in the Americas which never drove the people living there to breed their animals for the same trades as in Europe and Asia.

So it would probably help if somebody compellingly laid out his hypothesis, at least as it relates to animals, while making some reasonable effort to account for the countless self evident arguments against it.

But I have a deeper problem with Diamond’s book, and the main reason I will probably never read this book, is the fact that I believe he is asking the wrong question. The question of European colonization should not be about capability, but of consequence.

Brutal armies have in the past from all over the world been able to siege, occupy, colonize and genocide vast areas with nothing superior but their brutality. The Mongol army for examlple might have had a superior breed of horses, but what they had above else was complete disregard of the human lives of their victims. Same with the Huns, or the Japanese imperial army, and yes, colonial Europe.

Guns Germs and Steel (the explanation, not the book) sound to me like a post hoc analysis, an overfit if you will, to fit history neatly between the lines, and tie it together with a nice bow. Asking the question, „but how could Europe do this?“ is an extremely colonialist thing to do, a euro-centric world view. If Jared Diamond wanted to do history, he wouldn’t ask this question. He would ask: „what were the consequences of actual people victims of these crimes?“ Yes this is ideology, but I would argue that Diamond is also full of an awful world view which doesn’t fit in historic analysis of this century.

Also, if they are basically useless now, most groups won't even realize there's a point to starting to tame them.

Having worked in academia for many years, when I see academics attack a book such as GGS my instinct is to question their motives. Academics can be very egotistical and territorial. A priori, it is very difficult to imagine a situation where academics would say to any book like Diamond’s “oh yes this is a really great point and we need to learn from this guy” and very very likely to say “this guy doesn’t know anything about (less important factors that I know a lot about)! What an idiot! He even gets the date of this event wrong, proving I am clever and he is wrong.”

So when I hear about academics attacking something that seems to be fairly obviously correct at least at a very general level, my instinct is not “oh, yes, this guy must be completely wrong” but rather “this guy is probably mostly right but of course there will be a lot of other factors and it will be very easy to pick apart his book if you so wish, especially if your ego relies on you finding fault with him.”

I’m not so easily dissuaded that GGS isn’t mostly right that geography and in particular agricultural factors are the broad strokes of history, rather than the less permanent and smaller scale “Gaussian noise” of cultural events that intuitively are likely to mostly even out over time.

Geographical factors would seem to be this kind of importance that establishes a long dominance and strong chance of success, sure, but what Geographical factor allowed for Industrialism to be established in Western Civilization, with all the force multipliers that Industrialism gives? Almost all countries nowadays are industrialized therefore there is no geographical factor that prevents industrialization in those nations.

Finally, historical trends seem not really to last more than 200-400 years, which 200 years really seems like the kind of thing that can be effected by a cultural issue - somebody who was a really bad king came along and reined for 70 years and destroyed the country, now you're in a weakened condition and get picked on by everyone else for the next 130 years. Yeah - your country's rich geographical resources finally lead to comeback but it just does not seem a very profound or interesting point the more I think about it.

the Industrial Revolution started because Great Britain had an over abundance of coal, so another point for the geographical theory?

I would say Printing is the most important explanation for the Industrial revolution, allowing spread of science through the West, and at the same time providing an example of a technology that was successful and financially beneficial. If you're smart, coming up, and see that other smart people became financially successful by building tools it drives your ambition.

The most compelling explanation I've read about the convergence of trade, textiles, free-energy (coal), and engines is one that comes up on HN periodically:

https://acoup.blog/2022/08/26/collections-why-no-roman-indus...

You need metallurgy considerably more advanced than the Romans had in order to make a useful steam engine.

One thing that bothers me is, before that Netherlands had an abundance of windmills. So why was the industrial english and coal powered and not dutch and wind powered?

Centralization is then arch nemesis of progress.

[0] picked for size, not mineral abundance; I don't want to waste time delving into exactly which part of China is currently mining however much coal.

Wasn't there a whole book devoted to exploring exactly this question?

Now what was its name…

To give a top-of-my-foggy-memory answer to your question about industrialization, here are some of the contributing factors as I recall:

- Head-start: agricultural settlements started in Mesopotamia about 10k BCE, and branched out from there. That's the earliest record we have anywhere in the world of a farming culture which allowed specialized classes to emerge (builders, rulers, administrators, inventors, etc etc) and the basis for emerging technology. e.g. in the Americas it looks like this happened 5k years later.

- More wild plant and animal species suitable for domestication. Only a small % of wild plants and animals are suitable and useful for domestication, and they were overwhelmingly concentrated in Europe. Wheat, barley, and beans were farmed earlier and are easier to farm than rice (East Asia) and potatoes/corn (Americas). There are no African or American animals with the capacity for burden and domesticability of european horses, donkeys, and oxen, and we haven't even talked about cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, etc.

- the mix of small arable geographical area and concentrated population centers led to constant war in Europe, which drove a lot of technological innovation, especially in metallurgy. Europe is also particularly rich in iron and coal, which gave another advantage to pre-industrial tech branches (to use a Civilization analogy). In contrast, China was extremely politically stable and had less need for tools of war like hardened steel.

- The relatively limited available land and population also motivated invention in European farming methods, which was not the case in e.g. China, where human labor is in many places still cheaper than technological efficiency. Human labor intensive farming methods from the 6th century are still in use in many parts of China, because that's just more effective than the alternative.

- Constant war improved infrastructure between cities, too (thank you Roman empire). Hundreds of years later this accelerated trade beween population centers, contributing to many features that characterize industrialization as it happened in Europe. Including: a merchant class, production geogrpahically separated from sale, etc.

- Early advantages were determining factors in colonialism and wealth extraction from other continents. i.e. because Europe had better guns, more germs, and better steel (ha), when they arrived in the Americas they wiped out the indigenous populations.

Please don't take this as a unilateral endorsement of the ideas in the book - I'm not qualified! If nothing else the whole question is post-hoc... "why did Europe achieve European-defined success before any other continent achieved European-defined success?" In any case the ideas are interesting and I bet you would enjoy thinking about them, as I did.

That they had more germs not sure about, my take on the germs part has always been the same thing you have with any invasive species in a new environment. It is mathematically easier for them to spread their germs to indigenous population .

So it seems like the book is mainly a condensation of the widely understood historical narrative (although maybe my knowledge of what is understood is out of date as I have not read so much history in the last 20 years, most of my history reading having been in my teens)

However, while I agree that geography is an important contributor to success in endeavors it is imho not a determinant. It seems to me that industrialism could have arisen a few places and times in the history of the world but it didn't, that it did in Britain, sure, the environment was favorable, but a lot of things led into it. So many things that it becomes in many ways a clever Connections type discussion where you connect one thing you would not think was connected to the outcome - for example does this guy talk about the Black Plagues influence on Industrialization? https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/black-death-and-industrialisa...

probably it's a pretty easy connection to make but still almost everything can be connected and when the thing comes about you say HAH all these things here together made it, the perfect soup! But there were all sorts of soups in the past that did not achieve perfection, and I don't think there is a convincing argument why that is.

on edit: tldr - I don't think the Industrial revolution was destined to start in Britain in the mid 1700s because of some combination of Geographical factors. If it hadn't started there it would have started somewhere else later - probably in the U.S. Or it could have started much earlier, but many factors did not pan out in just the right way in the past when it was possible for Industrialism to start.

There was one major disease Europeans brought back from the Americas: syphilis.

Otherwise, the raft of diseases Europeans brought to the Americas (which devastated the indigenous populations) can be specifically traced back to animal husbandry. The intensity of Europeans’ relationship to domestic animals plus all of the wild animals living in urban areas in close proximity to humans (such as rats) is what led to Europeans being potential carriers of so many diseases. You simply get way more disease exposure from farming (cattle, pigs, goats, sheep, poultry) and living in cities (rats, mice, cats, dogs, bats, insects) than you do in small hunting or fishing villages.

So the germs axis is part of Diamond’s geography argument. Proximity to domesticable animals and cereal grains leads to more exposure to disease, greater concentrations of population, and therefore devastating plagues. Those who survived the plagues had the potential to be asymptomatic carriers who would eventually bring destruction to the indigenous people of the Americas.

Does anyone claim it's determinant? I thought the claim was merely that these factors make the outcome more likely.

Ironic statement given the context.

Well, we can say everyone has motives but that does not mean some incentives are more misaligned than others. So it’s not really a counter argument to say “everyone has motives”.

I wouldn’t say it’s my “feelings”, but my common sense, which is mostly derived from wider reading.

Quite often we wish to overcomplicate subjects to make them seem sophisticated. But many topics just don’t lend them to the complex analysis of say, high energy physics, they’re just much more prosaic. It’s ok to say “someone who lives near the sea has accessed to an additional food source and that’s probably beneficial” (as a random example) without having to write a thesis on it.

I defer to Charlie Munger on this topic, as he expresses it so well.

We can guess the effect that might have on exchanges by considering: unmounted but encumbered people travel at about 25km/day; spanish missions in California were about 50km apart; Pony Express riders with relay remounts could cover 120km/day.

The Pony Express lasted all of 18 months and was apparently financially unsustainable.

On a fortress of the city: “Many Spaniards who have seen it, and who went to Lombardy and other foreign kingdoms,” he adds, “say they have not seen another building like this fortress nor a stronger castle.”

In any event, the advantages of stronger pack animals are only significant if you can create wheeled carts. The Incans, like most Mesoamerican civilizations, had limited access to metals and advanced metallurgy preventing them from widespread usage of wheels as a means of facilitating travel. Without wheels, the amount of distance most animals can go while carrying their supplies is fairly similar.

If I recall correctly, it is something on the order of 150 km, regardless of horse, ox, or even human. If you have to carry your food and water you can only go around 150 km with what you can carry. That means proportional consumption rate is highly similar, so two animals that can carry 100 kg is not materially different than one animal that can carry 200 kg. Under that model you would probably actually prefer smaller pack animals to reduce concentrated risk of animal loss and improve maneuverability.

You actually can do better since animals like horses can efficiently graze, but that heavily limits your transportation speed and weight maximums for commerce purposes and you still need to feed the humans.

Incidentally this is why rivers are so important in early civilization. Barges on rivers bypass the fundamental distance limit even without wind. Floaty boat and a stick to push off the banks/riverbed dominates almost everything else for commerce.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renaissance-quarterl...

The capital city of the Incan empire, Cusco, is estimated to have had a population of ~40,000 [1] ruling over an estimated 10,000,000 people.

The capital city of Spain at the time, Toledo, had a population of a mere ~32,000 [2] at the time ruling a population of a mere 6.5 million at the time.

Contemporaneous accounts demonstrate the comparable grandeur of their seats of power and more objective determinations demonstrate the comparability of scale and scope. It is not just “a handful of fancy residences” unless you apply that moniker to Spain as well.

For that matter, Spain in the early 1500s is not exactly a wealthy country. Their wealth largely came from their American conquests which resulted in what is believed to be a ~300-600% increase in the amount of European-accessible gold and silver [4]. It is a little hard to determine how much came from plunder and how much from the mines and slavery, but the Incans were not poor in precious metals, the measure of wealth in the contemporaneous European societies.

[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/Cuzco/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo,_Spain

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Spain

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution

The looting was doing the same thing that the US government does - injecting money into the economy, which always results in inflation.

The same thing happened with the two American gold rushes.

This can be disproven by simply plotting the quantity of money in circulation compared to the inflation rate.

For instance from 2005 to 2020 the US went from 6.5 to 15 trillion dollars in circulation yet inflation was around 2%.

Same story for the eurozone which went from 3 to 9 trillions euro in circulation, with similar inflation (despite the Quantitative Easing policy of injecting currency in financial markets).

The eurozone provides another clue in that its member states experience different inflation in spite of sharing a common currency.

The true effects of injecting money in the economy are more complex than a straightforward increase in inflation. Most notably, since economic projects must be financed before they can be undertaken, injecting money in the economy can result in the economy increasing in size if there is spare productive capacity and resources.

There are indeed cases like Venezuela where injecting money results in inflation because there is a supply crisis (more money attempts to buy the same quantity of goods) but it cannot be generalized to all economies.

Why were the Spaniards colonizing the Americas rather than the Incas colonizing Spain?

A more subtle answer is the Spanish commanders had access to thousands of years of military history in the form of books.

The person I am replying to then makes the implicit argument that obviously a poor society would be conquered and then makes the explicit argument that obviously the Incans were poor because alpacas do not count. This line of argumentation relies on the Incans being poor otherwise the implicit argument fails. The implicit argument is being made because otherwise there is no reason to bring up "it's impossible to build a wealthy society" since that would be irrelevant.

I point out how the Incans were not poor and thus their implicit argument fails. I quoted first-hand witnesses who support that the Incans appeared to be quite wealthy and thus the "wealthy conquers abject poor" theory does not adequately explain the Spanish conquest of the Incans.

You are free to make a different root argument, but it is not really the point here. But you do have to make a argument that is consistent with the fact that the Incans seemed pretty darn wealthy even though they were missing certain technologies that we would normally view as critical or indicative of "progress".

It goes beyond the sheer number of soldiers, too - if you have more economic surplus, you can spend it on e.g. things like mining to obtain better materials to make weapons from, on science to construct more advanced weapons etc.

If you do not think that the Incans were materially poorer than the Spanish, the we already agree. If you disagree and actually want to respond to the arguments presented, please present a argument supported by evidence that does not use circular reasoning to demonstrate that the Incans were much poorer than the Spanish.

As an example of circular reasoning: "The Spanish had more advanced weapons demonstrating they invested more economic surplus into weapon technology which proves they had more societal economic surplus." Not to say that superior weapon technology could not be a reason for the successful Spanish conquest, but it is not evidence of a significant "wealth gap" unless you subscribe to the ludicrous notion that all technology gaps are by definition wealth gaps. Even if we did assume that ridiculous notion is true, we have no way of comparing the tech trees of two civilizations to compare their "tech wealth" so it still just ends up being circular reasoning.

Meanwhile, in 15th century Europe…

Diamond is a skilled and persuasive writer, who's had success as a pop science writer but the theories he pushes to put it lightly are largely not accepted within academic communities.

Some, like the stories of ecocide featured in Collapse, have been completely and thoroughly debunked. That book is about as academically rigorous as The Lorax and fills the niche: a modern ecological morality tale for a modern Western audience.

Diamond is more the Jean-Baptiste Lamarck of Anthropology.

I loved the team's demonstration that showed the complexity of Easter Island's civilization, and included a demo of how the moai statues were "walked" into place.

https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.11613

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yvvES47OdmY

Simply put, if you want to convince people that Diamond is wrong, don't start by telling them that his books are bad because racism/colonialism/..., even if that is true.

So people had already been living in a given zone. When Europeans first arrived in America, had the locals not already been there and learned the ways of that land and shared, famously the first Thanksgiving in US education, the new arrivals would have perished.

Good thing the article didn't really say that, then? They explicitly agreed with some of his proposed mechanisms.

> However, the researchers discovered that these environmental barriers do not consistently favor Eurasia over other continents. This finding directly challenges Diamond’s assertion that Eurasia’s geographic orientation provided a unique advantage in the spread of agricultural and other critical innovations.

> Instead, the study indicates that the facilitation of cultural spread by geographical and ecological conditions is a global phenomenon, with no clear bias towards Eurasia.

which to me says that indeed the authors of the article intended to say that Diamond was "wrong", at least that's how I interpret the part with "challenges Diamond’s assertion".

> In line with Diamond’s hypothesis, the researchers found that environmental barriers do indeed impact the likelihood of cultural traits being shared between societies.

> “Our analyses support the hypothesis that yes, environment likely influences how cultural innovations spread, just like Diamond intuited..."

> “Our study offers one quantitative realization of Diamond’s arguments and not a definitive answer,”

Meaning, not a definitive no, either.

> “Our findings point out that geography, like genetics and ecology, matters, but it is not destiny.”

It's complicated. I hope this doesn't surprise anyone.

Temperate climates, maybe, but ports?

To be honest I didn't understand why they felt the need to position it as a rebuttal of GG&S when reading it either.

A lot of the complaints about GG&S are to some degree a complaint about Diamond in general being mapped on to the least offensive of his works, and if that is the only exposure you have to Diamond, it can be seem like the complaints are coming out of left field.

Which discredits the entire field. Ad hominem arguments have no place in science. Everyone knows that Newton wrote extensively on the occult but that takes nothing away from his contributions to physics and mathematics.

If I could address his critics as a whole I would say:

Critique the theory on its own, independent of the author. Provide an alternative theory. “It’s complicated” is not a theory.

Furthermore, the kinds of argumements that Diamond would provide weren't actually "tested" per say. Social Sciences are a "Science" (albeit flawed in some shape or form), but are dependent on validating a hypothesis in a reproducible manner as well, hence why economics has basically become applied math since the 50s (and similar changes in other fields like Sociology, Linguistics, Polticial Science, and Anthro as well)

There isn't much difference between grifters like Perun or Zeihan and Jared Diamond.

Also, Jared Diamond doesn't have a background in Economics or Political Science - he is an Ecologist/Environmental Scientist (and one of the best ones at that), and as such reading GGS induces Dunning-Kruger for those with a background in Comparitive Politics.

No one in the academic PoliSci, Sociology, or Anthropology space views him as credible.

He is a great Ecologist and Environmental Historian, but he is not someone with domain experience in Comparative Politics, Political Economy, IR, and/or other adjacent fields which people try to extrapolate GGS to.

I don't have a dog in the fight other than having read (most of) GG&S and found his writing style laborious, but the quoted bit above seems more like an issue with those other people that Diamond.

If I say "x" and people extrapolate that to things for which it was not intended, how does that make _ME_ a grifter?

I read it, found it all very plausible and interesting.

I read Gavin Menzies next book, 1434, found it equally interesting and compelling.

Then I read his third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, and found it just as plausible as his first book.

Except the prior plausibility in my head of a Minoan civilization maintaining global trade was way, way lower, and so I didn't just accept it as uncritically as I had the first two books, and that made me realize how unskeptically I had been reading the first two books, and other books in the genre.

It was a more enjoyable life lesson than most, all things considered.

von Daniken really knew how to write in academic prose, which only sold it further.

You can basically say anything about a culture that the audience is not familiar with, and they will think it is plausible.

For me, AA jumped the shark when they claimed that Vikings came from "nowhere" and "suddenly" had sea faring technology. Obviously the Aliens had given them the technology through the god Odin, who was also an alien... what other explanation could there logically be?

There was so much wrong with those claims, that I just turned off the TV. I decided to be more careful about looking at shows about aliens and conspiracies, because I am afraid that it will slowly change my ability to distinguish fact from fiction.

In reality, the ships were based on a long history of ship making with incremental improvements and did not suddenly appear. Anyone could find this easily, which indicates to me that they don't care to make even a slight effort to moderate their claims.

That got me thinking of all the other programs I watch that are not necessarily as "inventive" as AA. What other false statements are said about other cultures that I am not aware of?

Basically, they think that multiple agricultural civilizations arising independently at the end of the last glacial maximum is implausible, and that there must have been a global progenitor civilization that discovered it all and spread it after its own fall.

Except ... all of the crops of those early agricultural civilizations were distinct, based on the plants native to that region. Why would ancient farmers have traveled the world to teach people how to farm, but not have brought seeds with them?

There are some things that are plausible that I think would be interesting to see actual academics researchers spend time on, such as the Sphinx and a few other claims.

- The Sphinx:

To me it seems plausible that the Sphinx may have been constructed before the Egyption civilization, based on geological analysis that indicates a wetter climate and that the head seems to be carved much later than the rest (even proportions are wrong).

The findings in Göbleki Tepe proves that you don't need a massive agricultural civilization to create impressive stone works. People can get together and make amazing things without having to invent an Atlantian civilization that travels the world.

Unfortunately I think that Hancocks involvement may prevent serious research into this, as they don't want to be associated with him.

Is this definitive? Couldn’t it be evidence that the people that built it might have had massive agriculture that we haven’t found yet?

I haven't got to GGS yet, but given that the top reddit "debunking" is pretty open that its main argument is "his conclusions are racist, therefore he mush be wrong", I'm feeling a little more hopeful.

As a trained STEM Scientist, I found this book utterly nonsense and non-scientific.

"Then I read his third book, The Lost Empire of Atlantis, and found it just as plausible as his first book."

For me this is not very promising. "As plausible as his first book"

sadly, "critical" and "innovation" are semantically characterized as both important and good because who made those critical innovations dominated with weapons other trivial and unoriginal populations.

Edit: I havent't read the book but such hypothesis are quite sterile considering how populations move (and used to move) around the globe. We are taught a pretty static idea of ancient civilizations, while they probably move more than us.