Extending the idea of Guns, germs and steel.

Great Debates
1

I apologize if this has been done, as I don’t think it is a particularly original idea. But I searched and came up empty.

Most here are familiar with Jared Diamond’s hypothesis in Guns, germs and steel. To paraphrase and oversimplify a large tome, Diamond favors the idea that there are no innate differences among the different peoples of the world that would account for the European dominance of the past few centuries. He posits that differences in geography, ranging from the east/west axis of the Asian/European continent to the luck of the draw behind having many domesticable animals and plants in their geographic vicinity allowed Europeans to generate a large enough population that Europeans developed scientific advances, and diseases, that facilitated world conquest.

Many argue against this as being very deterministic; Europeans had no choice but to become conquerers. My question is, doesn’t this imply that had the geographical landscape been different and had, say, North America had an east/west axis and access to horses, cows, wheat, beans et al that the Incas or Aztek would have sailed over to a scientifically backward Spain and spread conquest throughout Europe?

Is there anything different about Europeans that made them more inclined toward conquest and is there any reason to believe that Native Americans (or Australians or Africans for that matter) would have acted differently had they had these advantages.

2

I think that’s what would have happened. IIRC the book mentions that when local groups got access to European technology, many of them used it to attack their neighbors who hadn’t. A period called “The Musket Wars” is mentioned, where the Maori turned on each other, musket armed groups slaughtering the ones who had none - then attacking their neighbors with European style ships.

3

Nope. And remember, the GGaS hypothesis only really explains differences on a continental scale, and for its purposes, Eurasia is one continent, not two. The theory can explain why Eurasians beat Africans, Americans, and Australians rather than the other way around, but it can’t explain why Europeans beat East Asians (in terms of exploration/colonization). At that level, ordinary facts of history, geography, religion, politics, resources, etc. take hold.

4

But, if any of the people on Earth would have done the same thing (conquest, pillage etc), does this absolve the Conquistadors and their like at all? There is no doubt that some terrible, terrible wrongs were done, but if those actions were predestined by geography and human nature and would have been performed by any group of people in the same situation, can we legitimately look back at the actions of the Europeans distastefully?

5

Well, now you’re getting into some other territority. It is, undoubtedly, human nature (indeed, just plain nature, as evidenced by warfare among chimps, etc.) to war, kill, and conquer over and over to gain an advantage for your self/family/tribe/nation. Does that mean it’s good? I don’t think so. It may have been inevitable (in the same way that other genocides, wars, or everyday murders are inevitable), but that doesn’t make it good.

But if there’s any absolution, it’s this: Every tribe in Africa, every band in New Guinea, every nation in the Americas, every ethnic group in Eurasia killed some other group to get the land, etc., that they now rule. Everyone has done it throughout history, but that doesn’t mean it’s necessarily good, and certainly doesn’t mean it should continue.

6

Actually, his theory does have an explanation, at least partially. According to him, the local geography made Asia too easy to unify, especially China. This produced stagnation. In Europe, the countries were big enough to have significant resources, but hard to actally unify; this produced more competition.

7

The means and incentives were there for them to become conquerors. No-one forced them to do it, or prevented them from deciding it was immoral and staying home, or conquering less savagely, or more savagely for that matter. This would work the same way in your hypothetical example too.
I think it’s fair to say that if you set up a large amount of social and economic factors that encourage something, its highly likely to happen. Whether it actually WILL happen, when, or in what fashion are imponderables. India was definitely going to shake off British rule sometime during the twentieth century - given demographics alone, it was almost inevitable. You could spend a lifetime arguing about whether it could have happened sooner, later, more peacefully, more violently, etc. or whether the Raj could somehow have held on.

8

I just wanted to make clear that the “Europeans had no choice but to become conquerers” is part of what I’m trying to figure out with this thread, and not necessarily what I believe myself.

I’m not sure what I believe myself, which is why I wanted to hear some opinions.

9

Not “no choice”, but it was inevitable some would. The temptation was there, and it was inevitable that some would take it. On the other hand, the sheer brutality involved was more cultural; plenty of conquerers have avoided genocide, slavery, and systematic cultural destruction.

10

No, for the same reason that someone with sociopathy/antisocial personality disorder should not be absolved of their crimes. It may have been easier for them to commit genocide and spread terror, but they still made the choice to do it. Heck, you don’t even have to bring sociopathy into it; if I see a $5 bill hanging out of someone’s pocket and take it, I’m still culpable even though the guy who lives a mile away might have made the same choice given the circumstances.

11

Just to say that Cecil has discussed this here

http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a970620.html

12

Taking into account the geographical conditions favoring conquest, also look at the ideology. Christians are taught by their Bible in Genesis 1:28 to “subdue” the earth (KJV). The original verb in Hebrew is radah, ‘to have rule over, to tread down, to sujugate, to scrape out, to cause to dominate’. We have this domination imperative programmed into Western civilization. What about that?

13

Depends whether that’s a cause or an effect, I guess.

Maybe the ideology developed expressly because hebrew society had developed into one in which radah was the principle on which they operated.

14

The Aztecs were not just some large collection of people in South-Central Mexico who decided to organize themselves into an empire. One of the aspects of their conquest by Cortez (that gets missed by the typical “he showed up with horses and armor, gave them smallpox, and took over the country” views that are presented in most (U.S.?) high school history books) is that the Aztecs were actually ruling a very large collection of other subjugated peoples. Cortez finessed several of the larger groups into joining his campaign against Moctezuma.

When Pizzarro went up against the Incas, he discovered a recently created empire that had been created in the previous hundred years through military conquest.

The Indian subcontinent had been conquered by Southwest Asian invaders long before the British showed up.

When the Arabs found a unifying force in religion, they were quick to exploit their new-found unity to launch campaigns of conquest.

The wars and empires that waxed back and forth across what is now Burma/Myanmar, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Laos matched anything that occurred in Europe.

China was quite happy to keep annexing adjacent lands, being restrained more by the natural frontiers and periodic internal dissension than by any deep desire to stay home and tend their gardens. (Even the destruction of their massive fleet of exploration in the fifteenth century was the product of internal strife.)

The Mongols were quite happy extending their conquests to the whole known (to them) world, retreating only when recalled by internal strife. (And having been co-opted by the possession of China when they discovered that they actually had to administer their new possessions.)

I see no reason to believe that there is an inherent psychological aspect to European desire for conquest. It seems to me that the fortuitous (for them) phenomena of the development of gunpowder, the resurgence of shipbuilding, and conditions that were promoting increases in population simply brought together the conditions that prompted aggressive exploration and conquest and that if similar conditions of technology and population had occurred elsewhere, the humans in those places might easily have followed similar paths.

The details of such conquests might have changed, shaped by the cultures of the conquerors, but the general thrust of the actions would have been similar.

15

(Note that Europe did not simply wage a war outward, attacking Russia and North Africa to outflank the Turkish Empire. The Europeans explictly got in their boats and wandered out to go after distant lands.)

16

Before Western Europe took off as a powerhouse in the 17th century, they somehow had divided up into nation states and to a large extent shed their tribal identities. Tribalism, wherever it exists in the world today, seems to correlate to retarded economic and social development. This can be seen in the plight of indigenous peoples in the United States and Canada, and in the progress of many 3rd world countries.

At the time of the Roman empire, northern Europe was rife with dozens of Germanic tribes that even fought each other as mercenaries for Rome, and identified by Tacitus. What happened to these tribes ?

If geography could explain the demise of tribalism and the eary development of nation states in Europe then I could ascribe some relevance to this postulation.

17

When I read GG&S, it was very familiar to me. I took me a while to figure out that it was from the computer game Civilization. Starting position played a huge role in how easy your game was going to be.

If your settler starts off on a small island, you’re fucked. By the time you research ocean going vessels, you find all the continents have been colonized by stronger civs.

If you ended up alone on a small continent, you were safe from aggressive neighbors, but the isolation usually means you technological advances are slower than the other civs that are trading technologies.

Ideally you want to be on a big continent, so that the most resources will show up somewhere. Fertile, temperate land. Lots of rivers. Access to the ocean. And you want to be exposed to other civs.

18

Oh, I couldn’t agree with that more. Unfortunately for the people of New Guinea, they couldn’t just restart until they got a better starting position!

19

If I remember right, one of the things that Diamond points out is that the competition factor was pretty crucial in Europe’s eventual domination of other areas. My thinking is that this also means that the cultural traits for competition were selected for. If you were too passive, you were taken over by a group that wasn’t so laid back. If you didn’t try to kill off, enslave, or outbreed your competitors, you’d get killed off, enslaved, or bred out of existence. That accounts for why European cultures ended up being so nasty and brutal in some ways; they had to be or they wouldn’t have survived.

20

Can you provide the page number where he asserted that?

I recall that he noted Europe’s geography allowed many more small states to arise in competition, with a number of small regions set off by seas or mountains that provided some natural defense for rebellious groups breeaking from larger groups. I do not recall any claim that the people were more competitive, and, as my very short list above should demonstrate, people have been competitive and aggressive across the breadth of the world.