Guns, Germs and Steel Links
The posts that Ozma and I wrote about Guns, Germs and Steel seem to have struck a nerve, and already there is a fair amount of discussion in the blogsphere. In addition to Brad DeLong’s dismissive pot-shots, there is a very good discussion developing in the comments section of this Crooked Timber post. From there I learned that the Science article mentioned by Ozma (and also by Majikthise and Louis Proyect) has been posted online by Louis. I recommend everyone take the time to read it in full. Also, Nomadic Thoughts is collecting links about the debate, and I will try to mirror some of those here, as well as whatever else I come across as I discover them. And stay tuned – our resident New Guinea expert, Rex, is on vacation, but I’m sure he’ll have something to say when he gets back!
UPDATE: For those who want a quick overview of the debate so-far, go take a look at an excellent write-up by Scott Jaschik at Inside Higher Ed.
UPDATE: This is getting very long, so I’m moving everything below the fold.
UPDATE: Stentor Danielson, over at debitage, has some thoughts on GG&S:
As I see it, the main problem with Diamond’s thesis is that he reaches too far back in history to find the roots of Euro-American dominance. He traces the current power imbalance back to the arrangement of continents and biota that prevailed at the dawn of “civilization” some 10,000 years ago. Diamond makes much of Pizarro’s easy victory over the Incas, treating it as the proof in the pudding of the superiority that Europe had achieved. But even as Europe was laying the smackdown on the Americas, it was desperately trying to catch up to the much more advanced civilizations of India, China, and the Middle East. It wasn’t until the the 19th century, when the industrial revolution was in full swing, that we can say with confidence that (western) Europe was the world’s dominant power (see Andre Gunder Frank’s ReOrient). This suggests that a historically contingent explanation is likely to be better than one positing a long-standing inevitability.
UPDATE: Brad De Long has updated his post with a new cheap shot. He deliberately misunderstands me in order to try to make me look foolish. [UPDATE: Yes, I said some things in sloppy ways which facilitated such misrepresentations, but only if you ignore the point I was trying to make in my initial post. Is the point to try to understand each other, or to play "gotcha" - berating someone until they are tired and say something you can use against them? The latter might work in presidential debates (Kerry's "global test" remark), but isn't appropriate for scholarly discourse.] I said:
Addendum: Yes, if the book had been framed in terms of “why, prior to 1600, did the west have more cargo” … fine. But that is not how the book is framed. Nor do I think it would have been as popular if it had been framed in those terms (for the reasons Ozma alludes to).
To which he responds with quotes showing that JD did, indeed say the year 1600 was his ending point, in his book.
All this proves is that Brad is a troll. He deliberately misunderstands and misrepresents what I am saying in order to make me upset (this time it worked). I shouldn’t rise to the bait, but this is too easy….
It is very clear that there are two frames. Yali’s question sets up the larger frame within which the other one is set. I, and I believe Ozma, are arguing that much of the popularity of the book derives from the slippage between these two frames – the fact that answering one question seems to answer another. In my initial post – which was a critique of the TV show, I argued that this slippage begins with Diamond’s setting up this slippage in the book, even though I explicitly acknowledged that he did a better job of it in the prologue than what we see in the TV show. Still, I felt it was important to make it clear that one question does not answer the other, and that in fact Yali’s question was not the one we should be asking in the first place.
Rather than trying to understand all of this, De Long deliberately uses it to dismiss me. If you read our discussion in the forums I think you can see that this derives from the fact that he doesn’t like the implication that capitalism might somehow be at fault for contemporary inequality. But rather than having a civil debate about this issue, he resorts to cheap shots.
The number one rule for dealing with trolls is “don’t feed them.” There are a lot of other people who have contributed interesting points to the threads here, at Crooked Timber, and even on De Long’s post. From now on I will focus any energy I have (I don’t have much these days) on interacting with those who have attempted to make a civil contribution to promoting further dialog rather than trying to prevent reasonable discussion. Don’t feed the trolls!
UPDATE: Our very own Tak is keeping quiet on GG&S (he hasn’t read it) but in a post over at Frog in a Well he has a lot to say about an article Diamond wrote about Japan.
There are also frightening parallels in the history of Japanese fascism to the kind of environmental determinism used by Diamond.
… Instead of reading these simplistic assumptions about race, technology, and stages of civilization, I’d rather wait for the release of Civilization 4, in which the game designers rely on the same assumptions.
UPDATE: Henry Farrell thinks that Tak’s post (together with those on this blog) represent “some underlying deformation of thinking.”
In the comments on that post, Doug, of Fistful of Euros, says:
Maybe Tak et al. are a put-up by the right-ish bits of the academy to make more left-ist bits look silly?
I have to admit – that one cracked me up.
If we anthropologists seem a little to ready to throw around the term “racist” it is not because we are “jealous” of other disciplines (in fact, anthropology is doing better than ever before), it is because we are all too aware of our own history as a discipline. Anthropologists were the foot-soldiers of colonialism, promoting theories of racial superiority to justify colonial expansion. As a result, we are sensitive to the ways in which specific interests can be served in the name of “objective” science.
UPDATE: Now Kevin Drum links to Brad’s Post. Kevin is as thoughtful, polite, and articulate as he always is. I just wish people would stop conflating my comments about the reception and limitations of the book and the TV show with Ozma’s critique of his environmental arguments. And just because people say they aren’t doing something doesn’t mean they aren’t doing it – that’s one of the first things you learn when you do ethnographic fieldwork!
UPDATE: Timothy Burke takes up the discussion at Cliopatria:
It’s a serious mistake to even imply that Diamond is racist, as Henry Farrell properly observes. I would say that he has a stubborn inclination to use racial terms when they don’t serve any empirical or descriptive purpose.
And,
Fourth, on Yali’s question, I have a few problems. Though Brad DeLong insists that Diamond only means his answer to explain the relative imbalance in material wealth and power between many non-Western societies and the West up to 1500 and not afterwards, I think it’s clear that Diamond thinks that post-1500 events are no more than the icing on the cake, that the fundamental explanation of post-1500 inequalities and disparities in the world derive from the grand arc of pre-1500 development, from the luck of the geographical draw. He’s not alone in that: this is a venerable argument which takes on variant forms among world-systems historians and Marxists. But De Long is being a bit unfair to insist somehow that the Savage Minds bloggers have in this respect misread Diamond: he clearly argues that the pre-1500 history is crucially determinant of the post-1500 history.
UPDATE: Brad DeLong responds to Burke’s critique, and Burke responds in the comments. Burke adds this:
It is important to note, though, that Diamond’s latest work makes it clear that he’s not a determinist, not exactly, in that he does think elites can make decisions, that there are multiple pathways a society can travel in relation to its environment.
That book would be Collapse, which I haven’t read.
UPDATE: I missed this one, but De Long seems to have taken Ozma seriously enough to actually read one of the articles she cited, although he ends up ridiculing it. Still, I’m glad he made an effort! That’s all we ask of our readers.
UPDATE: Lawyers, Guns and Money discusses the debate between Ozma and DeLong in ethical terms. (Note: Ozma is a she.) And recommends a few books on egalitarian ethics.
Stentor Danielson has a followup to his own earlier critique.
And John Hawks thinks that “Diamond’s work … is a lot closer to traditional anthropology than some find comfortable” (despite flaws with its historical framework).
UPDATE: Someone over at Crooked Timber posted this link to a review of Collapse by Clifford Geertz.
Also, Tak has an extended reply to Henry in the comments section of his post.
First: I didn’t say that Jared Diamond was racist.
…Yet despite the things I liked about the article, I was disturbed by some of his assumptions, which in my opinion are the kind that help fuel the very racism abound in East Asia today. This is what I meant by him perpetuating racism.
UPDATE: A libertarian take on Collapse by Ronald Bailey.
UPDATE: There has been a significant amount of new discussion on the site. Most of it by Deborah Gewertz and Frederick Errington. You can see all their posts here. Rex also had a post about the nature of anthropological critiques which has some good discussion in the comments. And I have two more posts: One on the third episode of the TV show, in which Diamond discusses malaria in Africa. And another one about a trenchant critique of his new book, Collapse.
Trackbacks & Pingbacks
- Brad DeLong's Semi-Daily Journal
- Crooked Timber
- Gene Expression
- Right Reason
- Lawyers, Guns and Money
- Shopiere
- Keywords
- Its All Just A Ride
- Left Center Left
- SerendipEye
- Nomadic Thoughts
- Frog in a Well - The Japan History Group Blog
- Easily Distracted » Blog Archive » DeLong, Diamond and Savage Minds
- WILLisms.com
- Jim Caserta: August 2005
- Savage Minds: Notes and Queries in Anthropology — A Group Blog » World Simulation: Part One: Constructing the World
- Sherman Dorn
- Edmund Carpenter’s Trees and the Forest of the West « zunguzungu
RE: “I didn’t want to impugn anyone’s motives for liking the book, but the truth was, I felt most of the favorable response the book received was for highly impugnable motives. So the post was about coming clean—describing why I thought the book was neither brilliant nor laudable. I’ve been careful to say that although I think I am correct that the book is wrong—and that therefore, it is only honest to forthrightly say that I think the book is wrong—that the book may be right and that any ultimate scholarly judgement of rightness or wrongness is made collectively, across time…”
May I suggest that the first part of the above is not very credible? And that you have given only the weakest of reasons to support your belief that the book is wrong?
Argh!
I haven’t argued for any middle ground, and you will definitely never, ever see me claiming that the middle ground is somehow inherently virtuous. I’d hope that my comments on this blog have proven me enough of a jackass to be immune to that accusation.
I will, however, argue vociferously for going into debates with your eyes open, and with awareness of the full implications of your own arguments.
One of the implications of your argument is that the accusation that you’re just a run of the mill leftist trying to dispose of arguments you find politically inconvenient by accusing their supporters of thoughtcrime is now ethically acceptable, and in fact, guaranteed to be launched.
If someone begins an argument with “you believe X because it justifies your unethical actions,” there are only a few responses available:
1. You can claim that you really believe X because it is really convincing.
2. You can claim that X does not justify the alleged actions.
3. You can claim that you do not perform the alleged actions.
4. You can claim the allegedly unethical actions are in fact ethical.
5. And, you can throw the SAME ACCUSATION back at your critic.
So, if you’re going to make that attack, get ready for the retort, and don’t act all put out when it arrives. If possible, be prepared for it. You cannot impugn someone else’s motives without your motives coming into question. It simply does not work.
I’d go into a discussion of how to structure arguments so that you’re less vulnerable to these attacks, but I already did.
A minor point — it sure looked to me like the slavery1/slavery2 talk was an apologia for slavery as it was traditionally practiced in africa, NOT as it was practiced on field slaves on plantations in the american south. The implication was that african slavery was different in kind and africans didn’t know what they were selling their slaves into when they sold to europeans. Also there may have been a little bit of apologia that europeans took awhile to notice what was happening in the cane fields and the cotton fields etc. This is not the first time I’ve seen you read something and get a very different reading from me about what the writer was saying. ON top of the things like the wealth of nigeria, it appears to indicate a lot of carelessness.
If you’re going to get a lot of attention it’s good to be careful, people have a bad habit of dismissing the position when they see reason to dismiss its proponent, and you do a disservice to your claims by making yourself easy to dismiss. It probably isn’t real good for your reputation either.
I would agree with you that the most important thing for a science-popularising book is its reception, but for an actual scientific monograph the most important thing is the content. It’s important to distinguish whether this is one, the other, or both. It looks like sheer popularisation to me, and in that context warmed-over generalisations are about as good as you’re likely to get. What surprises me is the number of people from other fields — economists particularly — who say that it’s a breakthrough, who say the methodology is new and they want to apply it in their own work, who say the conclusions are new and exciting and will require decades of testing to prove them. They are claiming that this is science and further that it’s seminal science. If you want to discuss it with them, you need to get past that fundamental difference in viewpoint. Sorry to be noticing this so late, I was doing it some but I didn’t have it thought out well enough to say what was needed.
One approach to that might have been to quote some other science popularisation that covered the same areas, to point out that it wasn’t new. Another might have been to look at some economics popularisation, Lester Thurow maybe, and start gushing about what an incredible scientific breakthrough it is and how clear the writing is and how it’s going to have wonderful implications for science over the next decades as the details get proven, and how wonderfully well Thurow proves his points and how important his methodology is. ;)
You wound up arguing with a bunch of people who wanted to believe in environmental determinism, about how bad environmental determinism is. And on the scale Diamond discusses, there’s no way to tell how true it is. (Apart from how bad it is, where as you agree if it happens to be true how bad it is doesn’t matter.) You could point to vastly different cultures occupying very similar environments, and that wouldn’t say anything to Diamond. He agrees that vastly different cultures can occupy the same environment — but he’s interested in what it takes for one of them to develop the weapons to destroy the other. Once the more vulnerable one is destroyed we no longer have two vastly different cultures in the same environment. And he’s talking about a scale where there can never be enough data to test his ideas — he’s used up every inhabited continent already to describe his theories, leaving none to test them against new data.
Looking back, it seems like people may have been strongly attracted to an explanation why people of european ancestry dominate the world, at just the time that such domination may be ending. They were glad to hear that it was all luck that put them on top, when they were hearing it confirmed that they *were* on top. I’m not sure where to go with that. Maybe when people ask you about the book you might start talking about the new book that discusses cultures that didn’t make it, and start talking at length about how we’re losing ground on all fronts and what we should do to avoid total destruction. That might give them a new perspective on Diamond. ;)
Finally, I haven’t had much experience with actual anthropologists. Once I wandered into an anthropologist’s office because they were on the floor above ours, and he told me fascinating stories about what he did. Like, he’d been involved in an effort to help a native american tribe. So he had them invite the President’s daughters to come visit, and they made a big fuss over them and served them traditional meals and gave them headbands and doeskin dresses and made them honorary members of the tribe. And for awhile after that the BIA bureaucracy started opening up. And then it started closing down again. He told jokes that american black women told in the days when a lot of them worked as “maids”.
A white woman was driving her cadillac and she stopped on the street where a black woman wa walking, and she rolled down her window and called out, “Yoohoo, do you know where I could get a maid?”. And the black woman said, “Try the swedish embassy, that’s where I get mine!”. It wasn’t very funny to me but I could see how it could be funny, and listening to him I could imagine how you could tell a lot about people from their humor.
So I got this stereotype of cultural anthropologists as people who could go visit cannibals and say the right things to be accepted as visitors and not eaten. People who could understand cultures and learn enough about how they worked to get results.
You guys haven’t been nearly as impressive as the old man telling old stories. You tried to set moral standards among people who didn’t share your values. You blasphemed their idol. You got them to dismiss you, and you, Ozma, acted like you accomplished something by doing it, like you are used to so low a status that you wouldn’t dare say what you thought, and it was a victory to speak out and say things that got them to treat you as a child who was babbling. And it may have been. But a really godlike anthropologist would have understood their values, and found a way to make some points that would be useful to them that fit into their own beliefs, and left them thinking she was a great person.
You’re real people and not the gods I imagined, but I’d really like it if next time something like this happens you turn out more like my fantasy.
To Ozma: I sense *rapidly* diminishing returns here, but in the following passage, “seems to me” is the operative phrase:
“Colin—your point seems to me similar to the point you made on another thread, about forcing people to “define their terms” (what Bernard Cohn called the scholarly call to the field of battle). I call TB on a point he makes; you interject that I am going too far.”
No. Simply questioning Tim’s terms would have been fine. You advanced a thoroughly tendentious, mistaken interpretation of his post, ending on this helpful note:
“Do you really live by this farcically high (or perhaps low) standard of intellectual discourse? REALLY?”
In my response I did *not* say you were “going too far,” as an inspection of #89 will reveal. I said you deliberately misconstrued Tim. Misconstrual does not count as critique and thus it’s hardly a question of taking misconstrual “too far.”
Look, there’s a basic question about how you carry on a conversation if people start with different priors, concerns, frameworks. You encounter a difference. What does the difference mean? How do you deal with it? Surely this goes to the heart of what this blog is for. If you enjoy slanging matches, then, yes, what you do is caricature people at manic length and try to tie them up denying the caricature. If we want to actually learn a little from each other, we need to avoid flying off the handle.
To JThomas: Check out some ethnographies! No discipline’s common-room chatter is going to be as good as its best polished work. Several good ones have been mentioned on other threads lately, maybe someone should make a list of best reads. Let me start with a nomination for Sidney Mintz’s _Worker in the Cane_, which maybe isn’t exactly an ethnography, but is good among other things because Mintz is up-front about what he does not understand, and his key informant emerges as a complex figure.
Ozma, the strangest thing of all about your responses is that my own critique of Diamond aims squarely at his environmental determinism and materialism. Both because I think his use of those perspectives is empirically flawed in various ways, and because I disagree at a deeper philosophical level with it. You seem determined to read past (or not read at all) what many people are saying. Your misconstrual of the slavery1/slavery2 thing is another example of that. It came up in this thread the context of the venerable argument (championed first by anthropologists like Igor Kopytoff) that kinship-based forms of slavery in West and Central Africa were quite different than the practices and forms of slavery introduced by the Atlantic slave trade. It’s got nothing to do with an apologia for plantation slavery in the Americas: it’s quite the opposite. Some critics have asserted that the argument is an apologia for slavery in precolonial Africa, and that’s a legitimate possibility. But you basically didn’t read before you snarked, which seems to be a habit. Go back to post #68: DeLong is referencing a huge body of anthropological and historical work on the Atlantic slave trade which is the exact opposite of an apologia for American plantation slavery; in fact, it argues that American plantation slavery is uniquely immoral in the context of world history.
Actually, one of the biggest reasons that Western European countries have more “cargo” is Western Europeans DESIRE for equality between people. “Western Altruism” is so far as we see, not talked about at all on this message board. North Western Europe is about as socialistic as you can get. The cold environment forces certain behavior, altruism in a modern society is one of them…
Also note, western civilization has a history that forcluded the scientific reasearch at a scale, and ability that no other culture has ever displayed. One can make parallel comparisons with ancient Greek society, the steam engine, etc…
Diamond supposes that given the proper resources, any group of people would be flying helicopters, but this is untrue. While China did have its Picaso, they did not have the psycological perspectives of the West to advance thier civilization to western standards. Its a matter of ethno-psycology, although one has to agree that environment played a major role in European peoples evolution, development, and superiority. I have also seen people say that Diamond “agrees” with “the Bell Curve”, as cultures who could not support a huge middle class, could not produce an intellectual class of people, etc…so that is why the “average western IQ” of certain African groups stands unchallenged at around 75 or so…
I find the “appology” for slavery an interesting concept, as only western europeans were evil slave traders, and any form of slavery practiced in Africa is nothing like American slavery.Anti-western sentiment seems to be cart-blanch on most anthro message boards, as though all other ethnic groups are angels, or are “pure and noble” savages…
interesting
Hello All,
I’ve had a lovely weekend and just can’t get it up for this. But I did want to apologize for misreading the original source for the slavery 1/2 distinction. I missed Brad DeLong’s earlier ref to it, and mistakenly remembered the first one as:
_”In the american south we had both slavery1 and slavery2. A family that had one slave, or even 10 slaves, couldn’t really afford to work them to death. Arranging that would be too much like hard work. Their slaves were kind of like family, and might get converted to christianity or even married to another slave. Slavery1. And that’s part of what made it such a big deal to get sold down the river….”_ [from J. Thomas of July 31st; for some reason numbers are not appearing for me today].
My bad. As for the rest of it — I’ve said the same things over and over again and again, I feel the same way about them as I did on day one, if I had it all to do over again I’d repeat every statement (no — I take that back. I also feel bad for calling Tim Burke’s post boring. That was mean of me, and I’m sorry for it). Otherwise — well, if anyone is left reading about this — I just continue to stand by each part of what I have said.
Firstly, Yali’s question is misleading. Really, it is the old historians question of the ‘rise of the west’. There have been many attempts to answer this from ninetennth century writers positing geographic determinism, to racial differences, to religious differences. More recently, answers have been put forward by William MacNeil in his “The Rise of the West”. Yali’s question is a rhetocial device (“cargo” being a metaphor) to place in the reader’s mind a central theme which the book hopes to answer, viz, how is it that all people begining at the same place have come to end with such disparity in wealth. It is not cargo per se, but cultural, political and economic dominance that is the heart of the question.
Secondly, the approach Diamond uses is loosely ‘ecological history’. An earlier version of the same topic Diamond presents is in the historian Alfred Crosby’s book, “Ecological Imperialism: the biological expansion of Europe, 900-1900″ (published 1986). The effects of disease in the colonial history is presented in William MacNeil’s “Plagues and People”. It is worth contrasting Diamond’s book, with its primary emphasis on the role played by geography, with another recent work by Alan Taylor, “American Colonies”. While Taylor presents the ecological consequences of colonization, it is the role of empires that is most profound in the history of colonisation. In short, geography has a role, but empire is more the primary causal agent.
Thirdly, the emphasis on Europe and America does not explain the more interesting questions raised by historians. Why was it Columbus and Magellan et al. who sailed the oceans and not the Arabs? If one had to place a bet in 800 AD as to the success of regions in the world, India, China and the Islamic nations were better bets than Europe. This is the fascinating question, and historican have focused on it in two directions. Historians, such as Janet L. Abu-Lughod have focused before European dominance in “Before European Hegemony: The world system A.D. 1250-1350″; while Kenneth Pomeranz in “The Great Divergence: China, Europe and the making of the modern world” look to the role Empire plays in the political-economy of the near past and its role in the rise of the west. These are debates that are ongoing within the field of history. Unlike Diamond, who traces the rise of the west into the Neolithic, these historicans see the origin of the modern world in the last 500 years. In short, it is not just guns germs and steel, but better ships, long terms bonds to pay for such voyages, navigational advances, emmigration enmass, diplomatic overtures (Niall Ferguson is correct in asking how so few Englishmen could control all of greater India: clearly it is not just guns germs and steel).
Fourthly, Europeans did not fare as well as might be thought. In America, the planting of tobacco in Virginia occured because it was easy to grow and not physically taxing. As Ferguson notes for the Plymouth settlers, disease rid the region of indigenous people occuring only after they had tilled the land and buried stores of corn for the winter. Without this helping hand, it is likely the Plymouth settlers of 1621 would have vanished as did those at Roanoke. By contrast, Africa and the Caribbean were death sentences to most who went there, including Africans repatriated to Liberia and Sierra Leone. In the early nineteenth century, chances of dying in Sierra Leone, 1:2; in Jamaica, 1:8. As Crosby notes, these regions of high mortality did not become the Neo-Europes. Queensland is an exception and worthy of study.
Finally, the solution of disparity has less to do with the legacy of guns germs and steel, and more to do with governance and capital investment. This is the realm of economists (and beyond my epxertise), but it is one in which progress is being made. However, in this age of globalisation, the flow of capital investment is principally directed towards developed nations (eg. Japan, China, Europe, India). The basket case of the world is Africa, and it is the absence of capital development which in part is holding back this region. What monies these nations generate is siphoned off to repay debt to banks, or simply removed from the country into foreign banks. Amatyra Sen’s latest book addresses such questions of underdevelopment, and is worth anyone’s time to read.
Well, there is my review. Not scathing, but hopefully presenting Diamond’s book within a broader context. However, as a lay reader, I would recommend people read Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel, but then also give over to some of the other texts mentioned above.
Re: “DeLong is referencing a huge body of anthropological and historical work on the Atlantic slave trade which is the exact opposite of an apologia for American plantation slavery; in fact, it argues that American plantation slavery is uniquely immoral in the context of world history.”
I would say that large-scale Classical Mediterranean slavery–latifundia, ergastula, et cetera–was probably equally immoral. Who was the Roman Senator who said that Rome was doomed because the armies were no longer bringing in slaves by the hundreds of thousands, and so now a pretty-boy cost more than a sword?
I always wonder how “Anthropologists” can have an openly bias political veiw, and tend to fit “Social Anthropology” conveniently within that political veiw, usually far left. This seems to be the main cause of controvesy in Anthropology today. If the openly biased leftwingers would leave their political baggage at the door, so to speak, there wouldnt be so much “controversy”…
what would we have to do for there to be fewer bad monkeys?
Better than hiddenly biased right wingers who claim to be objective, BadMonkey.
Does anyone know the answers to the questions in the back of the book, if so email me and you will have my gratitude. Email is Sweetsixhitter09 {at} aol(.)com, i only need the first ten answers, or any ten answers that you know.
Thanks truly,
Jenny
Came upon website purely by accident…wondered throughout the reading what opinion(s) (this is not necessarily attached to the subject at hand)…what is the opinion of readers regarding supplementing expenses for cultural minorities like native americans, hispanics, etc… just another debate someone in the office is having at the moment over tribal cultures in Hawaii that they say are being considered as being added as a minority for supplemental benefits in the near future….
Guns Germs and Steel is one of the flimsiest historical theories I have ever encountered and I can not understand how Jared Diamond has garnered the attention that he has. Leave it to a Geography professor to take on the job of an Anthropologist/Archeologist and get it all wrong. I believe what Jared Diamond attempts is benign justification for Western stereotypes and misconceptions about the rest of the world. He seems to believe that nobody outside of Eurasia has benefited from cultural diffusion, nor have they contributed anything of value to world history or civilization.
Ironically, Northern and Western Europeans have contributed among the least to what we could consider human civilization. For example, there is no sign of relevant civilizations ever existing in Scandinavia.
African nations have been trading with other parts of the world for millennia. Ancient Nubia had strong trade relationships with nations inside as well as outside of Africa for thousands of years and at one point even ruled over Egypt. Ethiopians were also among the first people to adopt Christianity in 4th century AD. How could this have come about if there was little contact with countries outside of Africa? Yemen is only a stone’s throw from Ethiopia; the countries are divided by the “Bab el Mandeb” (Red Sea/Gulf of Aden).
To convince one’s self that civilization and technological advancement have only come about within the parameters of that arbitrary border confining what Jared Diamond refers to as Eurasia is ridicules, especially in the face of Archeological and Anthropological evidence to the contrary. Any first year Cultural Anthropology student would know this.
In East Africa Swahili were building ships for centuries that were superior in quality to early European ships called “mtepe;” and were trading with China, Arabia and India by sea, becoming very wealthy as a result. Most of China’s ivory for some time came from direct trade with the Swahili. According to many authors including Schmidt and Avery (1978, 1979, 1986) and a review in American Anthropologist (Kusimba, 1997), Africans between 1500-2000 years ago were smelting iron at temperatures not reached in Europe until the industrial age. These Africans (in Tanzania) are believed to be among the first to produce carbon steel, using a special preheating method.
In West Africa the civilizations of Ghana, Mali, Songhai and Timbuktu attracted people from all over the world. In the early part of the fourteenth century to the time of the Moroccan invasion in the late sixteenth century, the city of Timbuktu became an important intellectual and spiritual center of the Islamic world, attracting people from as far away as Saudi Arabia to study there. Great mosques, universities, schools, and libraries were built under the Mali and Songhay Empires, some of which still stand today.
A large number of innovations that many Europeans today recognize as being uniquely their own, such as fire arms and the old trade ships once used for commerce (The kind used by Columbus for example) trace their history back to technologies and influences acquired through Islamic contacts in the Iberian Peninsula. In the year 711 AD, Islamic invaders conquered that part of Europe known today as Spain and Portugal and ruled over the region for close to 800 years (711 to 1492). Europe as a result saw a number of improvements in various areas of life and interest, ranging from the medical sciences to military; to paved roads, and street lamps. The Moor also introduced Europe to its first Universities and the numerical system currently in popular use today.
Scholars describe the Moor as originating in the Senegal River valley in Southern Mauritania as Almoravides, and then gathering followers from many ethic groups before overwhelming the Iberian Peninsula. The Almoravides were a group of devout Muslims also partially responsible for the destabilization and eventual demise of the Kingdom of Ghana — located in what is today Northern Senegal and Southern Mauritania — in and around the same time as the Iberian siege.
The spread of Islam into Africa is not mentioned in Jared Diamond’s theory, nor is the fact that the Saharan Desert is only between 5000-2000 years old, making his claims of isolation seem all the more ridiculous in from a broad perspective. Further, it has also been shown that the current inhabitants of Europe do not resemble Neolithic and Bronze Age Europeans in craniofacial form, but share close affinities with sub-Saharan Africans (Brace et al, 2006). I am curious why Jared Diamond does not incorporate these bits of historical, geographic and Anthropologic information into his makeshift post hoc hypothesis.
At the time of Columbus’s arrival in the America’s the Aztec were using math, astronomy and agriculture that was superior to Europeans. If it were not for contact with South American Amerindians (initially by accident) much of Europe would have likely died of starvation; as the continent was experiencing sever famine at the time. It was South American agriculture and crops that saved Europe from near death. Ironically, in exchange for this vitally needed learning the Europeans inadvertently killed off between 80-95% of Amerindian populations; completely wiping out many Aboriginal Caribbean native groups with new-world diseases, and then slavery.
THE REASON EUROPEANS CONQURED THE NEW WORLD IS BECAUSE THE TURKS WERE BLOCKING EUROPEAN PASSAGE TO THE SILK ROAD, AND SO THEY HAD TO FIND ANOTHER ROUT TO INDIA/CHINA. ATTEMPTING THIS BY SEA EUROPEANS EVENTUALLY DISOVERED THE AMERICAS; INADVERTLYING, THROUGH SHERE INCOMPETENCE (COLUMBUS WOULD ACTUCALLY NAME THE NATIVES AMERICANS “INDIANS”). THIS ENCOUNTER WOULD END UP WIPING OUT 80-95% OF THE NATIVE POPULATION WITH EUROPEAN BORN DISEASES. MAKING LATER CONQUEST ESPECIALLY EASY!
Africans had access to guns, too – but like the Arabs, who introduced the weapon to Europeans, initially found them inconvenient for traditional warfare. In effect, Africans also had guns germs and steal, which refutes a large part of Jared Diamond’s ridiculous theory.