In a way, isn’t that like asking why does DNA code for eye color? The question doesn’t really make sense. The book does address the question of how the environment shapes culture.
Again, I remember things differently in the book. Remember when he discussed at length the QWERTY keyboard system, and used that as an example of how one seemingly inconsequential decision can have long-lasting ramifications? Remember when he talked about Japan’s abolition of gun production and how that one decision impacted them hundreds of years later? I’m pretty sure there more instances that he pointed to.
His main point, though, is that on a macroscale, the influence of individual cultural idiosyncracies and capricious decisions is probably going to be outweighed by the influence of external factors. Another thing to remember is that the influence of cultural idiosyncracies is going to be stronger the more geographically isolated a culture is. So the irrational village taboo may persist a long time in a small isolated society, but the same taboo would die in a short period of time in a society repeatedly exposed to different people. So again, we come back to the environment.
Could the fact that corn was the only main domesticable plant in the area be relevant somehow? Could the fact that the Americas had very few domesticable large animals in general have been an important factor for why buffalo–which is not exactly the easiest of beasts to domesticate–weren’t domesticated? Could the fact that the first Americans were relatively isolated from other peoples explain why the idea didn’t occur or take root? I mentioned the hunter-gatherer lifestyle before, but there are other environmental factors that could explain the absence of buffalo herders.
Another thing that Diamond says (but maybe not loud enough) is that just because the Native Americans hadn’t domesticated buffalo by the time the Europeans had come doesn’t mean it never would have happened.
I misunderstood your comment because I thought you were talking about pre-colony Australia. Sorry.
You are now indulging in special case pleading. On one hand you claim that a monolithic ‘Europe’ has dominated continuously and unchallenged for 500 years, then when I point out European domination prior to that you say that “Greece [is] far more incomplete than you make out and often for a relatively a short time”.
Yes Greece “only” ruled for some 150 years. But then Greece isn’t Europe. You want to argue that Europe dominated for 500 years, yet no single country, not Spain, not France, not Russia, not England, dominated for all that time. At best they dominated for a few hundred years, just like Greece or Rome did. Then it shifted to another part of Europe, just as happened with Greece. The same is true for spatial dominance. Even the massive USSR was far from a complete domination of Europe.
Similarly you say that the Moors pushed into Spain, so Europe wasn’t dominant at that time, yet when I point out that the Ottomans pushed into Europe much less than 500 years ago and the Japanese defeated Russia les than 100 years ago you ignore that and continue to contend that Europe has been a monolithic, unilateral power despite those incursion form Asia.
As I said, you do not appear to have any clear idea of what you mean.
If this ‘pop’ was characterised by one European power holding unambiguous power for over 200 years then the pop has never occurred. No European nation held power for over 200 years in the last 500. If it is characterised simply by power passing around Europe and not being shared with Asia then that has been true for almost 1500 years, not 500 as you claim
And in the same way, if the ‘pop’ is characterised by a Europe with no Asian incursions then the pop has never occurred. Asians controlled parts of Europe as little as 100 years ago. And if the ‘pop’ is characterised simply by a Europeans nations holding power then that has been the case for 15000 years, not 500.
I notice that despite asking you to explain what you mean and how you set your standards you have been unable to do so. I suspect that is because you are knowingly indulging in special case pleading. You want Europe in the last 500 years to be special, so you will ignore power changing hands within Europe and Asian incursion during that time. But you want the world prior to that to be normal, so you will include power changing hands within Europe and Asian incursion during that time. That doesn’t work. If you want to argue that the last 500 years have been special you need to compare the two periods by the same standard.
And of course I explain the exceptions like China. That was the whole question: why Europe, why not China. Diamond could hardly explain why not China without explaining why China was exceptional, now could he
No, Diamond is not attempting to explain that pop, He never attempts to explain anything like that. He attempts to explain why Europe benefited form that pop, or even why that pop occurred in Europe, but he never seeks to explain why it occurred at all, much less why it occurred in the last 500 years.
Once again, you are trying to compare two different things. On one hand you are asking why the pop occurred and why no culture anyway was capable of such dominance in the first 120, 000 or so years of human history. Then you ask why Europe was the recipient of the benefit of that pop. Those are totally different questions. One Diamond addresses, the other he doesn’t.
The first problem with that, as I have pointed out, is it makes the mistake of assuming that all culture must be environmental or evolutionary advantageous, rather than simply human arbitrariness and stubbornness.
The second problem is that it doesn’t really address how environment chapes culture. Rather it simply assumes that it does and then proceeds to try to justify that position through ad hoc reasoning. We might just as well assume that environment doesn’t shape culture and proceed to justify that.
Well the qwerty keyboard isn’t really a cultural decision, it’s technological one. All cultures use the same keyboard. It’s not like English speaking Jews don’t use the same keyboard as atheists, despite there numerous cultural differences WRT food, dress, procreation etc. Nobody disputes that technology can be subject to these sorts of random decisions, bit that is as much true within cultures as between them, so it can’t really be called cultural unless you want to say that “qwerty keyboard user” is a culture of itself.
And rather than an example of a cultural practice that isn’t shaped by environment the Japanese decision to ban guns is discussed precisely as an example of a cultural decision that was shaped by the environment. Diamond uses it specifically to point out that such a cultural practice would never have been possible is Japan wasn’t a densely populated island and hence never occurred in Europe.
I would agree with all of that, except for the claim that this was Diamond’s main point. The reason why I brought this up was his insistence that there must be geographic reasons why Indians never domesticated reindeer or bison. He essentially rejects out of hand that a culture could exist that simply forbade it arbitrarily. He seems to try desperately to avoid having to admit even the possibility that some cultural practices could be damaging without be necessitated or even influenced by geography.
Well yeah, most of those things could be the cause. Or it could just be a random cultural quirk. The point is that Diamond’s answer is nowhere near as simple and plausible as you suggest. Isolation form other people really can’t be factored in. Although the Americas are smaller than Eurasia they are more than large enough and fertile to have supported large numbers of different peoples. If we say that it’s because they were isolated form Eurasia then we need to explain why Eurasia never suffered the same form isolation from the Americas.
Yes, I agree that he should have stressed that point. The problem is that he only implies it in one paragraph in the first chapter, and then promptly spends the next entire chapter telling us that the bison could never be domesticated because it simply isn’t domesticable. The two points are in total disagreement. If the species wasn’t domesticable then the Indians could never have domesticated it. If, as we now know, it was domesticable, then the Indians may well have domesticated it.
But in that case Diamond’s claim that Indians lacked riding and draft animals because of a total and unalterable lack of candidates is nonsense. He contradicts himself either way.
Does “special case pleading” mean the truth? Because I don’t understand what you are trying to say. Are you saying that Greece accomplished something comparable to what Europe has in the last 500 years?
I thought by your standards the Ottomans were European (although that was pushed back nonetheless, in the last 500 years). Japan did defeat Russia, in a few sea battles. Before getting pummeled a few years later, including by Russia. So what? Neither of those involved domination by an Asian power over a European power. Of course, you can always say “special case pleading,” in which case I suppose any attempt to differentiate is pointless. Perhaps Diamond’s discussion of the last 11,000 years is special case pleading, I mean, the Native Americans won Battle of Little Bighorn.
As I said, you do not appear to have any clear idea of what you mean.
No, special case pleading means that you attempt to apply special conditions to the case you want to support that you will no tolerate for the case you wish to contest. This post is a classic example of it.
For the last 500 years you want to apply the standard to “Europe”, as though Europe was a homogeneous whole. But for the time outside the last 500 years you want to apply the standard to just “Greece”, which is only one European country; you won’t tolerate the inclusion of Rome, which was also European.
That’s special case pleading. You have to decide on your standard and apply it both before and after 500ybp.
If Greece never dominated Europe >500ybp as you claim, then Spain, France and England, Germany and Russia never dominated <500ybp which is contrary to your claim that Europe has dominated for the last 500 years.
Or else a succession of European states have dominated for the last 500 years as claim, in which case the European state of Greece dominated 1500 years ago.
No, I asked you to make up your mind whether they were Asian or European.
If there were Asian Ottomans in Europe only 100 years ago then how can you claim that the Europe has been unilaterally powerful for over 500 years?
And if the Ottomans were European and they have been supplanted by ME cultures in the last 100 years over much of their range, which once again proves that European cultures haven’t dominated for even 150 years.
No matter whether the Ottomans are deemed Asian or European they destroy your position. If they are Asian then they occupied Europe les than a century ago, which proves that Europe didn’t dominate. If they are European then the fact that ME cultures have taken over so much of their range in Iraq, Syria etc. in the last 100 years is still an example of a European power ceding territory to a ME one.
The simple fact that the Ottoman empire existed until recently and has been partly subsumed by Europe and partly by the ME means that your position is untenable, doesn’t it?
And you still haven’t answered the question. Are you considering Ottomans Asian/ME or not?
A few sea battles? WTF? IIRC the Japanese defeated half a dozen of Russia’s armies and captured large amounts of land in addition to gaining unbeatable naval superiority.
And WTF x 2? They won the sea and land battles and captured territory, but didn’t dominate? Once again we see run into a problem because you refuse to simply say what you mean by “dominate”. >500ybp when an Asian culture wins a few battles in Europe and get pummelled a little later, that’s domination by the Asians. When the same thing occurs <500ybp it’s not domination.
You really do need to tell us what you mean by these woolly terms so we can understand what you mean. I am using the definition for dominate meaning “To enjoy a commanding, controlling position in”. Japan dominated the seas WRT Russia less than 100 years ago.
:rolleyes:
The difference is that if Diamond or I say that Europeans dominated North America I can point to numerous unchanging, objective, hard-and-fast standards by which to determine that. I can say, for example, that domination requires that the victor contribute >80% of the genetic makeup of the ruling classes in the region, or that all conquered people speak the conquerors language within 2 generations, or that the conquerer’s religion be practised by >70% of the population and so forth.
You on the other hand can’t do any such thing. The Greeks’ imposed their language and rulers on the Egyptians, but that isn’t domination. The Roman language became the lingua franca for all of Europe and the ME for generations, but that isn’t domination and so one and so forth. Yet when we say precisely the same thing about the Spanish or the English or the French, that’s domination.
And that, my friend, is special case pleading.
Look I’ve suggested you do it several times, now I am going to politely request that you do it: please clearly state what you mean by terms like “dominate”. Tell us what standards you are using and what objective measures we might use to judge when a culture has reached a point where it ‘dominates” and when it has not. This constant use of the term in an ambiguous and changing manner is futile. AT this point you seem to be saying that a culture dominates if it was in the last 500 years, but not if it was before then.
And can you also please tell us how you define a European culture and how you define a ME./Asian one. Specifically is Turkey/Ottoman ME or European, and why?
Well in that case tell me specifically what areas my meaning is unclear in and I will happily clarify. I know exactly what my position is even if I haven’t articulated it well. I have clear and objective standards by which I can measure any of the terms I use and will happily tell you what they are so we can agree on a standard.
You OTOH seem unable to match that. Instead you bandy around ambiguous terms that seem to change meaning depending on whether they support your position or not.
Don’t know if you read it, but as stated, I’m done with you on this. It is clear to me that you do not want to understand my point, and I have no desire to continue to “define” basic English words for you or continue entertaining your cheap rhetorical device of showing isolated examples against the norm when we are discussing massive geographic and temporal scopes.
You are right. In the end, so long as a single Asian (if we can define “Asian”) somewhere killed a European in the last 500 years, Europe cannot be said to have dominated the globe. I now disagree with Diamond’s book, because he really didn’t explain to me what he really meant with regard to Eurasian ascendency. I mean, not all of the Native Americans are dead, and Native Americans killed plenty of Eurasians, so did the Eurasian landmass really have any advantages? Sure, although most of the globe speaks English, not everyone does. Granted, European powers have effectively controlled (oh wait, I can’t define “control” so it didn’t happen) good chunks of India, China, and the Middle East (well, wait, what is a “good chunk?”), and the reverse was not true, but hey, the Ottoman Empire briefly got as far as the gates of Vienna, so that’s an effective counter to the entire thing. Is there really anything to even write a book about in the first place?
Yes there certainly is because if you had read the book you would see that Diamond defined what he meant by all those things very clearly. That you belive that he didn’t simply tells us that you either never read or failed to understand most of the book. Hardly surprsing given your behaviour in this thread. You wanted Diamond to explain something that even you have now been forced to admit never occurred.
Your generous use of absolute terms (“all”, “only”, “never”, etc) was something Diamond doesn’t do in the book. I don’t remember him making absolute statements about the cause of all cultural observations everywhere; in fact, I specifically remember him taking into account the role of human arbitrariness. I guess I don’t see how Diamond forces us to assume what you assert.
What’s the alternative? It’s not like he can study culture in a laboratory.
Yeah, Blake, but it’s an example of how a seemingly arbitrary decision can persist years down the line even when it makes more sense to change. That’s not much different than the mushroom taboo you proposed earlier.
Certainly. I think if you asked most historians, they would tell you that Europe has not dominated the last 500 years, and was pretty much on par with Asia in terms of colonization, technological development, expansion of culture, and other items.
You are right, Europe’s domination never happened.
This thread is getting unnecessarily caustic, but I think there are some valid questions on the table.
I, too, would like a precise demonstration of what “Europe dominates” means. It’s not that I disagree with the statement necessarily, but I can’t test its truth and the truth of the reasons given why Europe dominates without knowing the precise definition.
Is it enough that any nation-state located in Europe “dominates” (Over whom? How much success is required to achieve “domination”?). What if one nation-state is dominating the rest of Europe and the world equally? Is it then valid to say that “Europe” is dominating if most Europeans are being dominated?
Because we are talking about time spans of hundreds (and thousands) of years, I do not think the normal “definitional” game holds water. I understand what you are asking, and appreciate the question, but I do not think it is applicable to this subject. Over the past 500 years, European states in general (which obviously does not mean without exception, as some apparently believe) have had far more success in colonizing, developing technology, and effectively submitting their will onto others. You can’t say “over whom” when the time period is 500 years. At times it has been Great Britain over African territory. At times it has been France over Middle Eastern and Asian territory. At times it has been Spain and Portugal over New World territory. But interestingly enough, with (gasp) some minor exceptions, Asian, African, and New World nations of any stripe cannot point to where they have technologically exceeded Europe, or conquered any European nations or peoples.
Here’s the problem. Most all these examples you’re pointing to are of various Eurasian states exerting power over non-Eurasian states. Diamond’s theory explains why this should be quite adequately. A few of your examples are Eurasian states exerting power over other Eurasian states. However, this has been happening since time immemorial. The list of states with empire on the brain is a very long one, and specifically European states have been among those capable of asserting imperial control over their neighbours since Alexander conquered the known world.
So what, exactly, are you saying needs explanation? Why the domination of non-Eurasian states didn’t begin until 500 years ago? That’s dead obvious. The transportation technology of Eurasian states was lacking. Contact between Eurasia and the rest of the world prior to that was very, very limited. This near-isolation is of course a part of why the rest of the world was “behind”. Then suddenly in the 16th century, the incremental progress of sailing technology in Europe passes a critical point, and suddenly those states that are European powers can project their power globally. That is why Europe came to dominate the globe 500 years ago.
Interestingly, China had embarked on large-scale naval exploration a hundred years earlier. Zheng He led several expeditions which sailed throughout the Indian ocean possibly as far as the Cape of Good Hope. Compared to the European explorers, these were huge expeditions. In 1405 Zheng He sailed with over 300 ships, all of them much, much larger than the tiny things used by Columbus, Magellan, or Drake. However, within a century, Imperial China became very insular and stopped seeking contact with the outside world. Instead, they built the Great Wall trying to keep it out.
So why did Spain build a sprawling overseas empire, and not China? The answer is much the same as it would be if you asked why did Spain build a sprawling overseas empire, and not Italy. Well, okay, the answers the complete opposite - in the 16th Century, Italy was politically fractured and was being dominated politically by France and the HRE, and hence wasn’t in any condition to be projecting imperial power overseas. China, on the other hand, was politically unified and capable of projecting imperial overseas, but China’s leadership at the time happened to be insular and xenophobic and was focused on turning back the Mongol hordes in the north, not projecting imperial power via naval expeditions in the south. But in the case of both Italy and China, the explanation for why they didn’t project power overseas is based on specific cultural and political considerations, and not a lack of the technological means to project power.
So again, what precisely is it that you think needs explanation? Why did European global domination suddenly spring into being 500 years ago? As to why it suddenly became global 500 years ago, that’s the transportation technology. Before that the Eurasian powers were taking it in turns to dominate each other, but couldn’t get at non-Eurasian people enough to dominate them. But you seem more interested in why Europe, as opposed to some other portion of Eurasia. This, however, is a misguided question, as I’ve said above. First off, it wasn’t Europe which began dominating globally 500 years ago. It was a very few countries within Europe. Spain, Portugal, France, England, and the Netherlands. Why these? Spain and France were European powers, but the other three were small, not particularly influential countries by European standards. Heck, the Dutch haven’t even gained independence from Spain at the beginning of this 500 year time period. The answer is just that these were the countries with naval capacity that happened to not be preoccupied with other concerns at the time. The Holy Roman Empire was tenuously united collection of semi-independent princedoms, and was anyways preoccupied with preventing the Ottoman Turks from taking Vienna for the first couple centures (when it wasn’t trying to fend off French advances in the west, or fight the War of Spanish Succession, that is). It was also thoroughly ravaged by the 30 Years War as our timeframe opens, which turned substantial chunks of Germany into nearly unpopulated wastelands. The aforementioned Italians were politically fragmented and dominated by the other European powers. The Scandinavian countries were too poor to do anything other than make the occasional power play on the Continent, a la Gustavus Adolphus. Russia and Poland were still largely peasants engaged in subsistence agriculture. And finally, the Turks were empire-building, they just did it on geographically contiguous ground, because they weren’t hemmed in the way the other powers were. China, as has been pointed out already, was going through a xenophobic phase and was preoccupied with Mongol invaders to the north. That leaves India, whose sailing and military technology happened at that moment to be lagging a bit. Note that the Moghul Empire a few centuries earlier had been one of the major Eurasian powers of its time, however, and previous Indian empires had also exerted influence far to the west of India itself. (See: interactions between the Mauryan and Seleucid Empires, etc)
So again, what is it precisely you want explained? Diamond’s theory tells us that areas with the best prospects for food production will develop faster and further than other areas, and that’s exactly what happened. It does not and cannot explain local politics. Now, Diamond does put forward a hypothesis to explain China’s unified and insular state of affairs, which Blake has described above somewhere. I’m not convinced by that hypothesis. It’s not an implausible hypothesis, but there’s nothing like evidence for it. It’s mere conjecture, unlike most of the rest of the book for which there is evidence, even if that evidence is spotty at times. But basically, you seem upset that Diamond doesn’t answer a question that Diamond isn’t even trying to answer. Diamond is trying to answer “Yali’s question”, i.e., why do Diamond’s people have so much cargo, while Yali’s people don’t? And Diamond’s theories do answer the question of why New Guinea lagged behind Eurasia.
Most of them are not. Most of them are examples of European sstates exerting power of non-European states, in the last 500 years. There are far fewer examples of any non-European states, including Middle Eastern or Asian states, exerting power over European states. In other words, it has been European states (if you want to say Western European states, that’s fine) that have been exerting the most power, not all Eurasian states.
Why Europe, and not Asia or the Middle East.
That answer is satisfactory to me. It also does not fit into Diamond’s method of explanation. Because I do not think you can use a book to explain how everything is based on geography, but then start discussing politics with regard to why Europe. I posit that elsewhere, he would say those politics do not matter, or that they were caused by land and resources. In particular when in the past, you have explained nearly everything in connection with geography and physical resources, I do not think it is legitimate to “switch over.”
And I think that Diamond’s limited extent to use geography to explain why not Asia or the Middle East sounds like a gloss, in particular based on his discussion of the earlier time periods.
I agree, but by answering in this way, you have dropped out of Diamond’s system of explanation, and moved back into local personalities, politics, disputes, and struggles. Things that are not explained (at least by your explanation) by land and resource availability and portability.
I’m sorry, I just don’t understand what you’re on about. You seem to think that Diamond purports to be able to explain everything in terms of geography. He doesn’t. He purports to be able to explain the broad differences between continents in terms of geography. He never said cultural and political factors wouldn’t be an influence, just that if they aren’t a wash in the long run, then they need explaining too. But cultural and political factors are a wash in Eurasia in the long run (i.e., there is no uniform trend of one portion being dominated by another portion, but rather the various portions take it in turns to dominate each other). So they aren’t in need of explanation (except possibly China’s long political unification, for which he postulates a geographical explanation that you continually ignore), and yet they are the explanation for why portions of Europe, not Europe as a whole as you keep implying, exploded outward in an orgy of colonizing.
And another thing. You keep equating the way “Europe” has “dominated” various places, and yet they are in no way equivalent. Spain conquered the huge Aztec and Incan empires with a tiny handful of conquistadores. England, on the other hand, attempted to assert political control over India, and in large part failed because the local resistance was sufficient to prevent it. Spain was 4000 years “ahead” of the Aztecs, who were very roughly on par with the earliest Fertile Crescent empires. England, on the other hand, was only 200 years “ahead” of the Indians, who were politically and technologically only very slightly behind. You seem to be equating these two phenomena when in fact they are very, very different. The colonizing that the western European powers did in Eurasia was radically different from the colonizing they did in the Americas, Africa, and South Pacific. Diamond’s theory explains why this would be the case. But you seem to be asserting that there’s just a uniform, universal European hegemony when in fact there was nothing like that at all. Hell, European colonization of the Middle East postdates World War I!!! It wasn’t Europe dominating the Middle East, it was the Allies winning the Great War and divying up the spoils. For most of the 500 years you’re talking about, the Ottoman Turks were seen as the gravest peril Christian Europe faced (except, of course, when they were a handy ally against Russia).
Gack. I’m done. You may continue to miss every point I’ve made, as you’ve been doing. Carry on.
Actually, I’m going to say one more thing, as a sort of analogy has occured to me.
Diamond’s theory is a lo-res theory. It describes broad trends over long periods of time. It doesn’t make predictions about local trends over the short term.
You’re asking a hi-res question, and complaining that the lo-res theory can’t answer it, when of course it should never be expected to. When I give the hi-res answer to your hi-res question, you say “but by answering in this way, you have dropped out of Diamond’s system of explanation.” Well of course I have. I can’t give you the lo-res answer to your question, because there isn’t one.
I think that what’s tripping you up is that you think that you’re asking a lo-res question. That’s why you keep saying that you want to know why “Europe” has “dominated” for 500 years. But here you’re just mistaken. “Europe” has done no such thing. This is why I keep pointing out that it’s only a handful of European countries that build colonial empires. This is why Blake pointed out that a Middle Eastern power dominated southeastern Europe for nearly your entire timeframe. This is why I just pointed out that China had the technological and economic wherewithal to build a colonial empire spanning the Indian Ocean in the 15th Century, but they simply weren’t inclined to do so. That’s why I pointed out that “European domination” of South Asia was radically different from “European domination” of sub-Saharan Africa or the Americas. The question you’re asking is actually hi-res. It’s only by glossing over the complexities of colonial expansion that you can pretend to be asking a lo-res question. And the fact that Diamond’s lo-res theory can’t answer your hi-res question is not a strike against it. Diamond’s lo-res theory provides a fairly substantial answer to a long-asked lo-res question, and that’s all you should expect from it.
Then you should explain to me what you think Diamond’s theory is. Because I believe it is, roughly stated, why the New World was conquered by Eurasia, rather than the opposite (or at least why the New World didn’t have as much luggage as Eurasia). But the New World wasn’t conquered by Eurasia, it was predominently by Europe. Perhaps different nation states of Europe at different times, but Europe. Diamond tries to move from the “something unique to Europeans” viewpoint and describe why it was the Eurasian landmass in general, but then never explains why it was still specifically Europe and not China, India, etc. that conquered.
You may be closest when you have stated that Diamond’s theory is lo-res. I just believe that: (i) it is lo-res, but he still tries to use it to discuss the Europe specific issue (which you have admitted is high res); and (ii) it is so lo-res that it doesn’t really answer difficult questions. Because if it does not explain with more specificity, then I am afraid that I fall into the, “So the big continent with more exploitable resources won, huh,” camp. I give some value for the thought that it is east-west latitude that allowed diffusion of crops (and of course, everything in the world was caused by that, but it wasn’t, since China received diffusions to, but somehow, was too “open” and did not turn out in the same way as Europe). But that either explains higher res issues such as technological and military power developed therefrom (which it doesn’t do adequately in my view), or it does not explain those higher res issues, and is a pretty limited point to make.
The big continent with the grasses that had the biggest seeds, more like. His theory turns more than anything on the availability of domesticable species, and I’m not aware that anyone had ever so much as explored that before. I don’t think his thesis is as blindingly obvious as all that, even if it looks that way after you’ve read it. The Americas and Africa are also big continents with vast amounts of easily exploitable resources. Just not so easily exploitable native agricultural resources.
And “Why did Europe conquer America rather than vice versa?” is a lo-res question. “Why did England, France, and Spain conquer America rather than Germany, Turkey, India, or China conquering America?” is a hi-res question. The point is that all of Eurasia was in substantial contact throughout history. No one part of it ever got very far ahead of the rest before the technical advances spread. Diamond’s theory can’t tell you anything more than that you should expect those technical advances to occur in places where food production is sufficiently advanced to allow for labour specialization and political unification of large areas. And that’s what happened. It didn’t and couldn’t predict that religious strife would rip Germany apart in the 16th Century, leaving one of Europe’s inherently richest areas permanently in the dust in the colonization race. It could and did predict that China would be a rich area. It didn’t and couldn’t predict that China would be on the verge of creating a colonial empire in the 15th Century, 100 years before the western Europeans started building theirs, only to turn inwards and reject the world thanks to political machinations of the Chinese ruling class, and the threat of marauding Mongol nomads.
That’s what you seem to keep missing. China was every bit as advanced as Europe in 1500. If we look at Eurasia in 1500, western Europe just isn’t ahead of the rest of it. Sure, there are various bits of Eurasia that are lagging behind western Europe, but the Middle East and China aren’t among those. They’re right up there, technologically and politically speaking. It’s just that western Europe was expansionist just then, and China wasn’t, and though the Middle East was it had lots of room to expand contiguously in the face of weak opposition, where Spain, England, France, Portugal, and the Netherlands were hemmed in by equally powerful neighbours preventing local expansion. That’s all the explanation you’re ever going to get, because that’s as deep as the explanation goes.
I really don’t think that Diamond tries to extend his theory to that level. He does have that late chapter (which you still haven’t even addressed) about possible relations between geography and large-scale political unification, which he suggests might be why China was unified and Europe was fragmented, which in turn relates to issues of competition of ideas and ways of doing things, etc. I don’t buy that argument, but Diamond’s pretty tentative about it himself in any event. Insofar as Diamond is trying to address Europe specifically, he’s just addressing the racialist explanation for why it’s white people who took over the world, and I think his theory does quite adequately explain why it was white people who took over the world, and why there’s no reason to think it has anything to do with white people being superior in any way. No, it doesn’t explain why it was white people rather than Chinese, but it does explain why it wasn’t sub-Saharan African, Amerindian, or New Guinean people, and that’s enough to make his point.
That’s something that’s been bothering me: Guns, Germs, and Steel was published in 1999 but have there any people since 1965, besides the KKK, who have used an inate superiority of white people to explain the European takeover of large parts of the world?