Uh, what do you think proselytism is?
Re: Excuse me good sir, but Buddhist don’t proselytize. At least, none of the Buddhists I know.
Because the Buddhists you know (of the Westernized sort, I’m guessing) are a representative sample of Buddhism. Clearly.
Buddhism is absolutely a religion of conversion, like Hinduism was in the middle ages but is no longer. How else do you think much of East, Northeast, and Southeast Asia became largely or mostly Buddhist today?
Re: Islam isn’t big on trying to convert people, either…they just blow shit up.
I assume that’s a joke, but Islam, like Christianity (and Buddhism) is absolutely a religion of conversion. Sometimes by the sword, but more often not.
Incidentally, let’s not leave out that modern science was invented in early-modern Europe, though it had some precursors in ancient Greece, the medieval Islamic world, and elsewhere. Technological advancement comes quicker when you have a body of theory (modern physics, chemistry, and later biology) to put it in context.
Umm, confronting random strangers and demanding that they kneel and submit to some fairy tale character? At least that’s what I’ve always assumed it is.
Naturally, I’m a Westernized Buddhist. In fact, I’m only ½ Buddhist (the good half). The other half is a secret to everyone. 
Cite?
Really, I would love to read a journal article or, gasp!, an actual book discussing this. As I am not an historian, or a geographer, I don’t know much about this.
(And don’t mock us for not understanding how the Mercator Projection that we have been exposed to our entire lives has mislead us.)
Buddhism, like Christianity and Islam, regards itself as a universal religion that holds answers for all people and wants to share those answers. That’s the basics of proselytism right there.
As others have said, proselytism doesn’t just mean annoying people at their doorways or threatening people with a sword. Those are the worst negative forms of proselytism. The better forms are seeking to convert people to your beliefs by education and setting a good example.
You can start here. You don’t have to buy all of his premises - I certainly don’t, particularly his predictions for the future. But Frank helpfully spends much of the book collating and presenting the research of others re: the economic comparison between pre-modern Europe and the rest of the pre-modern “developed” world ( i.e. China, India, ME ). Though he is a bit disorganized and rambly at times.
An interesting book which does an excellent job of answering the question of why Europe might have been more successful in colonizing the world than Hawaii, or South America, or Australia. But which does not at all address why Europe did a better job of colonizing the world than India or China or Mongolia.
Two things about Diamond’s book have always bothered me.
-
he claims Eurasia had domesticatable animals like the horse and other continents did not. E.g., the zebra. Do we actually know that the original wild horses were more easy to domesticate than a zebra. They were domesticated in prehistory so what do we know about the original wild ones. Later wild ones could easily be descended, at least in part, from domestic stock.
-
The east-west orientation of Eurasia meant crops etc,. could easily be moved to other areas. But if the America’s had come to dominate, the argument would have been, the north-south orientation meant that many different things had to be tried and this lead to various developments which meant to faster over-all progress.
If I recall correctly, it does address the question of why China or India didn’t colonize other places. One main reason, as was mentioned above, was that they did in fact govern a huge tract of land in Asia. There were some travels to other parts of the world. However, at some point the rulers decided that such adventures were not a good idea, and forbade further efforts. In China, if the single group in control turned you down for travel funding you had nowhere else to go. In Europe, well, we all know how Chris Columbus tried several different rulers before getting his funding from Spain. According to Diamond, the geography of Europe is well-suited to the development of several competing rulers as compared to China.
-
People have tried to domesticate every available animal. Even today, it is very difficult to tame, for example, zebras. After cattle were introduced from Europe several African groups became excellent at maintaining them. If any of the native African animals could have been usefully domesticated, they would have been.
-
The Inca and Aztec empires did not spread into more northern locations mostly because of geography, again. The intervening area was quite inhospitable and they had no way of knowing there was additional useful land even farther north.
Oh, so it’s like wanting to share baby photos or wedding albums and stuff. Or teaching a loved one not to do drugs by not doing drugs yourself. I’m surprised you would call that sort of thing “proselytism”; because, it’s just about basic sharing the things that inspire you (and sometimes I am indeed forced to look at someone’s photos or else they’ll threaten me with a stick, LoL) Anyway, it’s no big matter – /hijack. 
Modern attempts to domesticate zebras & other non-Eurasian wildlife have mostly failed. (And “domesticate” ≠ “tame”, natch.) If we can’t do it with 21st century science, it’s no wonder our ancient ancestors have never been able to do it.
Except, agriculture is the ultimate foundation of civilization itself. And many early North American cultures did develop agriculture independently, but they were unable to exchange the secrets of raising maize, tomatoes & coffee, for example.
I’m not really seeing the connection between baby pictures and religion but okay, I guess.
How come ostrich riding never took off in Africa? Never mind, they tire easily.
Proselytism simply means trying to convert people to your religion. Doesn’t have to feature a sword or making demands : just going about telling other people “hey, I have this god story you should really listen to, because I think it’s teh awsumz !” is the heart and soul of proselytism. Buddhism is an actively proselytizing religion w/ missionaries and everything, and hasn’t always been peace-like about it either (e.g. things like Sohei monks & the Ikko-Ikki sect of Japan).
Contrast with Judaism for example, which not only doesn’t proselytize or seek more converts, but typically has a high threshold for spontaneous would-be converts since it’s intimately tied with ethnic/tribal considerations.
Thank you. A quick look suggests the User Reviews alone might provide an adequate primer.
Plenty of Europeans were killed off by the local diseases, the Caribbean for example was considered to be a death trap .
So I don’t buy the hypothesis that germs opened the way for Europeans to do whatever they liked .
It was more down to curiousity ,technology, the abiilty to explore worldwide , to innovate, carry out scientific research even when there seemed to be no physical benefit from it, and to make a profit from trading in distant places .
The former making the latter possible .
Right.
In these discussions, I often feel this doesn’t receive appropriate emphasis. Development of the technologies associate with reliable long-distance navigation by sailing ships had enormous influence on the current map of the world. Europeans took the lead in this, and held it for hundreds of years.
This required many things, including:
- Ships, sails, cordage, etc. that could cope with extremes of weather
- Techniques for navigation out of sight of land (including mathematics for celestial navigation)
- Food preservation adequate to keep men alive and tolerably healthy during long voyages
- Development of gunnery
- Mapping
- An understanding of winds and currents
- A financial system that encouraged investment in ships and trade
However, the number of Europeans killed off by western hemisphere germs represented a tiny percentage of the total European population. The European germs killed in some cases the majority of a local populace and left the remainder extremely vulnerable.
For what it’s worth, I think the ‘east west axis’ argument is terrible. You can’t base any scientific conclusion on a sample size of one. If we had four continents with east-west belts and four with north-south ones, then that might be a meaningful comparison.
Also, Africa does have one significantly large east-west belt that’s climatically similar and suitable for agriculture, i.e. the savannah belt from Senegal to Ethiopia.
Some of the difference is ultimately going to be down to historical contingency. Scientific and technological progress advances exponentially, not linearly (well, up to a point), so even very small initial differences in technological advancement or in laying the groundwork for science, will lead to very large differences within a few centuries.