I don't see how soft determinism denies human agency. The fact that certain types of outcome are more probable doesn't mean that humans are forced to follow the most probably route.
There are several polities in Meso-America that achieved very high populations.
There certainly were, and I didn't say there weren't. I was saying that the Old World possessed advantages in food production, which often leads to city-building. Having an advantage doesn't mean that you have everything and the others have nothing at all.
There are also many available domesticates in the Americas. The early extinction of the horse there was certainly a blow to transportation, but there are more than enough domesticable food animals in the Americas.
Eh, I'd disagree with this. His argument about the lack of New World and Australian macrofauna is spot-on, by my assessment- physically and behaviourally modern humans arrived on landmasses which had never before encountered humans. The largest animals were wiped out in very short order, in what is now known as the
New World Pleistocene Extinctions. By comparison, old world macrofauna (particularly that which existed in Africa) co-evolved with humans, and thus had been selected for hundreds of thousands of years to cope with the pressures of human predation.
In terms of food animals, we have bison, which was a possible domesticate. However, bison today are temperamental and often aggressive animals. It may be the case that humans simply didn't have as much time to artificially select for more passive animals, due to the fact that humans have existed in the old world for much longer than they have in the new world... or perhaps because some of the major centers of native american agriculture were away from the main range of the bison. This is speculative.
As for other animals, we have the muscovy duck (confusingly enough a native american species), the turkey, and the various south American camelids (guanaco, llama, vicuna).
Then we have some more potential domesticates. Capybaras might have made it, if they had possessed a range which overlapped with more agricultural civilizations. Rheas are in a similar position there.
So there is certainly some potential for agricultural animals in the new world. It's just that they lacked the range of options which were available in the old world, and they lacked the time to conduct full domestications of many species.
That's exactly what he did. He just didn't say the actual words.
But he didn't say that. What he wrote was that the old world possessed advantages, head starts,
They were only disadvantaged by contingent events, not due to any natural phenomena which they could not escape.
By contingent, do you mean 'up to random chance'? We're talking about continental-scale issues here. A broad lack of appropriate agricultural domesticates, and everything that entails, is not a contingent event.
If he didn't know, he shouldn't have made a guess in a supposedly scholarly work.
I am not familiar with how scholarly historians structure their writings, but in the sciences people often suggest hypotheses for a few of their remaining unanswered questions in the end of their papers.
Unfortunately for that argument, European geography is no more fractured than many other regions. Look at a topographical map of China sometime.
Actually, topographic maps of
Europe and
China were some of the things I looked at when I was composing my post, along with an animation of Chinese historical maps. I have been operating under the understanding that the historic core of China has consistently been around the light green area and its surrounding environs... although Masada informs me in chat that my understanding of this matter is mistaken.
At any rate, I've already said that his argument about fragmentation was speculative, and this is getting out of my area of expertise.
Also not true. Firstly, until the recent period of communist rule, there has been next to no homogeneisation of China. There are literally dozens of languages spoken in China, and that's without including the relatively recent acquisitions of Tibet, Xinjiang and Outer Mongolia. China has also spent many periods partitioned between foreign invaders or split by internal warlords.
The main reason China has remained relatively unified for such an extensive period of time is that it was it was divided into various satrapies which owed their loyalty to the Emperor, rather like Persia, rather than various individual states which did not owe fealty to a larger power. Even then, there were several such hegemonic powers in European history, notable the Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg and Holy Roman Empires, all of which lasted for centuries.
Since most exploration and trade has always been done under private auspices rather than government ones - admittedly, Columbus' voyages were government-funded, but they and the Portuguese explorations are anomalies - this is a moot point anyway.
I am not sufficiently well-informed to make a statement about the nature of Imperial Chinese rule, so I can't say much in response to that. However, I don't feel that the dominance of the Byzantine, Ottoman, Habsburg and Holy Roman Empires can really be compared to the influence wielded by an Emperor of China, during one of the periods when there was only one dynasty.
I would grant that argument some water if Diamond didn't completely discount the existence of large European polities like Russia and the HRE.
He didn't discount them... and again, these entities existed contemporaneously with other significant power in Europe.
China has usually, until the last five hundred years maximum, been the most technologically and economically advanced region in the world. This is, if we follow Diamond's hypothesis, apparently in direct contradiction of his 'competition' argument. The rather large coffers of the Chinese Emperors enabled a surprisingly modern funding of pure research by scientists - usually metallurgists or chemists (alchemists) - and artisans, leading to advances in fields such as architecture and weaponry which Europe was incapable of matching until the Industrial Revolution, which occurred due to unforeseeable and contingent circumstances in the UK just a few centuries ago.
Diamond did provide an explanation for that, although I think it is a particularly bad case of oversimplification. He said that a single unified state had greater potential for advancement than a smaller state, but that chance events could cause that hegemonic power to make a poor decision, which could slow that advancement. However, as you point out at several other points, this is very likely giving too much credit to the power of a state, and not enough to the actions of individuals.
Instead he invents other advantages to explain Europe's greatness, instead of acknowledge the purely contingent nature of European success. That's apologism.
He does say that Europe's success relative to East Asia is pretty much entirely due to chance. Also, I still disagree that what he's saying is an apologetic. He's trying to find reasons for why a trend appeared, but he's not trying to morally defend it.
When you reach the conclusion that certain regions were predoomed to be dominated by other regions, you are justifying that domination.
So if I reach the conclusion that a rock that falls from above someone's head is fairly likely to strike that person in the head, I am justifying that head injury? That does not make sense to me.
He most certainly does. He repeatedly states that 'Eurasia' was destined to dominate the globe, and throws in that crap about Europe's "competitive international conflicts driving growth and change" as an excuse for why it wasn't China or India that became the dominatn global power. He also conveniently ignores those Eastern European untermenschen, who are embarrassing in their lack of global success. Only Western Europeans benefited from "competitive international conflicts," apparently.
He said that Eurasia had a lot of advantages. States from different parts of Eurasia being stronger than other Eurasian states, at different times, is not a meaningful argument against Diamond's point regarding the old world's advantage over the new world, because you're discussing conflicts between old world states. Also, please stop flirting with Godwin's law.
Explain Mali, Egypt, India, Kongo, Srivijaya and the many other successful polities with sizable populations that were not in this temperate region. For that matter, explain the Aztec confederacy, Teotihuacan, the Maya, Tlaxcala, the Pueblos and the many Meso-American tropical polities. Then there are the polities in the southern Hemisphere, such as Zimbabwe, Zululand, the Incas, the maritime cultures of Brazil, Ngola and others.
I shouldn't have been so narrow with my terminology. I should just refer to the old world in general, rather than just the temperate bits. What matters is not if a state is temperate or not, but if it's connected to the old world's agricultural zones or not. Mali, Egypt, India, Kongo and Srivijaya are all old world nations. The Kongo in specific was a Bantu state, and Diamond spends a lot of time talking about the expansion of Bantu culture across Africa- but I'm getting off topic. At this point, you're simply listing civilizations with agriculture, but GGS never argues that agriculture can't exist outside of the old world. It merely makes the argument that the world's geography causes some regions to have large numbers of available domesticates, natural corridors for population/disease/agricultural exchange, and all of the ingredients needed to jump-start a populous, agricultural collection of civilizations. Other regions who enjoy less promising locations on the globe can still develop agriculture, complex civilization, and everything that follows. It is just more difficult, and time consuming for them to do so, which has led to the broadest of broad trends observed in human history.
Diamond started with European success and sought an explanation for it. Even if we assume the best of intentions on his part, which I don't, he still fails spectacularly as a scholar. He seeks out information which confirms his hypothesis, glossing over or ignoring any information which contradicts it. In his defence, he is not an historian, but that's a very good reason why he should have known better. I'm not an astronaut, so I don't write books on space travel and argue that I've stumbled onto some sort of hidden truth that all astronauts have missed because they were "too caught up in their particular specialisation" and refuse to respond to criticism from astronauts who denounce my work except to say that they're "too close to the material being discussed to look at it objectively."
I agree with your first sentence- indeed, that's pretty close to a reframing of Yali's question, which is 'Why did Europe develop so many technologies and spread across the world, while New Guinea developed so little?'. That's basically the germ for the entirety of the book.
Regarding your views on him as a scholar, he made observations, developed a hypothesis, performed experiments (as he looked at something which cannot be studied in a lab, he made use of
natural experiments), accumulated data from these experiments, and then proposed a conclusion. His conclusion offered support for the broader aspects of his hypothesis. That's how scientific method works: make observations, propose a hypothesis, make predictions, test predictions, modify or reject the hypothesis if the predictions are not met, support the hypothesis if the predictions are met.
His attempt to take a scientific approach to history only works on the broadest level. That's the point. I would state quite vehemently that Diamond should hold himself back from trying to explain the finer details of history through his model- that is definitely the domain of trained historians.
Yeah, I agree with this. Some claims against Diamond are completely misplaced. His discussion of Papua New Guinea makes it clear that admiration he has for those people (who were an original inventor of agriculture but struggled due to a lack of protein that he theorizes led to cannibalism as part of their diet).
However, I do agree that insufficient attention is given to agency, chance, etc. in determining outcomes. That being said, there's no doubt that early development of agriculture and domesticated animals gave Eurasians (regardless of whether you agree that Diamond meant that term literally, I mean it literally) more advantages, which helped balance the numbers and overcome random chance. Plenty of colonies in North America failed but, as disease wiped out native populations and more colonists arrived, some were bound to succeed.
His work isn't good on a micro level. And I agree that his appendix proposing a hypothesis on China isn't particularly strong (I read it more as a "more work can be done in this field" than suggesting an answer). However, it's entirely possible for things to be more deterministic in broad outlines while having absolutely no answers for the details (where human choice is more prominent). I don't think it's a fair criticism to say that the book doesn't explain the details of human history when it doesn't really purport to.
I agree with pretty much all of Louis' post, except for the cultural cannibalism bit, and I do think that Diamond gives proper credit to agency and chance (although you're right that he doesn't devote much space to talking about that in the book). But other than that, strongly agreed, particularly the bit about how things can be deterministic in broad outlines while being contingent at smaller scales.
The problem with this view is that if the situations were reversed, if the Native Americans had discovered Europe, the Native Americans would still have brought back some diseases, yes. But they would not have wiped themselves out. I have no problem with Diamond stating that Eurasian immunity to certain diseases gave them an advantage upon making contact. That much is obvious. But using that immunity to explain that 'this is the way it had to happen' is garbage. And that is what Diamond claims, albeit in far more words than I just used.
Yes, I worded that somewhat poorly. In my defence, I was writing during the commercial breaks for Agents of Shield. Nevertheless, as I stated later in that post - a section which I actually wrote earlier - while I do not personally believe Diamond's intentions to be virtuous when he wrote GGS, even if I am wrong and his intentions were pure, his argument is still incorrect.
@Mouthwash: The bolded sections of that quote don't prove anything you said or disprove anything I said. Try again if you want to follow me from thread to thread again, attempting to discredit everything I say because I got you banned once.
I'm pretty sure that the gradient of diseases from 1400 onwards goes overwhelmingly against the new worlders in almost all cases. Unless contact is limited and very strictly controlled, I think we're going to see ever increasing chances of the same broad patterns repeating themselves, to the detriment of the Native Americans.
Disclaimer: I don't think Diamond is a racist. I do think he's an apologist for colonialism though. "It wasn't Europe's fault! It was the domesticates that did it, honest!"
Again, I don't follow, unless we use the term 'apologist' differently. European colonialism was certainly Europe's fault, the domesticates merely provided a scenario to make such dominance possible.
That's my basic objection. Diamond seems chiefly interested in providing a post-hoc justification for European success. In his narrative Europe succeeded because it had access to a broad range of domesticates. The problem being that Asia had access to the same basic range of domesticates and rice which is head and shoulders above anything available in Europe. Rice has better yields, grows in a wider climatic band, works well with variable levels of labor and can be farmed in two distinct methods. The results are sort of obvious as well: China was supporting population densities in the pre-modern period that large parts of Europe still haven't achieved. So if geographic factors were the be all and end all, China should be ruling the world. It isn't which tends to suggest that geographical determinism isn't a strong force.
I think people would be foolish to say that geographic factors were the be-all and end-all, especially in describing modern histories. The historical screw up of China over the last few centuries is far-better described by historians, than by broad-brush geographer-scientists like Diamond. Geographic factors seem to be at their most relevant before the development of recorded history.
China spent about as much time broken in fractious states as it did under a single ruler. And the view that China was united under a "homogenizing" power is true to the extent that it created a common elite culture but then so did Europe. The other issue is that this is not a geographical argument at all.
I'm quite interested about this, but perhaps we should save these questions for some time after we've finished
the Jared talk.
Also, I basically completely agree with North King, so I have little to add to his statement. Diamond proposes soft geographic determinism which is mostly relevant millennia before the present in human history.
