So a popular theory among many theorists is that “Geographical Determinism” the idea that it was the geographical location and its proximity to certain resources which allowed it to Develop compared to say Sub-Saharian Africa, this was mainly propagated by Diamond’s famous Guns, Germs and Steel, although the concept is probably older than that.
But that doesn’t explain to me why only Western Europe developed at such a alarming rate compared to Eastern Europe, isn’t the geography similar there?
The other one is that some of the objections seem to be political in the sense that many leftist thinkers are uncomfortable with the idea that Europe had some “uniqueness” to it, some unique cultural element which allowed it to develop, so it must of been the land.
Regardless of the many pros and cons to the idea, what is your opinion on it?
P.S this is not a “homework thread” or anything like that seeing as my last thread got closed, just interested in getting your thoughts
It’s isolated enough that the big invasions – Huns, Mongols, Spanish Islam, Turks – never quite conquered the place. Meanwhile, it benefited from Islamic knowledge, and from ancient knowledge preserved by Byzantium.
And it’s got a LOT of sea-coasts and rivers, making water-borne trade extremely profitable.
Geography was very favorable to European advancement.
(Islamic civilization was doing very well, being in the center of things, thus becoming a trade nexus. This also allowed it to become a center of learning. However, the Mongols annihilated their civilization, and Tamerlane came around to give it a nasty “late hit” – fifteen yards penalty – putting out the lamps of civilization there.)
As far as natural resources are concerned, the evidence points the other way: abundance of natural resources is negatively correlated with economic growth, democracy, quality of life, etc.:
the problem that i see is that Geographical argument, would the presume that Europe was always “powerful” but that is not the case, Europe did not really start to “outclass” the world until about the 1400s with the Age of Discovery and the colonization of the New World.
Another important fact is that it disregards the developing University system in Europe during the middle ages
Two things that were critical to both European and North American development. Navigable waterways with gentle relief, and temperate zone seasonal variations, with hot/cold seasons and reliable rainfall.
I think a lot of the points presented in Gun, Germs and Steel are likely to be valid. Mind you we can’t really reset history and see if everything happens the same way again, but they are plausible.
As for Western vs. Eastern Europe, the power balance between nations in Europe in general waxed and waned, it’s easy to imagine different powers in Europe getting the boost of the colonial era had it started at a different time. You’re basically looking at too small a scale for Geographical Determinism to apply.
I recently watched a YouTube video which argued against Diamond’s book. (Perhaps the OP watched the same video.) I feel the speaker misrepresented Diamond’s idea.
The old idea of geographical determinism was undeniably pseudoscientific racism. It claimed that certain environments (ie Western Europe) had produced a superior race of human beings (ie Western Europeans). This was nonsense.
Diamond’s book agreed that this was nonsense. He explicitly wrote that there is no group of human beings which is inherently superior to any other group of human beings. Human groups are all essentially identical. His argument was that the differences in their relative success could be explained by the different environments these identical groups had found themselves in.
I’ve also heard it suggested that the terrain also made it difficult for a pan-European empire to form, and that the panoply of small states in constant competition contributed to intellectual and technological advancement.
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Two things that were critical to both European and North American development. Navigable waterways with gentle relief, and temperate zone seasonal variations, with hot/cold seasons and reliable rainfall.
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Another important fact is that it disregards the developing University system in Europe during the middle ages
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I’ve also heard it suggested that the terrain also made it difficult for a pan-European empire to form, and that the panoply of small states in constant competition contributed to intellectual and technological advancement.
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Yeah any and all of these things are true elsewhere as well and Europe did not have some advantages that other places had. And before anyone says it, other places also had these things cumulatively.
Guns, Germs and Steel was very convincing on ‘why Eurasia developed faster than sub-Saharan Africa, North and South America, and Australia’. I found it lost focus somewhat on ‘why Western Europe developed faster in modern times than the ME, Eastern Europe, India or East Asia’. To be fair, that’s not his focus: he deals very shallowly and briefly with this very question in his Epilogue “the future of human history as a science”. He mentions a plethora of theories, but they are not nearly as well-developed as his primary thesis.
For that question, I would recommend another of those ‘big history’ books: The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers by Paul Kennedy. Dated somewhat, but still well worth reading.
In short, they simply deal with different time-scales.
I’d add a third to the mix - the more recent Sapiens.
To get the following range:
Why did humans of the variety homo sapiens have the advantage over other hominids/human species? - Sapiens
Why did humans living in Eurasia have the advantage over humans living elsewhere? - Guns, Germs and Steel
Why, in modern times, did humans living in Western Europe have the advantage over humans living elsewhere in Eurasia? - The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers
Well, yes, the World land mass is divided neatly into three parts (the Eurasia-Africa sector, the Americas and Australia, and what he says is right, generally). Trying to answer why Europe dominated since 1500 is like trying to ask why civilization developed in Iraq, not Europe, or why Arabs broke out, or why Rome, or Persia or various Chinese empires arose, not related to the basic question of as to why the Eurasian-Africa sector developed so much more the others, which is the central theme of Diamond’s work.
Up until around the 1600s or so Europe was significantly poorer and technologically behind the Middle East, India, and China.
Agreed that “Guns Germs and Steel” style arguments work best to explain Eurasian advantages, not European advantages.
Of course by the 1600s Europe had caught up a bit. But while European adventurers were stomping all over the Americas, the Ottomans were stomping the Europeans up until the 1683 siege of Vienna. And note that the Age of Exploration itself was triggered by a decisive Western defeat, as the Turks closed the former trade routes between Europe and the “riches of the Orient”.
It seems to me that the looting and wealth of the Americas supercharged the European economy and trained European powers in the art of conquering and ruling distant colonies. European “Frankish” adventurers were hired as mercenaries all over Eurasia. So by this point Europe had a military advantage, but not an economic or technological one. Just as the Mongols ravaged China despite China’s much more enormous economy and superior technology, European armies were getting better than those in China, India and the ME.
But things didn’t really start to get serious for Eurasia until the kickoff of the Industrial Revolution in Europe. Now suddenly soldiers with industrially produced clothing, industrially produced firearms, and industrially produced ships could arrive anywhere in the world and cause trouble for the local powers. But just look that the conquest of India. It wasn’t like the British just showed up with guns one day and marched across the Indian subcontinent, the way the Spanish walked across the Americas. Instead the local princes wanted to use the British forces as mercenaries to help them against their local enemies. And just like the Romans inviting German soldiers to defend the empire, the foreign soldiers ended up first dominating and then ruling their former patrons.
Jared Diamond is, as a rule, not taken even remotely seriously in academic circles - not only because there are factual errors and gross errors of logic in his work, but also because the entire idea of environmental determinism was already a debunked, discredited theory long before Jared Diamond published Guns, Germs, and Steel.
That’s not to say that the work is a complete waste of time to read, but it should be read with keen skepticism, and with the understanding that it is the pop-sci work of a geographer intended for the layman, and not the work of an anthropologist or historian intended for peers.
Agreed. I have read various attempts to attach geographical-deterministic theories to such events (most specifically, the domination by Western Europe); none are particularly convincing.
In my opinion, it was simply a matter of good timing. Various historic factors came together to give Western Europe ‘the edge’ at exactly the right time: when worldwide exploration and the scientific and industrial revolutions were within the grasp of civilizations within Eurasia.
In my opinion the primary factor was that Europe was never completely dominated by a centralized ‘gunpowder empire’, though the Hapsburgs came pretty close. It is only hindsight that makes, say, a Hapsburg empire covering all of Europe “impossible”: the Manchu Ch’ing Dynasty managed to rule an empire just as geographically complex. Europe, just like China, had a centralizing theory of empire as a positive good (in Europe’s case, based on the Romans).
It was China’s misfortune that it was centralized by a conservative, not to say reactionary, imperial government for the vital centuries when the Hapsburgs (and later the Bourbons) were busy failing to do the same in Europe.
The way I look at it is this: the dominant culture-area of power in Eurasia at the relevant time could have been located in Europe, the ME, or China (or, less likely, India, the Kievian Rus, SE Asia, or Japan). It could not reasonably have been anywhere else, though.
As mentioned, Guns, Germs and Steel is a book about why people from Eurasia became poised to take over the world: Why they had, by 1500, the “guns, germs and steel” required to outmatch almost any non-Eurasian society. And it has nothing to do with race, genes or human biology.
At the end of the book, Diamond hazards a few guesses as to why it was the Europeans and not the Asians of Eurasia who ended up colonizing the world. One of his guesses had to do with the fact that Europe was comprised of a bunch of small political regions battling it out almost constantly for power and territory, while Asia had places like China which were relatively peaceful and politically homogeneous. So there was far more pressure on Europeans to become very good at political and military conquest.
Which helps explain why Europe was the armpit of the world up until the age of exploration: They wasted all their time and effort killing and subduing each other (and in the process inventing excellent tools for the purpose) while the rest of the world focused on feeding themselves and participating in (comparatively) peaceful economies.
I’m partial to this explanation, myself, but I recognize that it is no more than a guess.
The fact Europe was “the armpit of the world” was also a major factor. Europeans wanted to go to Asia; Asians had very little reason to want to go to Europe.
Depends on what you mean by ‘Asians’, but invasions of eastern Europe by armed Central Asian horse cultures was a big thing during some eras of history.
C Asian horse cultures (who racially tend to be “white” anyway) also tended to prefer to go to the SubContinent rather than Europe.
I would say the discovery of the Americas is what pushed Europe to the pinnacle. Before that, European naval technology was actually fairly primitive compared to what was seen in the East.
The Americas provided the incentive for technological development and the means to do so. Also a good place to dump malcontents.