Yes–Diamand gets it wrong in his first book (Guns Germs and Steel), but he corrects himself in a later book( Collapse).
In Guns,Germs and Steel, he blames everything on the physical environment, and pays zero attention to human ingenuity and cultural values…It’s a good book, full of fascinating facts, presented well. But it leaves out a lot, too.
In Collapse, he focuses on the physical envirionment too…but he explains how human cultural values make all the difference.
He compares the Vikings in Greenland (who died out) to the native eskimos , who survived.
He, correctly, blames the death of the vikings on their culture, for not being willing to adapt to the climate. The environment is harsh, but humans can adapt to anything, if they have the desire.
Re: The Caribbean was a death trap alright… for the locals! Within decades they were completely wiped out by the gun, but mostly by disease.
I do wonder why Europeans never settled the English Caribbean or French Caribbean regions to the extent that they did in the Spanish colonies. Places like Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, PR etc. have a lot of European ancestry in their population today (mixed with African and indigenous ancestry), while places like Belize, Haiti, Jamaica, the Antilles, Guyana, etc. really don’t.
Maybe the Spanish had a little more disease resistance, living in a warmer climate exposed to African and Middle Eastern contact? I don’t really know.
Exactly right: his main thesis does a good job of explaining “why Eurasia?”. For pinpointing “why Europe, within Eurasia?” you have to move on to other theories.
My own favorite theory is that, for various reasons, the European powers were never able to form one unified empire - the Hapsburgs never pulled it off, unlike the Turks, the Moguls, or the Chinese. This disunity and resulting competition proved to be an advantage, driving technology (particularly military technology) and economic development.
A lot of the lesser Antilles were pretty much giant sugar plantations. You had a tiny amount of rich European planters who owned almost all the land and had a vast number of slaves to work it, and a town that grew around the island’s harbor for colonial administration and servicing the ships. But most European colonists who came to the New World came to get cheap land, and there wasn’t really much cheap land on, say, Barbados. It was only in some of the larger islands where you saw any substantial white settlement. Haiti, for instance, before the revolution was about 10% white and “free colored” (free people with mixed white and black ancestry). Most of them were killed or fled when Haiti got its independence.
Interesting historical note: South Carolina has a different colonial history than the other English colonies in North America. All of the other colonies were founded by England. But South Carolina was a second generation colony; it was founded by Barbados. As you noted, Barbados had an economy built around sugar plantations. With sugar being so valuable, landowners wanted to devote all their cultivatable land to sugar - and nobody wanted to “waste” land growing crops for people to eat. So the Barbadians decided to start a colony on the mainland to provide food to Barbados.
