Note that GGS is considered very poorly by historians as far as I understand, see e.g. this AskHistorians comment:
The quick and dirty answer is that modern historians and anthropologists are quite critical of, if not borderline/outright hostile to, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Put bluntly, historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history that, in the end, paradoxically supports the very racism/Eurocentricism he is attempting to argue against. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those “just so stories” don’t adequately explain human history.
Given our natural tendency to avoid speaking with authority on topics outside our expertise, academic analysis of GG&S is somewhat wanting. To work around this issue, /u/snickeringshadow and I constructed several point by point refutations in another history-related community. I will quote a bit from both analyses because they illustrate many of the critical issues permeating GG&S, though I’ll just discuss three of the issues.
First, Diamond notoriously cherry-picks data that supports his hypothesis while ignoring the complexity of the issues.
In his chapter “Lethal Gift of Livestock” on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when I dived into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) on his hand-picked All Star team could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. Diamond ignored the evidence that didn’t support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.
Also, he cherry-picks history when discussing the conquest of the Inka...
Pizarro’s military advantages lay in the Spaniards’ steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses… Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.
This is just patently false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling “game over.” Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were “conquered”, and then immediately rebelled again. The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come. Technological “advantage”, in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, but Diamond doesn’t mention that complexity. The Inka were conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered, and technology reigns supreme in Diamond’s narrative.
This brings us to a second issue: Diamond uncritically examines the historical record surrounding conquest.
Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts, like Diamond seems to do, you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond’s thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.
Finally, though I do not believe this was his intent, the construction of the arguments for GG&S paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world-wide in general, as categorically inferior.
To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as fundamentally naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. When viewed through this lens, I hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.
Instead of GG&S try...
Restall Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest
Mann 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
MacQuarrie Last Days of the Inca
And if you would like to hear more about infectious disease spread after contact… Kelton Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715
Yours is a common conundrum. Look through any /r/history thread mentioning Diamond and you will see dozens of people who find our critiques pedantic, and that, in a general sense, Diamond’s thesis makes sense. This is a very difficult attitude to address, because it’s rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how social sciences work. The attitude evaluates the ideas of popular authors from a utilitarian, practical approach: if the thesis is useful and helps makes sense of the world, it has value. We researchers take an inductive approach: if your methodology and facts are wrong, your thesis can’t be right, no matter how much it “makes sense.”
For this reason, I’m kind of sick of talking about Diamond’s theoretical bents and ideologies. The standards by which scholars and the public evaluate them are so different that we have to address an entire epistemological orientation.
But before we get anywhere, let’s start at the very beginning: the central thesis of GG&S:
Europeans decisively conquered the Americas
with a potent combination of guns, germs, and steel
which they had, and the Americans did not, because of several ecological factors.
This is why white people have all the “cargo.”
Anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians critique this thesis because numbers 1, 2, and 4 are simply incorrect.
The greatest weapon Europeans had was neither guns nor steel, but native alliances, which you seem to have read about. Similarly, the titular germs were not inherently devastating. Epidemics started after European intervention in the form of slave trades, forced resettlement, or the like. Diamond’s depiction of European arrival is mostly incorrect.
White people having the “cargo” is a result of colonial practices of the newly globalized world. Colonialists typically worked with local elites to exploit already disadvantaged populations
That leaves us with number 3, which is what I presume you are asking about. How do local mammals, available crops, etc. play into the development of civilizations? The shorthand for this mechanism of historical processes is environmental or geographical determinism. As I’m sure you’ve seen on the sub (if not, do a quick search for “determinism”), there’s dozens of questions that pop up regularly:
How much does Diamond rely on it? How central is it to his thesis?
Where do we draw the line between “were able to” and “did?” If Diamond proves the ability to conquer, how does that relate in any way to the actual conquest event?
What then is the reason the Spanish had ships and the Aztecs didn’t? And so on.
Again, I’m kind of sick of this. I and many other flairs have discussed these questions in good faith with people whose ideas are not going to change, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve dug myself into some holes. You’re right. There’s not many books or articles out there that offer a sound, thorough rebuttal of Diamond’s brand of environmental determinism.
And I, for one, couldn’t care less. Why?
I have better things to do than critique explanations for events that never happened.
Let’s suppose I’m reading a lab report from a student. Tommy writes that when he mixed two clear liquids together, a purple solid formed at the bottom of the beaker. Tommy determines that this solid is a chemical called Purple. The report has some figuring to show that the only two clear liquids that combine to form Purple are Chemical A and Chemical B. “Great job!” I write on Tommy’s paper.. and then I turn to the photographs he has attached of the lab. Silly Tommy! The solid in the photos is obviously green, and there are bright yellow bubbles.
I’m now stuck with a dilemma. What do I make of the reaction Tommy’s come up with? Is he a good scientist? There’s sound internal logic in the reaction he has plotted. Chemicals A and B do make Purple when mixed. But at the same time, thinking the solid was purple and missing the bubbles is so outrageously ignorant and unobservant that Tommy obviously has some work to do. Did he even do the experiment?
This is where we stand with Diamond. Just as Chemicals A and B do in fact make Purple, environmental determinism is not inherently a flawed historical mechanism. Abundant, stable, and nutritious fish populations on the Peruvian coast encouraged early sedentism in South America. Close access to obsidian, iron, gold, or other commodities gave many polities trade privileges. Wheels are dumb in mountains. The divergent developments of cultures across seven continents can of course, in some ways, be attributed to their environments- wild seed sizes, protein content centrality, and all.
At the same time, Diamond pins the present state of the world, the difference in “cargo,” on events that never happened. Just as Tommy’s report extrapolated causes from a flawed version of an event, Diamond extrapolates causes for a conquest that didn’t happen. (Let’s not get into the teleological flaws of such histories.) In a world where conquistadors bested Aztecs with with guns and Spanish friars set up missions in communities devastated by plague, Diamond’s arguments would matter. But this is a world where Tlaxcalans bested Aztecs, and Spanish friars set up many failed missions before gaining a foothold and witnessing entirely disrupted populations fall to disease afterwards.
Thus, even if we validate with absolute certainty that the Eurasian continent gave its residents greater contact with domesticated animals, and that larger wild seed sizes were able to support larger urban populations, and that these in tandem gave Europeans a increased resistance to disease it wouldn’t matter. History as Diamond describes it still would not have happened. It never did. The given effects did not happen, so we must question the validity of the causes.
If you’re arguing that Ross Perot became president in 1992 instead of Bill Clinton, it doesn’t matter if you think that Clinton’s campaign was sabotaged by the Chinese or that Perot personally changed all ballots to votes for him: he didn’t win, so why debate what made him win? In the same way, I’m not going to waste my time critiquing Diamond’s brand of environmental determinism because it explains events that never happened.
To provide some resources about your other questions:
The simplest and most common critique of Diamond is that he’s reliant on environmental determinism exclusively. There are 5000 ways to study history, and choosing just one is never good.
Beyond Germs which you can pick up for a decent price, dismantles the idea that pre-existing factors caused native depopulation by disease. Diseases killed, yes, but primarily as a result of European practices post-contact. Mass resettlement into compact and unsanitary reduccion towns, disruption and destruction of traditional foodways, abusive forced labor in mines and hacienda plantations, and other factors all enabled diseases to assault an already weakened populace. Resistance had little to do with.
The “unequal development” of Eurasia and the Americas was not that unequal. There’s also no reason to assume they should have followed similar, and most “advanced” things are really just “more European.”
I would take a look at “World Systems” theory as an idea behind the development of the modern balances of power and wealth.
I thought I’d throw in my 2c’s and tell you exactly why I, personally, have issues with Diamond. I’m mainly going to focus on the Conquest of the Americas, because it is my area, and this was also the ‘turning point,’ as identified by Diamond himself.
The big challenge with debating Guns, Germs, and Steel, is that Diamond is not exactly wrong. The points he raises are valid. Disease and technology did play a role in the European domination of the world. The problem is that Diamond makes several basic, let’s call them assumptions, regarding some parts of his argument, especially revolving around agriculture and writing. In addition, there are several points that Diamond completely ignores or dismisses, such as Native disunity and human agency.
Let’s begin with the big set piece, Cajamarca. Diamond uses this set piece as a vehicle to demonstrate his arguments. To him, the Incas are defeated by a combination of technology and literacy. However, his portrayal of the incident is incomplete, and myopic. My first question is, why this incident? Why Cajamarca, and not Otumba, a battle against the Aztecs? This might seem like a bit of a nit-picky question, but the Aztecs were the first major Native American Empire to fall to the Spanish. This war basically created stereotypical views on the clash of culture. However, dealing with the Aztecs would bring up two points that contradict his argument. First, there is the belief that Motecuhzoma mistook Cortes for a returning god. Now, historians have largely dismissed the idea that the Aztecs thought the Spanish gods. However, dealing with the issue brings up the question of human agency. Second, the Conquest of Mexico took place in the midst of an Indigenous civil war, with the Tlaxcalans playing a prominent role in the conflict. Both of these challenge Diamond’s thesis of Environmental Determinism. It doesn’t help that the Aztecs inflicted some serious defeats on the Spanish, most notably La Noche Triste, questioning his technological argument. So he shifts his attention to Cajamarca, where these issues are less noticeable.
As for Cajamarca itself, Diamond makes two big mistakes. First, he presents it as a battle, when it really was not. Atahualpa’s retinue was unarmed and unarmoured. It was less a battle and more of a massacre. At that point the technological difference hardly matters. Second, he makes assumptions about Atahualpa’s intentions, blaming his decision to meet Pizzaro on a lack of a literate culture. Atahualpa could not see the obvious trap because he was not well read enough to know about deception. This view is problematic for several reasons, but the most important here is that it makes assumptions about Atahualpa’s intentions. The truth is, we don’t really know what Atahualpa was thinking. However, I have read some (secondary) sources that imply that Pizzaro and the Inca were discussing rebellions in Peru, and Atahualpa may have thought that Pizzaro was a mercenary offering to fight for him. Unfortunately, I’m not an expert on the Incas, so I’ll leave the guesswork there. Suffice to say, Diamond’s assertion that Atahualpa was ignorant is highly dubious, to say the least.
There are lot of other little things wrong with Cajamarca. For example, Diamond states that Conquistadors wore steel armour (most did not), that Native armour couldn’t protect indigenous warriors (it could), and the idea that technological adaption was restricted to a few indigenous groups, (it was actually pretty common). Basically, Diamond’s demonstrative example is a pretty poor choice. But let’s change tracks here and look at his points more generally.
Guns and Steel:
The easiest part of Diamond’s argument to understand are his technological points. After all, the power of a sword of gun can be demonstrated, tested, measured. However, the issue is much more complicated than it seems. While there is no doubt that Spanish steel swords were effective weapons, the Conquistadors were definitely better off with them, there is the question over exactly how effective they were in practice. The Aztecs for example, had the macahuitl, their obsidian swords. Although not as effective as a steel sword, they were still dangerous weapons that were capable of killing a horse in a single blow. They also came in two-handed varieties, which were longer than Spanish swords. Thus, the Aztecs fought the Spanish on relatively even terms, and it is not clear that the steel (though stronger than obsidian), would have been enough to make up the difference.
A lot of other Spanish weapons were much less clearly advantageous, often having serious limitations. Gunpowder weapons were slow, inaccurate, clumsy, and frequently lacked powder. They were useless in the wet, and noisy. Crossbows were more effective, but suffered from slow fire rates. Native bows were not quite as damaging, but nevertheless, they were still powerful. Furthermore, they could be fired several times for each crossbow bolt. Horse too, often regarded as the Spanish ‘ace up the sleeve,’ were much less effective than reported. Central Mexican warriors often stood their ground against cavalry, even to the point of grapping the riders’ lances. In any case, the Spanish only had a limited supply of these weapons, so it is hard to know if they really had an appreciable effect.
Conversely, Native societies proved far more adaptable than Diamond realizes, both technologically and tactically. Although Diamond is well aware of technological adaptation (he has a whole chapter on it), he tends to downplay it with the Spanish Conquest. Yet, many native peoples, especially Mesoamericans, responded to Spanish technological challenges with technological and tactical innovations of their own. The Aztecs used captured Spanish swords to make pikes to counter enemy cavalry. They also armoured their canoes to protect them against bolts and gunshot. They even attempted to use Spanish crossbows against them. Tactically, they switched to raids, urban warfare, night attacks, and ambushes. Nor were the Aztecs unique. The Mapuche in Chile rapidly adopted Spanish arms, eventually fielding pike and cavalry squadrons in battle. In general, it took less than two decades for Native Americans to be as heavily armed as their European opponents. Obviously, technology was an advantage for the Spanish. But it became less of an advantage every moment of those critical years. Eventually, European technology pulled ahead, but the Conquest of the Americas was already over at that point. Of all the factors, it was probably the least decisive.
Germs:
Germs seems like a slam dunk for Diamond’s arguments, and to be clear, I don’t doubt that Diamond is right here. Diseases did play a major role in the Spanish Conquest. My objection is that Diamond portrays a very simplified narrative. By which I mean he notices the disease, but does not seem to fully realise its consequences. Let’s look at the Inca civil war. Now Diamond certainly acknowledges that the Incas were in the midst of internal strife. Yet he doesn’t use this knowledge to better understand the events of Cajamarca. He seems to regard the Inca civil war as a simple and completed affair, a side show to the Spanish Conquest. Yet, the Inca nobility was still fighting each other when Atahualpa was imprisoned. Atahualpa even had his rival, Huscar, killed despite being a hostage at the time. Atahualpa’s successor himself was assassinated. This may explain why Atahualpa agreed to meet Pizzaro. It may explain why the Inca army did not immediately attack. They didn’t know who was in charge.
A similar pattern occurred in other conflicts, such as the Conquest of the Aztec Empire. The smallpox plague did not just kill Aztecs, it broke apart their political system. The same pattern repeated across the Americas. Native states could never form a coherent defence against Europeans because disease kept undermining their political structures.
But wait, there’s more. The way historians, Diamond, and people more generally, have regarded disease is also kind of problematic. The great plagues are usually viewed as somehow separate, from the rest of the colonization process, even though Europeans are acknowledged to be the ultimate source. However, even as disease facilitated the conquest, the conquest facilitated the germs. Generally, disease was devastating in the short term, but populations, if left alone, could recover in time. Spanish policies, including slave raiding, mission systems, coercive labour, and congregation, prevented this. Famine that resulted exacerbated the plagues, as starving people fell vulnerable to illness. In the US, thousands of Native peoples died as a result of US policies, even if the killer was technically a germ. Those who died in the reservation system were not the victims of virgin soil epidemics, which had long since passed. Colonial policies often created conditions for pathogens to thrive, even if the Europeans had no real control over the bacterium itself. This complicates Diamond’s argument, as this particular problem is rooted in the Colonial experience, and not from the origins of agriculture, as Guns, Germs, and Steel argues.
Books:
One part of Diamond’s argument revolves around the benefit of literacy. Personally, I find this assertion questionable. The first problem is that there is no way to quantify the advantage of writing. Especially as most conquistadors, including Pizzaro himself, were illiterate. Second, how does this argument account for peoples such as the Mongols, who routinely crushed (not just defeated), literate societies. In the context of the Americas, groups like the Mapuche resisted fiercely, despite being supposedly illiterate. Third, many indigenous groups, illiterate or not, used advanced and complex tactics. Fourth, the Inca were literate, using their quipu as a form of book. This argument is weak, and I think should be dismissed.
Agriculture:
Agriculture is an incredibly important part of Diamond’s argument. Yet, even here he makes some critical errors. First, he greatly underestimates the amount of land in the Americas that was under cultivation. Partly, Diamond is a victim of recent archaeological discoveries, which show that Indigenous societies throughout a much larger portion of the Americas (including Brazil, Columbia, and large parts of North America), farmed. Not only that, they were much more connected than Diamond realises, complicating his east/west, north/south argument. However, a bigger problem is that Diamond does not fully understand the nature of agriculture in the Americas. He seems to think that it was less productive and efficient (largely due to animals) than European agriculture. The opposite is true. European agriculture was typically unproductive and underdeveloped, partly because of animals. Using Spain as an example, many Spanish lords preferred to raise stock, including sheep, because it was more profitable than agriculture, using prime agricultural land for their private wealth. Mesoamericans on the other hand used chinampas and wetland agriculture to produce huge food surpluses. The Aztec Empire may have had double the population of Spain.
The Aztecs were not unique in this. High intensity agriculture was practises all over the Americas, including in Peru. In the American South-East Hernando de Soto claimed to have passed through 12 towns in a single day. Even Brazil was filled with densely populated communities. So why is this important? Two reasons. First, it complicates Diamond’s deterministic narrative. After all, if the Americas were ‘blessed’ with superior crops (such as maize and sweet potatoes), then why didn’t this count for more? Second, because it was the introduction of these crops that fuelled a population boom in Early Modern Europe. Maize in particular became an essential part of the diet in the Mediterranean, while the potato became the staple of northern and central Europe. Without these crops, Europe may not have been able to sustain its colonisation of the rest of the world, although I admit this point is debatable. This is a problem for Diamond’s argument, as it implies that one of the key components of European superiority does not rest with the origins of agriculture, but on events that occurred after 1492.
Native Disunity:
Of course, this is only what Diamond talks about. There is also a huge amount that he barely addresses. The main issue here is Native disunity, a topic Diamond dismisses relatively quickly. Fortunately for me, a lot of research has gone into this question, and so I don’t need to belabour it too much. Suffice to say, native assistance, either passive or active, was present at almost every step of the Spanish Conquest and was also a feature of North American colonisation. The most famous example is of course, Tlaxcala, however other groups were just as important. Another example may be the Mohawk in New England. During King Philip’s War, the aforementioned King Philip attempted to recruit the Mohawk as allies. However, the British managed to flip them to their side, by claiming that Philip intended to attack them. The resulting Mohawk attack was the worst defeat Philip ever suffered, and it probably cost him the war. I could list more examples, but enough has been said of this. Diamond barely even tries to explain this away.
Agency and Opportunity:
And this is the most difficult section to talk about. There is a problem with ascribing events to ‘culture’ as such arguments can easily descend into racism. To avoid this, we perhaps should think of these events in terms of circumstances. So how did individuals make their choices, and how did this affect the outcome of European colonisation? Well, Motecuhzoma may be a good person to start with. Why didn’t he respond more aggressively to the Spanish? The general explanation (he mistook Cortes for a god) has long been discredited. Perhaps we should ask, why would he? Motecuhzoma’s Empire was powerful and prosperous, why would he feel threatened by a motely bunch of adventurers. Furthermore, Cortes presented himself as the ambassador from the King of Spain, and so Motecuhzoma treated him as such. On the other hand, the Spanish had a long history of befriending, and then betraying, friendly native lords, which Motecuhzoma couldn’t have known. This came to a head during the Toxcatl massacre, where several thousand unarmed Aztecs, many of them high ranking officials and officers, were slaughtered. The Spanish also seized Aztec nobles as prisoners, only to execute many of them during their flight from Tenochtitlan. These strategies, developed during the early years of the Spanish Colonial enterprise, played a key role in weakening native societies.
In north America, the settlement at Massachusetts was facilitated by Massasoit, leader of the Wampanoag. The Wampanoag had been weakened by disease and subjugated by the Narraganset (again we see a disease having an effect greater than the casualties it caused). To regain his political and economic strength, he allowed the English settle in his territory, so he could control trade with them, a decision that eventually backfired on the Wampanoag.
The problem with the agency argument, is that it contradicts Diamond’s determinism. In theory, though we may never know for sure, it was possible for Indigenous people to make different choices, that would have changed the outcome of the Conquest. If Atahualpa had taken armed men to Cajamarca, maybe his body guard could have put up greater resistance, enough for the Inca to escape, or even defeat the Conquerors. Maybe if Motecuhzoma had sensed the danger posed by Cortes, he could have intervened before it was too late.
Conclusion:
The ultimate problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel, is that it treats the European domination of the globe as a single, albeit drawn out, event, whose outcome was determined more than 10, 000 years ago. The colonisation of the world was not a single process, but lots of little ones, between which the position of Europe to the rest of the world keeps changing. Europe encountered the Americas before it became modern, and was a very different place after the mid-17th century than when colonisation began. Indeed, it was transformed by its colonisation of the Americas. The ‘Europe’ that met the Aztecs was different from the ‘Europe’ that colonised Africa. As a result, it is hard to argue that there was a set group of factors that explained Europe’s eventual victory. The USA defeated the Plains Indians thanks to its population and technology, but these factors were irrelevant during the Spanish siege of Tenochtitlan three and a half centuries earlier. Conversely, native allies and disease were not critical in the defeat of the Sioux or Comanche, while they were all decisive against the Aztecs.
To expand on these points, we are used to the narrative of history pointing to European supremacy, yet there were many times when Indigenous people defeated Europeans, and I don’t just mean in the odd battle, here or there. I’ve already mentioned the Mapuche and how they were never conquered by the Spanish. Well here is an example where Guns, Germs, and Steel did not win. It wasn’t until the 1880s that modern Chile came to dominate Mapuche territory, long after the virgin soil epidemics had ended and the population was fully familiar with European weaponry. A similar set of events played out in Northern Mexico during the Chichimeca War. The nomadic peoples of Northern Mexico defeated the Spanish in a 60 year war and had to be culturally absorbed. Even then, nomadic peoples like the Comanche and Apache plagued New Spain for centuries. This presents an important irony in Guns, Germs, and Steel. The people closest to the Spanish (in terms of technology and society) were ‘easier,’ to defeat than nomadic people who were much further ‘behind,’ them. Diamond’s argument doesn’t really account for this, as it implies that a ‘break in the chain,’ could have changed the outcome, contradicting its essential determinism.
None of this means that Diamond’s points are completely wrong. Disease certainly weakened native societies. Weapons gave Conquistadors some important victories. However, the impact of these factors varied between conflict and over time, and Diamond ignores other critical factors that help explain Europe’s rise.
I read some of Diamond’s books as a teenager, and not much else on the topic. It’s unclear to me if those critiques are saying “It would have been better if you hadn’t read anything at all” or if they’re saying “Diamond oversimplified things a lot.”
The rhetoric in the critiques seems to imply the former, but then the specific arguments are more about details of case studies rather than something that necessarily refutes the general thrust of Diamond’s thesis?
I mean, I think it’s a common view that if you tell a just-so-story and get empirical claims importantly wrong, your entire view is now refuted. However, I think there are occasions where the point of just-so-stories is more like “Something along those lines has to be true” rather than “This is how it must have happened.” And it seems possible to me to know enough about a topic to make a claim like “Geographical determinism is mostly right” even while being mistaken about some of the specifics. It’s kind of similar to evolutionary psychology and claims like “Women are more likely to cheat with high-testosterone men” and then later it turns out that this finding doesn’t replicate. Does that now mean that evolutionary psychology is wrong? Not really.
Of course, it’s obviously important to have good scholarship skills and get the details right! I’m just wondering about how far-reaching the update should be from learning of these critiques.
I’ve taken some anthropology classes at uni before social justice culture went more mainstream and already found the field (or at least the corners of it that I had access to) to be very “ideological” with respect to anything related to power/conquest, etc., and I got the same impressions more recently from broader observations. From what I remember, Diamond made it clear in his books that he thinks geographical determinism is an antidote to racist or colonialist thinking. The first person you quote seems to acknowledge that with the phrase “though I do not believe this was his intent.” Still, the author of that passage seems to think that Diamond was subconsciously motivated to paint some groups as inherently inferior, or something like that. And I don’t understand why they think that. For instance, there’s this part of the passage:
[..] too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms.
Isn’t the whole point that stupidity has nothing to do with (e.g.) not domesticating an animal you cannot find in your region? If your continent only has useless marsupials you’re not gonna be able to domesticate a mammal, no matter how clever you are.
This example reinforces my expectation that books like GG&S are generally poorly received in fields that react allergically to any investigation into the underlying causes of conquests or of inequality, whether that research is ill-motivated or not. That doesn’t automatically say that the critiques are overstated, but it contributes to my uncertainty about how to update.
tl;dr I’ve read those quotes but feel unsure how much to update, partly because it’s common for people to have probably-misguided methodological objections to the type of thing Diamond was trying to do (ambitious theorizing about underlying drivers of history) and partly because of ideological currents in the fields of anthropology and sociology.
[..] too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms.
Isn’t the whole point that stupidity has nothing to do with (e.g.) not domesticating an animal you cannot find in your region?
Yes. This is what Jared Diamond was arguing against. He is very clear and explicit about it.
The main point of Diamond books seemed to me to be that European dominated the world because of sheer geographic luck and emphatically NOT because they were more intelligent than Asian, American or African. Accusing him of latent racism seems really disingenuous to me.
Still, the author of that passage seems to think that Diamond was subconsciously motivated to paint some groups as inherently inferior, or something like that. And I don’t understand why they think that.
In fact, he explicitly said this, just not in the direction that critic thinks. Diamond thought Europeans were inferior.
From the very beginning of my work with New Guineans, they impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people around them than the average European or American is. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners.
… Intelligent people are likelier than less intelligent ones to escape those causes of high mortality in traditional New Guinea societies. However, the differential mortality from epidemic diseases in traditional European societies had little to do with intelligence, and instead involved genetic resistance dependent on details of body chemistry. For example, people with blood group B or O have a greater resistance to smallpox than do people with blood group A.
That is, natural selection promoting genes for intelligence has probably been far more ruthless in New Guinea than in more densely populated, politically complex societies, where natural selection for body chemistry was instead more potent. Besides this genetic reason, there is also a second reason why New Guineans may have come to be smarter than Westerners. Modern European and American children spend much of their time being passively entertained by television, radio, and movies. In the average American household, the TV set is on for seven hours per day. In contrast, traditional New Guinea children have virtually no such opportunities for passive entertainment and instead spend almost all of their waking hours actively doing something, such as talking or playing with other children or adults.
… This effect surely contributes a non-genetic component to the superior average mental function displayed by New Guineans. That is, in mental ability New Guineans are probably genetically superior to Westerners, and they surely are superior in escaping the devastating developmental disadvantages under which most children in industrialized societies now grow up. … The same two genetic and childhood developmental factors are likely to distinguish not only New Guineans from Westerners, but also hunter-gatherers and other members of technologically primitive societies from members of technologically advanced societies in general.
Thus, the usual racist assumption has to be turned on its head. Why is it that Europeans, despite their likely genetic disadvantage and (in modern times) their undoubted developmental disadvantage, ended up with much more of the cargo? Why did New Guineans wind up technologically primitive, despite what I believe to be their superior intelligence?
(Editing note: paragraph breaks got lost when I copied from kindle, I’ve added some back in but probably not the original ones.)
A lot of this is about modern Europeans and Americans versus modern New Guineans, but I’ve bolded a couple of passages where he says he thinks it was true historically too.
You bring up several points. I don’t think the livestock transmission theory of disease creation is very important. I think what matters is that Eurasia had large, interconnected cities than America, Subsaharan Africa and Australia. That alone is enough to explain the evolution of pandemic diseases.
If we interpret the title literally as describing just “guns”, “germs” [from livestock] and “steel [swords and armor]” then yes, there was more to the conquest of the Mesoamerican civilizations than (literally) steel, guns and horses. European steel production wasn’t that great. Early guns sucked. Horses were quickly adopted by Native Americans. I don’t doubt that those technologies helped, but I think disease, long-range ships and deep symbiotic connections to the more sophisticated Eurasian transcontinental civilization were the most important factors.
The point about “Native Americans…unable react to new weapons/military tactics” seems like a strawman to me. The Plains Indians (just to name one example) were extraordinary combatants famous for their efficient use of rifles. To defeat them, the United States had to terraform the entire Great Plains, and that was a hundred years into the Industrial Revolution. Incidentally, I did read 1491. It’s on my list of the top 13 history books I recommend.
I think the quotes you link mostly attack Jared Diamond’s case, not mine. For example the idea that ““advanced” things are really just “more European.”” feels at odds with my opening sentences “For most of history, China was the center of civilization. It had the biggest cities, the most complex government, the highest quality manufacturing, the most industrial capacity, the most advanced technology, the best historical records and the largest armies. It dominated East Asia at the center of an elaborate tribute system for a thousand years.”
A common theme in the arguments you quote is that Europeans defeated the Mesoamerican civilizations because the Mesoamerican civilizations were divided. I think this fits in neatly with how long-range ships gave European powers the ability to pick advantageous terms (and times) of engagement.
To clarify, I agree with Jared Diamond’s overall thesis that the interconnected trade networks linking giant cities on the Eurasian biome (including North Africa) produced network effects that gave Eurasia an unassailable advantage over America, Australia and (probably) Subsaharan Africa. In this context, I think of “guns” and “steel” as catchy concrete shorthand for the the more verbose and abstract “technology and heavy industry”. I think that Eurasian (including north African) dominance over America and Australia (Subsaharan Africa is more nuanced) was so overdetermined by the 15th century that it doesn’t matter to my core thesis whether Jared Diamond was right or wrong about all of his particulars.
Do you disagree with my core takeaway from Jared Diamond that Eurasian (including north African) dominance over America and Australia (and, to a lesser extent, Subsaharan Africa) was overdetermined by the 15th century due to Old World network effects related to technology, disease and industrial capacity stemming from large interconnected population centers?
Do you disagree with my core takeaway from Jared Diamond that Eurasian (including north African) dominance over America and Australia (and, to a lesser extent, Subsaharan Africa) was overdetermined by the 15th century due to Old World network effects related to technology, disease and industrial capacity stemming from large interconnected population centers?
I don’t feel competent enough to have an opinion about it, but Deveraux said a similar thing in the post I linked in the other comment, so it seems plausible in general.
I would take a look at “World Systems” theory as an idea behind the development of the modern balances of power and wealth.
Ironically, World Systems Theory is discredited in economics departments with similar reasoning as this criticism of Diamond=both ignore the established practice of an academic field and both explain things that never happened.
Note that GGS is considered very poorly by historians as far as I understand, see e.g. this AskHistorians comment:
or this one:
or this one:
I read some of Diamond’s books as a teenager, and not much else on the topic. It’s unclear to me if those critiques are saying “It would have been better if you hadn’t read anything at all” or if they’re saying “Diamond oversimplified things a lot.”
The rhetoric in the critiques seems to imply the former, but then the specific arguments are more about details of case studies rather than something that necessarily refutes the general thrust of Diamond’s thesis?
I mean, I think it’s a common view that if you tell a just-so-story and get empirical claims importantly wrong, your entire view is now refuted. However, I think there are occasions where the point of just-so-stories is more like “Something along those lines has to be true” rather than “This is how it must have happened.” And it seems possible to me to know enough about a topic to make a claim like “Geographical determinism is mostly right” even while being mistaken about some of the specifics. It’s kind of similar to evolutionary psychology and claims like “Women are more likely to cheat with high-testosterone men” and then later it turns out that this finding doesn’t replicate. Does that now mean that evolutionary psychology is wrong? Not really.
Of course, it’s obviously important to have good scholarship skills and get the details right! I’m just wondering about how far-reaching the update should be from learning of these critiques.
I’ve taken some anthropology classes at uni before social justice culture went more mainstream and already found the field (or at least the corners of it that I had access to) to be very “ideological” with respect to anything related to power/conquest, etc., and I got the same impressions more recently from broader observations. From what I remember, Diamond made it clear in his books that he thinks geographical determinism is an antidote to racist or colonialist thinking. The first person you quote seems to acknowledge that with the phrase “though I do not believe this was his intent.” Still, the author of that passage seems to think that Diamond was subconsciously motivated to paint some groups as inherently inferior, or something like that. And I don’t understand why they think that. For instance, there’s this part of the passage:
Isn’t the whole point that stupidity has nothing to do with (e.g.) not domesticating an animal you cannot find in your region? If your continent only has useless marsupials you’re not gonna be able to domesticate a mammal, no matter how clever you are.
This example reinforces my expectation that books like GG&S are generally poorly received in fields that react allergically to any investigation into the underlying causes of conquests or of inequality, whether that research is ill-motivated or not. That doesn’t automatically say that the critiques are overstated, but it contributes to my uncertainty about how to update.
tl;dr I’ve read those quotes but feel unsure how much to update, partly because it’s common for people to have probably-misguided methodological objections to the type of thing Diamond was trying to do (ambitious theorizing about underlying drivers of history) and partly because of ideological currents in the fields of anthropology and sociology.
Yes. This is what Jared Diamond was arguing against. He is very clear and explicit about it.
The main point of Diamond books seemed to me to be that European dominated the world because of sheer geographic luck and emphatically NOT because they were more intelligent than Asian, American or African. Accusing him of latent racism seems really disingenuous to me.
In fact, he explicitly said this, just not in the direction that critic thinks. Diamond thought Europeans were inferior.
(Editing note: paragraph breaks got lost when I copied from kindle, I’ve added some back in but probably not the original ones.)
A lot of this is about modern Europeans and Americans versus modern New Guineans, but I’ve bolded a couple of passages where he says he thinks it was true historically too.
You bring up several points. I don’t think the livestock transmission theory of disease creation is very important. I think what matters is that Eurasia had large, interconnected cities than America, Subsaharan Africa and Australia. That alone is enough to explain the evolution of pandemic diseases.
If we interpret the title literally as describing just “guns”, “germs” [from livestock] and “steel [swords and armor]” then yes, there was more to the conquest of the Mesoamerican civilizations than (literally) steel, guns and horses. European steel production wasn’t that great. Early guns sucked. Horses were quickly adopted by Native Americans. I don’t doubt that those technologies helped, but I think disease, long-range ships and deep symbiotic connections to the more sophisticated Eurasian transcontinental civilization were the most important factors.
The point about “Native Americans…unable react to new weapons/military tactics” seems like a strawman to me. The Plains Indians (just to name one example) were extraordinary combatants famous for their efficient use of rifles. To defeat them, the United States had to terraform the entire Great Plains, and that was a hundred years into the Industrial Revolution. Incidentally, I did read 1491. It’s on my list of the top 13 history books I recommend.
I think the quotes you link mostly attack Jared Diamond’s case, not mine. For example the idea that ““advanced” things are really just “more European.”” feels at odds with my opening sentences “For most of history, China was the center of civilization. It had the biggest cities, the most complex government, the highest quality manufacturing, the most industrial capacity, the most advanced technology, the best historical records and the largest armies. It dominated East Asia at the center of an elaborate tribute system for a thousand years.”
A common theme in the arguments you quote is that Europeans defeated the Mesoamerican civilizations because the Mesoamerican civilizations were divided. I think this fits in neatly with how long-range ships gave European powers the ability to pick advantageous terms (and times) of engagement.
Yeah, I included them because the line of yours that I quoted made it sound like you endorse his case overall (separate from your own argument).
To clarify, I agree with Jared Diamond’s overall thesis that the interconnected trade networks linking giant cities on the Eurasian biome (including North Africa) produced network effects that gave Eurasia an unassailable advantage over America, Australia and (probably) Subsaharan Africa. In this context, I think of “guns” and “steel” as catchy concrete shorthand for the the more verbose and abstract “technology and heavy industry”. I think that Eurasian (including north African) dominance over America and Australia (Subsaharan Africa is more nuanced) was so overdetermined by the 15th century that it doesn’t matter to my core thesis whether Jared Diamond was right or wrong about all of his particulars.
Do you disagree with my core takeaway from Jared Diamond that Eurasian (including north African) dominance over America and Australia (and, to a lesser extent, Subsaharan Africa) was overdetermined by the 15th century due to Old World network effects related to technology, disease and industrial capacity stemming from large interconnected population centers?
I don’t feel competent enough to have an opinion about it, but Deveraux said a similar thing in the post I linked in the other comment, so it seems plausible in general.
Ironically, World Systems Theory is discredited in economics departments with similar reasoning as this criticism of Diamond=both ignore the established practice of an academic field and both explain things that never happened.