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All of agp's Comments + Replies

Ten Thousand Years of Solitude
agp90

I did not intend to imply that historians were writing racist explanations for why Europe was able to colonize most of the world - sorry if that is how it came across! Instead, I believe those views were common among mainstream society. Part of that is because there had not been a cohesive, insightful, and popular alternate explanation.

McNeill is indeed one of the few historians who were investigating this question - and unfortunately I haven't read any of his work. However, I don't think that Jared Diamond was just repeating McNeill's argument because the... (read more)

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Ten Thousand Years of Solitude
agp*50

Ah yes, that comparison makes sense.

The prologue to Guns, Germs, and Steel outlines what Diamond sees as the most common explanations for the differences between peoples, and then uses the rest of the book to show why they are wrong and to offer a different explanation.

Probably the commonest explanation involves implicitly or explicitly assuming biological differences among peoples. In the centuries after A.D. 1500, as European explorers became aware of the wide differences among the world's peoples in technology and political organization, they assumed th

... (read more)
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0hairyfigment
Oddly enough, not all historians are total bigots, and my impression is that the anti-Archipelago version of the argument existed in academic scholarship - perhaps not in the public discourse - long before JD. E.g. McNeill published a book about fragmentation in 1982, whereas GG&S came out in 1997.
Ten Thousand Years of Solitude
agp*20

Devereaux’s quote there is similar to the argument that Diamond puts forward in the epilogue of his book. Diamond argues that the geography of Europe, with lots of mountains and peninsulas, encouraged the formation of lots of smaller countries, while the geography of China encouraged one large empire. So while one emperor could end Zheng He’s voyages, Europe’s geography encouraged the countries to compete and experiment. Columbus was Italian after all, but had to go to the competing kingdom of Spain to fund his voyage.

I agree that that is a harder question... (read more)

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2hairyfigment
Perhaps you could see my point better in the context of Marxist economics? Do you know what I mean when I say that the labor theory of value doesn't make any new predictions, relative to the theory of supply and demand? We seldom have any reason to adopt a theory if it fails to explain anything new, and its predictive power in fact seems inferior to that of a rival theory. That's why the actual historians here are focusing on details which you consider "not central" - because, to the actual scholars, Diamond is in fact cherry-picking topics which can't provide any good reason to adopt his thesis. His focus is kind of the problem.
Ten Thousand Years of Solitude
agp*163

Thank you for bringing this up - I'm sure that many people have seen those arguments and rate Diamond lower because of them. I have read each of those reddit posts over the years and have disagreements with them, I do not believe that, in it’s entirety, Diamond’s work is characterized by cherry-picking.

I find that arguments against Guns, Germs and Steel tend to be specifically about two chapters of the book, and also knock Diamond for pushing a monocausual explanation instead of a multicausual one.

The first chapter that's most commonly criticized is the ep... (read more)

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3hairyfigment
>The first chapter that's most commonly criticized is the epilogue - where Diamond puts forth a potential argument for why Europe, and not China, was the major colonial power.  This argument is not central to the thesis of the book in any way, It is, though, because that's a much harder question to answer. Historians think they can explain why no American civilization conquered Europe, and why the reverse was more likely, without appeal to Diamond's thesis. This renders it scientifically useless, and leaves us without any clear reason to believe it, unless he could take his thesis farther. The counter-Diamond argument seems to be the opposite of Scott Alexander's "Archipelago" idea. Constant war between similar cultures led to the development and spread of highly efficient government or state institutions, especially when it came to war. Devereaux writes, "Any individual European monarch would have been wise to pull the brake on these changes, but given the continuous existential conflict in Europe no one could afford to do so and even if they did, given European fragmentation, the revolutions – military, industrial or political – would simply slide over the border into the next state."
Radford Neal131

One problem I have with Diamond's theory is that I doubt that there is anything for it to explain.  The Americas and Eurasia/Africa were essentially isolated from each other for about 15,000 years.  In 1500 AD, the Americas were roughly 3500 years less advanced than Eurasia/Africa.  That seems well within the random variation one would expect between two isolated instances of human cultural development over a 15,000 year time span.  If you think there is still some remaining indication that the Americas were disadvantaged, the fact that the Americas are about half the size of Eurasia/Africa seems like a sufficient explanation.

Reply31
3ryan_b
I offer a simpler criticism of Diamond: the historical commentary doesn't deal in anything deeper than high-school public education as of the early 2000s, errors and all. This is the root of the "uncritically accepts" complaints. Historians don't hold him in contempt because he isn't a historian - it is because he seems not to have even checked the state of historical scholarship at the time of writing, much less seriously engaged with it. The book would have been much better, and much less despised, for the additional effort of one good review or summary article for each topic on colonialism he addressed.