Just a couple of quick things on this point. There are many people who
have made this point, including some Nobel laureate economists (Joseph
Stiglitz comes to mind).
There are, however, a few flaws (in my mind) with this argument. Many of
the major world cultures (on equal footing with Western cultures for many
years) were precisely in the climates that are argued to be
disadvantageous, like India, china, middle east, north Africa etc.. After
Greece and Rome, Europe sucked for a very long time. In fact, we know that
non-European invaders made their way into Europe quite frequently. At the
very least, Europeans didn't seem to have a clear battle advantage at this
point.
Thus, the concatenation of climate and exploration/colonial impacts seems
anachronistic to me. The similarity in climate between Europe and other
successful countries (US, Canada etc.) has much more to do with early
settlers v. late settlers. Early settlers intended to live on the land,
and late settlers intended only to extract from the land (e.g. Africa).
Of course Europeans settled in similar climates first, but this doesn't
prove that climate made the difference (it is equally plausible that a
European-style governance made a difference).
The million-dollar question then is: how did Europeans gain such an
advantage in exploration/war by the early 1400s when they didn't seem to
have it before? Is it, as you say, the climate that made the difference
or something else? Other possible theories include...cultural work ethic
(obviously bullshit), nation-state formation, and development of
capitalism.
Let me talk about the last two. Europe had the unique benefit of having
competing states (with fairly obvious boundaries) in a very small area.
The needs for additional resources and war making capability were very
high and apparent. China and India, on the other hand, weren't so
war-like because they weren't in close proximity to a state or culture
that could challenge them in war-making ability, so they were content
(enter the famous china gunpowder story...).
The exploration age pretty much starts at the same time as the commercial
age in Europe. Then exploration and resource gathering, extraction is
much more about increasing the wealth of the state, which in turn
increases the stability of the state (more money to technology
development, or war b4 the industrial revolution). Indeed, financial
systems were much more developed in Europe than anywhere else at a much
earlier time.
So, here are two competing theories with yours...where climate doesn't
matter. In one, differences occur due to the motivation to create war and
in the other due to capitalism. Unfortunately, the climate hypothesis
doesn't seem to work out empirically...but the integrity of the data is so
questionable, I don't think it lays the question to rest.
My personal belief is closer to the last argument. In fact, Europeans
were into commerce not because of the abundance of certain resources but
because of the lack of resources (spices from India, tobacco from the West
etc.) supposedly, the Brits had cut down all of their forests by the
1600s. There is quite a bit of work on societies that had more ships due
to geographic constraints having a leg up on the rest of the world in
terms of exploration and commerce (like the Dutch and Spanish). The
proximity of the European states made it so that each state could, and
did, specialize in certain elements and exploration provided a way to
increase a country’s terms of trade. In effect, the Europeans were able
to increase their pool of resources well beyond that of any other set of
civilizations. This extra economic benefit could then easily be turned
into extra war benefit through production and payments to members of the
population.
The thing that makes this work for me is that the earliest settler
encounters tended not to be violent. After about a hundred years, after
the Europeans had sufficiently built their war machines, they became
predatory. The disease point is interesting, but I’m not sure that people
in temperate zones could have handles tropical diseases either (after all
the plague started in china). The lack of tolerance may have had much
more to do with lack of exposure to certain diseases than to environmental
advantage.
In short, capitalism has a predatory effect. Countries that practice it
benefit from increasing trade partners and increasing their pool of
resources...just look at how china acts in the global marketplace. The
western European countries had natural trade partners and ships due to the
geography of Europe. The predatory effect of capitalism was then to
spread to areas where there was no obvious statehood to increase their
pool of resources (by settling on that land). After some period of time
(relatively quickly...by like the 1500s, maybe even a bit before) the
Europeans had sufficiently developed war capabilities to take over the
rest of the world. The rest is history....
this is an interesting topic to me...
--------------------
I’m glad this topic interests you and I know you have
studied a lot in these areas. Plus I have very little experience with the
evolution of economic systems and how that shapes human history, so please
keep offering any interesting and helpful points. Of course I have more
expertise in biological and natural history, but Diamond tries to have both.
Just to reply to some of your points, I never said that Europeans maintained
their top spot on the totem pole for all of human history. As you said, Mongol
and Muslim empires kicked white ass for centuries. But EURASIANS have held on
to their dominating position since "civilization" began millennia ago (Eurasia
also includes the Middle East and N Africa of course). Due to the ease of
interactions along the East-West Eurasian axis, powerful societies have
collided since ancient times. Some defeat or absorb others, and previous
giants sometimes fold and get replaced by new upstarts. As you said, during
the Middle Ages - Europe was in disarray, it's intellectual research squashed
by religious dogma, and brutal infighting between royal houses or religious
sects embroiled the major nation states in centuries of futile & costly civil
wars. The Ottomans had a centralized government that was more in control, less
tumultuous domestic issues, and developed scientific research, so of course
they took advantage.
I do not know why some dominant empires eventually succumb to rivals or
collapse. I am sure Diamond's new book addresses some of the causes (again he
is heavy on the environment), haven't read it yet but I’m sure we can
hypothesize some anecdotal reasons and examples. Geographic isolation and
capitalism let America blossom in relative security while Napoleon and Hitler
turned Europe upside down. That same free market mentality allowed the East
Asian powers to rise from the ruins of WWII and prosper with US help, at least
from a superficial perspective.
So you're right, Euros didn't have huge battle advantages over other Eurasian
powers for a long time, even the Romans were flattened by the Huns. But
Europe's foreign invaders also had livestock, farming, and disease resistance.
Even the most corrupt, misguided leadership (Vatican, ahem) would have easily
defeated Saladin and the Ottomans during the Crusades, if they had no cavalry
or germ immunity. I wonder how world history would have been different if all
the major powers got off on equal footing in terms of the major resources that
Diamond mentions. I wonder who would have conquered whom, but that is a fairly
vague and pointless thought exercise left for strategy gamers. :) SETTLERS!!!
Actually that is a good point, Settlers of Catan TOTALLY REINFORCES Diamond's
theories. I know it's just a simplistic recreational game based on mathematic
constructs, but so is human civilization (or at least economists would hope
so!). But in Settlers, whoever best manages the resource balance,
technological innovation, and trade usually wins (or at least has a marked
advantage). Of course the dice provide the luck element, which is also
relevant to the real world considering geographic and ecological differences
among the continents (plus many "lucky" examples, like how Ancient Japan was
saved from far superior Mongol invaders by the Kamikaze storm).
To your next point: climate. I think Diamond argues that "Euro style
governance" was definitely dependent on climate. If European peoples were
somehow living in Zaire with lower population densities, they would not have
evolved the socio-economic systems and philosophies that helped Europe
dominate during the Colonial Era. I think you have to agree with that. Modern
New World nations like the USA, Brazil, and Canada are, by extension, Eurasian
powers - because Eurasians created them to follow similar social
patterns. You have to look at how Eurasians and NATIVE AMERICANS used their
land of similar climates 1,000 years ago. People of ancient California and
ancient Mesopotamia developed very differently, even though the climate was
virtually identical. Why? I think I presented the arguments already in the
last email. When I mention climate, I do not argue that it was the primary
reason why some nations rose above others. Mainly, it's just to illustrate the
ecological truism that plants and animals spread easier in climates they're
more accustomed to (if geographic barriers don't prevent spread). It was the
spreading and sharing of useful ideas, inventions, and resources among
Eurasian peoples that really contributed to their dominance. That was
something the native Californians and Australians never had.
Right, going on to your discussion of European financial and imperialistic
systems during the Exploration Age. The tremendous competition among smaller
Euro nation-states encouraged innovation and aggression. By comparison (and
Diamond describes this later in the book too), China unified itself by 220 BC
under Zhou/Qin dynasties (by comparison, Europe is still not unified and
probably never will be, despite EU advances). Instead of pursuing foreign
expansion, they basically abandoned seafaring research, traded marginally with
Europe/India - but preferred ethnocentrism, to their own peril centuries
later. They "Sinicized" and homogenized everything, considering the Middle
Kingdom as the hallmark of civilization, resting on their laurels like Rome
(and a certain modern superpower too!). They did dominate immediate neighbors
like SE & Central Asian and Mongoloid peoples, but the vast distances of Asia
made European conquest less feasible and a very low priority to them (if one
at all). Ancient Chinese people spread to Pacific islands, and their knowledge
of farming/animals allowed them to out-compete indigenous inhabitants, but
that happened from 3500 BC (Taiwan) to 1000 AD (N Zealand), long before the
Colonial Era. Also, this spread was not militaristic nor organized/sanctioned
by government elites (as was the case with the Crusades or voyages to the New
World).
Imperial China got lazy and complacent, and of course eventual civil war and
social upheaval fragmented and weakened China for easy pickings by Euro and
Japanese powers. China's early consolidation and lack of competition made the
inward-looking Chinese less innovative and aggressive than Europeans, who were
trying to exploit every edge they could to get a leg up on their neighbors.
Therefore, maybe Euros were more open to accepting/exploiting new technologies
and ideas than Chinese, as with gunpowder like you mentioned. While Europe was
imploding under religious intolerance and Black Death, the Muslims became the
most scientifically advanced society the world had ever seen to that point.
Looking back, it's kind of sad that Taleban-style Muslim fundamentalism seeks
to reverse all the tremendous discoveries and open-mindedness of previous
Muslim cultures.
Maybe Indian history is similar in some ways, I don't know much in that area.
Just now the EU is barely starting to work together, of course under
tremendous pressure from American and Asian competitors. So it's hard to
consolidate, and maybe the example of China suggests it's unwise. But I guess
all the infighting and factions can either impel a society to excel, or cause
an empire to collapse. In a later chapter, Diamond discusses technology. The
old adage is "necessity is the mother of invention". But Diamond argues the
opposite. Inventions randomly happen everywhere in the world every day,
regardless of need. But sometimes you require an open-minded and conscientious
social system in place to identify and exploit useful inventions, thereby
assigning them to fill a need. I won't go into this much now, because I'll cover
it in the Part II email soon, but as quick examples - the auto was initially
dismissed as a waste of time, Edison intended for the phonograph to record the
last words of the dying, not play music, and the light bulb was invented in
Europe long before Edison - but the bureaucratic obstacles giving preference to
pre-existing arc or oil lighting systems precluded its implementation. As with
food and animals, you not only need a useful resource or idea - but a person
who is willing to exploit or improve upon it. The Euro systems during the
Exploration Age made them more able to take advantage of beneficial
discoveries and use them to conquer others, compared to the Aztec or Chinese
at the same time (who were complacent with less external pressures).
So again, it was the cramped geography and ethnic diversity of Europe that
engendered this spirit of competition and innovation, but it stalled through
centuries of Dark Ages before Europe (particularly Northern Europe) could rise
while other empires fell. Assuming that some cultures are not much more
"violence prone" than others, belligerent nations become so just out of
necessity from outside influences. Exactly as you said, Europeans were
competitive because they had fewer resources to share peacefully. Religion and
government systems also play a role, but I disagree that they appeared out of a
vacuum and singularly allowed Europe to dominate the globe. They were
important factors, but would not have emerged if European geography had been
different. Just like the ancient farming argument - you only switch to
sedentary food production if hunting-gathering is not lucrative enough to
sustain your people. Dark peoples in the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, and
Austro-Indonesia didn't have the pressures and threat of imminent destruction
to become overtly warring and aggressive. Sure there were some exceptions like
the Aztec, Maori, and Zulus, but once they had dominated all their neighbors,
their expansionist aggression abated like with China.
And yes, that's what I said already about germs. Disease tolerance/resistance
only comes about after exposure, unless a freak mutant baby in Mexico just
happened to be born with antibodies against smallpox virus in 1000 AD and had
a million progeny who out-competed the other Aztec. For the Plague to be able
to migrate from China to decimate Europe 5,000 miles away, established trade
routes and cultural exchanges must have already been in place (and we know
they were according to the archaeological and written records). As you said,
the COLLECTIVE innovations and advances of Eurasian cultures were vastly
superior to the other continents combined, and not because of inherent
cultural hierarchy as we both agree. This was simply due to trade and
exchange, with capitalistic profit and imperialistic expansion being major
motivators. But it's chicken-and-egg territory here: did those government/economic
systems emerge first by genius foresight, then the benefits of trade followed
accordingly - or did the trade routes emerge first and the economic systems
then evolved to better manage and exploit them? The historical record suggests
the latter.
So it wasn't due to exceptional European vision or ambition, nor superior
management systems - which are just necessary consequences of advanced trade
(that Incas and Navajos never had to employ with other societies until it was
too late). Don't get me wrong, intelligent financial systems are definitely
impressive and ingenious, but I believe they come about almost naturally as
consequence of that many peoples and states engaged in complex, competitive
commerce where the stakes are very high. As you said, many economic systems
predatory by nature, but to an obscene degree the natural world has never seen
(not even sharks or microbes come close). Trade routes emerged due to
geography, coupled with the inherent human need to explore and learn, which I
believe is fairly equal among peoples, unless social/behavioral pressures
teach otherwise (like the Amish, Taleban). Capitalism and imperialism then
followed suit as logical consequences of many peoples competing for finite
commodities. As you said, the resources were managed by the financial systems
- which were directed by government to fuel exploratory, intellectual, and military
machines built to gain advantages over rival nations. An obvious side effect
of this process was the decimation and domination of colonized peoples abroad.
As a final point, I don't know if I agree with you that the earliest "clashes
of civilizations" between Euros and dark peoples were initially benign, then
got more militaristic once the funding and planning was in place. Conquest was
always on their minds, maybe as you said - driven by their government/econ systems.
Why else would you risk death to sail to a new continent? (As Levitt said,
people are driven by incentives and punishments) Surely not just for
"religious freedom" or other revisionist explanations. The Vikings sailed
around with expressed purpose of pillage and conquest (but that was against
other Euros). In "Lies my Teacher Told Me", Loewen cites sources (some by
Columbus' own words) showing that Columbus sent armed men across Hispanola,
Cuba, and other nearby islands for explicit forceful domination. He didn't
find much booty, so he took back slaves instead. I don't know about Amerigo
Vespucci. For the English colonists on the Eastern Seaboard, they may not have
brought arms - but their germs did plenty of damage. Some diary accounts
praise God for the "wonderful plague" that is wiping out Indians, forcing
their migration, and allowing the whites to inherit their abandoned
habitations and pre-tilled farmland in places like Plymouth. And of course it
only got worse after Columbus. It's possible that African explorers from
Maghreb or Sahel boated to Brazil, but the archaeological evidence is scarce
and there is no evidence of their militaristic intentions.
----------
This has always been an interesting discussion. I think we are the latest
two to engage in a decades long discussion about what historical
conditions caused the huge gulf between Western Europe and other nations.
Population density. It's interesting that you brought this point up; I
was going to bring it up in my previous email but decided against it. In
any case, it turns out that population density is a great proxy (or
'instrument') for development in older societies. That is, greater
development usually meant people flocked to the area, and there was
usually an explosion in population growth as a result. This led to Thomas
Malthus' famous argument about development leading to overcrowding and
overpopulation. Of course, he was wrong b/c he never saw a demographic
transition where people stop having babies as has happened in the Western
world. So, before the colonial age, you could pretty much look at the
most populous areas and deduce that they were the most developed.
In any case, several 'empires' had large populations...certainly India and
China did, as did most of the developed Asian states. Why did the
European population become so fragmented? It has to do with the process
of state formation in Europe, as opposed to the rest of the world. You
mention that the political systems that developed in Europe have a lot to
do with their climate. That may be so, but it's not clear how the climate
and environment obviously advantaged one group over another.
Clearly, the climates in Western Europe and Southeast Asia were totally
different, but this doesn't imply that disparate development occurred
because of this situation. Here's a little thought experiment I had to go
through on a similar topic. Assume that the environs of Europe clearly
advantaged its population over the population in China or India. The
logical conclusion is that we would see divergence in development from the
very beginning, as the Europeans had superior resources. In fact, this is
not what happened at all. Asian states, with limited contact with Europe,
often developed faster in the beginning. Later on, the European powers
developed quicker. This contradicts the hypothesis. I don't deal with
the Americas or Australia since, b/c of geographical barriers; they didn't
have the same opportunities for population growth.
Your claim, then, is that Europeans could not have replicated their
development if they had all settled in, say, China, all else being equal.
Of course, we are unable to test this counterfactual. But there are other
historical reasons to believe that the Europeans had certain advantages,
sometimes due to luck. The easiest example of this is the Mongolian
effect. The Mongols took over almost all of Asia, and unified it for a
short time. Even India, which was originally skipped, was taken over by
descendants of the Mongols (the Taj Mahal was built by these dudes).
State formation is very much a function of identity formation. We are
probably getting closer to Andrew and Neel territory with this stuff now.
In any case, people identify with one another based on some 'imagined'
bond and form 'imagined communities.' People in New York identify more
with someone from Tuscaloosa than London, even though their lifestyles are
probably closer to those from London. As a starting point, lets say people
have an original identity corresponding to their tribe. A lot of tribes
settle close to each other, but people identify themselves only within
their tribes. Along comes a 'foreign invader' who subjugates a bunch of
tribes for an extended period of time. Populations mix and identity
differences are changed; now we may only have two groups the conquerors
and subjugated. In this way, identities are merged. More often than not,
identities were merged by force. So, yeah, if the Mongols had started in
Germany, we might be talking about the powerful Vietnamese.
So in conclusion, as you point out as well, fragmentation and political
systems had a lot to with disparate levels of development. But state
formation and the creation of political systems are complicated beasts,
and, in my opinion, the initial endowment of resources is not a very good
proxy for these ideas. State formation is due to a set of very
complicated historical interactions, many of which occur in a space
outside of natural resources.
-----------
Excellent points, and yes - of course I don't dare to claim that environment and resources totally dictate the success of a society. Look at Japan, they have very little domestic oil (the lifeblood of an industrialized society), yet their commercial empire is much more robust than Russia or Saudi (the largest oil producers).
Regarding environment (cumulatively resources, climate, geog, and interactions with others), I consider it to be like poverty-race determining the future success of a child. Considering affirmative action debates and other efforts for socioeconomic compensation, statistics safely show that rich children tend to do much better than poor ones. But there are exceptions. Rich kids can burn out or get fried on drugs (so can poor people of course). And poor kids can rise above their station to do great things, like Mao or Bill Clinton. But these are exceptions. Your background determines a lot about your future – not everything, but a lot. Nation-states follow the same trend. If Euro peoples were somehow transferred to Australia 15,000 years ago - it's POSSIBLE that they would have achieved similar global success, but highly doubtful. However, it's LIKELY that "backwards" peoples such as Aborigines would have evolved much different, more "successful" societies had they emerged in Europe. But resources and environment don't guarantee success, as Dark Ages Europe and further examples below will attest. Resources just give you a leg up, and it's up to the people to capitalize. As you said, the population density, competition, and ethnic diversity of Europe helped them eventually rise to the top (although they were obvious impediments to progress 1,000 years ago).
The notion of national and ethnic identity is an important issue and I can't get into it too much here (or this email will be 1 MB!). I think it plays hand-in-hand with state formation. Actually, the modern nation-state could not exist without nationalism and ethnocentrism to a certain degree. As you said, people need to feel like they belong to something greater than themselves, their family, or their tribe - then they will fight, toil, and die for it. But it's a double-edged sword: the ethnic pride of 15-16th century China made them introspective and complacent. The ethnic or religious identities of the Euro/Ottoman powers triggered expansionism and innovation (in the struggle to be the best, get rich, please god, vanquish the heathen, whatever).
I realized that I forgot to read the Epilogue (and quickly rectified the situation on a recent plane ride), which shed a lot of light on my recent dialogue with ___ and other good points on human social evolution. Just to address the previous issue of why Europe rose to dominate the globe when it’s medieval status was so meager, and why the ancient root powers in the Middle East and China fell. Again, the major underlying causes are environmental, according to Diamond.
No one would consider modern-day Mesopotamia to be “fertile”, so obviously a lot changed since 6,000 BC. Foremost was a gradual drying trend in that latitude and North/Sahel Africa, which caused drought and deforestation that handicap millions of people today. Since early Fertile Crescent crops were so productive, they were also over farmed. Without any knowledge of ecology or sustainable agriculture, early Mesopotamians clear-cut forests and farmed to the hilt. Unfortunately this reduced soil quality, and the low seasonal rainfall made native plant re-growth slower and more difficult. Food production happened to emerge in a very ecologically fragile region, but quickly spread to more forgiving locations in Europe and Asia. So the initial advantage that climate and flora provided for Mesopotamians eventually led to their gradual loss of prestige, as the Eurasian power center shifted westward. This “cycle” of advantage to disadvantage has played out many times in human history, also with China (that I will discuss next). Of course it may also apply to the USA, where our robust spirit of individualistic achievement, ambition, and industriousness helped us survive the tumultuous 1800’s and rise to the top in the 1900’s, but may ultimately spell our collapse when the negative manifestations of greed, arrogance, and ethnocentrism take over.
While Europeans were wallowing during the middle Ages, Islamic and Chinese empires thrived. China also enjoyed the benefit of earliest food production and favorable climate – but geography helped trigger its decline. As previously mentioned, China was unified very early (221 BC), while Europe never was and never will be (despite Caesar, Napoleon, and Hitler’s best hopes). China has less geographic fragmentation (smooth coastline, long rivers, large valleys, meager highlands except for the Himalayas), so that facilitated easier human exchanges. On the other hand, Europe is full of jutting mountains, water/peninsulas, and islands to separate peoples. The longest rivers are the puny Rhine and Danube. These barriers allowed independent cultures to evolve & diversify in a more isolated fashion during ancient times.
The ethno-cultural diversity in Europe far surpassed that of China, even before Sinicization (this can be traced with language variation too). Europe had 500 states in 1500 (40 or so today, depending on how the UN and Eastern Europe change things), and 45 modern languages. This fragmentation caused a lot of lost productivity and wasted resources through brutal infighting during the middle Ages, even if people could bridge geographic barriers to interact. In comparison, only one major language, alphabet, political philosophy, and centralized government existed in China. This consolidation permitted sweeping social action and fostered tremendous technological advancement. Chinese led the way in iron casting, gunpowder, paper/printing, reliable clocks, and compass/advanced navigation. Chinese seafarers constructed massive vessels to dwarf the Nina, Pinta, and Santa Maria combined, and such “treasure ships” sailed as far as East Africa in the 1400’s for trade. With a great start like this, what went wrong?
Every coin has 2 faces: unified, isolated China permitted early growth but then impeded competition and further advancement. Of course no empire stays unified forever, and as we discussed in the last email, factioned infighting in the Imperial Court set China back in a big way. The “eunuchs” (ewww) lost power in government, but they also controlled most of the shipping sector. So as punishment, the anti-eunuchs suspended seafaring and forbade future voyages after 1433, and the rest is history. Another problem with centralized government is one incompetent despot can spoil the party for everyone, as Germans, Iraqis, and Americans can attest. Backwards-thinking leaders can stall innovation or cultural “enlightenment”. The communists’ Cultural Revolution was a modern example of this phenomenon, suggesting that we Yanks aren’t the only ones who do not learn from our own gaffes in history.
So the initial connectedness, relative isolation, and integrity of China made it very strong during the Middle Ages, successfully quashing any emerging rivals and protecting it from foreign competition. But that same unification and lack of rivals made China more susceptible to poor executive leadership, complacency, and stagnation. In contrast, the fragmentation in Europe initially fostered much hostility, inefficiency, and non-cooperation. But emerging from the Dark Ages, the leading European states innovated out of necessity. As ___ mentioned, the development of capitalism, imperialism, proselytizing religion, and other political-economic systems came logically out of such favorable conditions and reinforced the competitive, expansionary process that eventually overwhelmed China and other foreign states. In such a hyper-competitive climate with many eager rivals, Euro nations either stowed the BS and made it happen, or were crushed by neighbors. Nations that failed to adopt useful advancements or ideas quickly fell behind those who did exploit them advantageously.
FINAL COMMENTS
To conclude the text, Diamond seeks perspective in order to evaluate the environment, cultural idiosyncrasies, and individual greatness as the main causes of human social evolution. In addition, he gauges the prospects of “historical science” as a valid method of study, using comparative and “natural experiment” techniques to shed causative light on why and how social history took place and continues to unfold. He uses analogies and techniques validated by other historical sciences such as astronomy, geology, and paleontology. After the facts, arguments, and beliefs presented, I’ll leave it to you to decide if it’s all worth a damn – which I suspect it is.
As previous comments have presented, major environmental factors governing human social progress can be generalized into continental differences, diffusion/migration rates within and among continents, as well as population size. Each land mass possessed variable resources and limitations for early humans that affected how they lived. Each land mass contained barriers that separated peoples to different degrees. And each land mass permitted the rise of populations of different sizes – of course more people = more chance for great inventions, leaders, and ideas to rise. Higher pop densities are not possible without robust farming and herding, which engenders the secondary, almost necessary consequences of germ exposure/resistance, writing and technology (to better manage and exploit resources), and complex political organization (to better manage and exploit people power).
But environment is not everything, as we all know. Einstein would have contributed greatly to humanity had he been born middle class Brazilian, but maybe not as a rural Sudanese. So how do cultures and individuals fit into the puzzle? Culture does greatly shape societies, as ___ argues and I agree – the systems of governance in Europe allowed for robust development of political-economic theories and management systems like capitalism, communism, democracy, and such to gain advantages over cultures that didn’t put much stock in such innovation (like the Navajo or Zulus). But on the environmental side, European political-economic systems would probably have not emerged had the continent been a tropical region without livestock and geographically isolated from Greater Asia. China was a great example of how seemingly arbitrary or politically derived cultural factors can change history for an entire civilization.
Another relevant example: the QWERTY keyboard that I am using now is the product of 1800’s typists who jammed their primitive machines if they typed too fast, so a deliberately inefficient keyboard was implemented to slow them down. Later studies in 1932 showed a more efficiently designed keyboard (common letters kept in the center near the dominant fingers) could reduce typing effort by 95%. Cultural and bureaucratic obstacles prevented this improvement, and now all of us will become afflicted with carpal tunnel (probably me first). I don’t think you can attribute much of this to environment, even though such decisions affected billions of people for generations. But who wants to change? If it ain’t broke don’t fix it! I wonder if they’ll say the same thing about us 100 years from now, figuring out why we stubbornly clung to our overuse of oil-based energy and transport (commercial powers blocked competing reforms of course), even against our own interests. Cultural diversity and decisions can affect things locally or even globally, but large-scale trends triggered by environmental differences can’t be stopped. It was the environment that probably helped create the cultural trends in the first place (Europe’s crowded fragmentation engendered a spirit of competition and individualism, while Chinese isolation and contiguity probably fostered conformity).
And surely the individual can affect things. Had Hitler been killed in battle during WWI or from the bomb planted by his subordinates in ’44, the world would be very different now. But I think that Diamond asserts that Hitlers and Einsteins will appear randomly throughout the globe irrespective of environment, but what they can do and how they can impact history are heavily environmentally dependent. No person, group, or army could have prevented Euro domination of the Americas, or China’s adoption of farming millennia before Austro-Indonesians. If Cortéz and Pizarro didn’t bring guns and horse to conquer the natives, Spanish missionaries and their diseases would have eventually. Nero let Rome burn, but he couldn’t destroy Europe even if he tried. The Crusades, Black Death, and Napoleonic Wars set Euro societies back quite a bit, but the majority of their political-economic institutions were still intact for later use subjugating other peoples and usurping their land, even weakling states like Belgium and Italy. Well, Eurasian domination seemed inevitable, unless an unlikely combination of events took place – such as a certain powerful leader (backed by popular ideology) doing really, really stupid things, with misguided, corrupt advisors and a very blindly loyal or apathetic populace … ironic?). But in summary, the effects of culture or individuals are more or less random – wild cards that rock the boat from time to time, but aren’t powerful enough to totally change the course of history that is heavily determined by environment.
So in closing, how does historical science work? Briefly, it attempts to apply scientific principles and methodologies for understanding human history (as we do with natural history). Obviously human societies are too complex and variable to conduct controlled experiments or useful simulations (as one would do in a lab). Instead, we can rely on observations and comparisons among similar populations to draw reasonable conclusions and trends. “Harder” sciences like physics and chemistry aim to characterize natural phenomena and establish predictive, deterministic laws that govern their behavior. This is unrealistic in biology and the softer sciences (with too many variables at play), so instead we must utilize large-population statistics over long periods of time (to reduce random effects). Although we can’t hope for perfectly repeatable experiments where only one parameter is varied at a time, we can compare populations with the presence or absence of one factor (in order to determine it’s effects). The Aztec and Incas rose to power fairly concurrently, but one group possessed writing and the other did not. How did writing affect relations with Conquistadors? The questions one can pose are limitless, but the chance of obtaining a reasonable, enlightening answer depends on the methodology. Historians tend to become too myopic and small-scale with their deep analyses of narrow historical periods. Of course Diamond doesn’t have all the answers, and his system is not perfect. He acknowledges its limitations, and errs on the opposite extreme: getting too general with 13,000 years of human history condensed into a 400-page text. But nevertheless, he broke new ground on the interface between science and history, and his novel studies hold great potential to better tackle the most profound questions that have always been on the minds of humans: who we are, how we came to be like this, and where we are going.
