Colonialism succeeded for several centuries largely because the invading powers had better weapons than the defending nations. The nations that most rapidly adopted the technologies of the colonial powers (ex: Japan) suffered the least from the deprivations of colonialism.
As far as why technological development boomed in Europe, that's not really a story of political ideology, sociocultural norms, or anything like that. For example, the invention of the blast furnance by German ironworkers c. 1300, was probably a key event. Add in the importation of gunpowder from China, and you had the world's most powerful weapons, such as ship-borne cannons.
A lot of history is just blind chance, as well. Manifest destiny claims about the inevitability of history and superior civilizational strategy aren't very interesting, other than as social propaganda aimed at justifying more expansionist warfare.
I consider political systems, language, cultural institutions, religion, values, educational practices, sports and so on to be social technologies.
Functional institutions and political systems, trust, capacity for co-operation etc are social capital, which had to be built up and developed.
An explanation which ties everything to resources, hardware and luck is "nice" in that it means we can cleanly ignore any possible value judgements about social technologies, which are a sensitive topic.
"suffered the least from the deprivations of colonialism"
Economically speaking, colonialism was in many cases a major advantage to the colony, not universally a deprivation. The US, Canada, Australia, etc., all did quite well during or after a period as a colony.
(This is not intended as a moral statement, merely an economic one, which is the topic of the article.)
I browsed a number of definitions of "colony" and none seem to include displaced indigenous people.
Some definitions seem to focus on the emigrants (and descendents), and some definitions are more about the region being colonized. But the displaced (or killed) people are neither.
The comment to which I replied was talking about weapon superiority. If by "deprivations of colonialism" it meant the indigenous people being deprived, then it would make a lot more sense to say "deprivations of invasion". But that's not saying much: that better weapons are more effective at invasion.
This definition of "colony" refers exclusively to the colonizers, not the colonized. At this point you're just saying that colonialism sometimes works out very well for the colonizers, which is no longer a counterpoint to what you're responding to.
But why wasn't China able to take advantage of gunpowder? They invented it. They had the worlds most powerful navy at a point in time that they also had the advantage of gunpowder.
But Europe ended up with all the power. How did that happen?
That story is enough for a whole collection of books...
But one explanation is that China didn't see the need to grow or improve their technology. They could afford to stay stagnant or even suppress technology because they didn't have major threats from nearby states.
Whereas if France/Britain/Italy/etc had done the same they would have been conquered by their neighbors.
The only book I've read on this list, Guns, Germs, and Steel, is heavily discredited amongst historians because it bases its conclusions on cherrypicked, exaggerated, or outright wrong facts, and also relies on some specious reasoning throughout the book.
Are the other books listed significantly better in terms of veracity?
Like the parent, my impression from discussing this very book with many people who work in the academic social sciences, is that Guns, Germs and Steel is largely discredited today. This might actually be an example of a situation where the wikipedia article is simply out of date, incomplete, and/or biased.
It seems like GG&S was the way people sounded "smart" for a while and now the way is to say "well actually....". Mostly it seems because people don't like the conclusions.
Like the post as an example. It says the European conquest was "hardly decisive". Which is just so ridiculous that it should disqualify them as a source.
But moving on they try to say that native alliances were the most potent weapon. Which is again just so ridiculous. Small pox wiped out double digit percentages of the indigenous population and devastated their society.
> Small pox wiped out double digit percentages of the indigenous population and devastated their society.
This is the kind of cherry picking I was talking about. It'd be like saying "disease killed a large portion of Jews during WWII". Technically, it's true. A lot of Jews died from disease (in concentration camps). But it avoids asking the question of "were there any aggravating factors (like sudden displacement from homes, famine, violence, etc.) that caused them to become more susceptible"?
Like being a virgin population in which the new pathogens could spread like wildfire, being totally unknown to their immune systems?
We have just seen the same with covid, where the entire humanity was a virgin population. And covid mortality was basically nothing compared to smallpox and a host of other Old World diseases.
Notably, the only disease to spread the other way round, syphilis, was very severe too. It took several generations for syphilis to mutate to a more chronic form.
And, notably, even though famine and violence weren't exactly rare during the later colonial conquest of Africa, it usually wasn't the natives who died of diseases, but the whites, who just couldn't tolerate local diseases such as malaria, to which the indigenous population was somewhat resistant.
There is a reason why the only significant white population in Africa is located in territories with more European-like climate, where the disease situation wasn't as dire as, say, in Congo.
I read Guns, Germs, and Steel a long time ago, but I'm pretty sure it focuses quite heavily on disease wiping 90+% of the native population and how decisive that was. I remember this because I was shocked when reading it that the percentage might be that high. One clue that the book is concerned with disease is the second word in the title.
it is estimated that 90% of new world natives died of smallpox and viral herpes immediately following contact with europeans -- that is, after initial contact with a small number of europeans on the western fringes, disease swept across the entire hemisphere and destroyed civilizations. it is literally the single most important factor in the history of western colonization. the europeans that colonized the americas arrived in a postapocalyptic wasteland.
> it is estimated that 90% of new world natives died of smallpox and viral herpes immediately following contact with europeans
Can you give an academic citation for this?
I can't find anything that would support these numbers, they're high even for older work that's since been debunked (and especially not "immediately"). I suspect that there's a methodological error, but I can't say for certain until I actually see how you've come to these numbers.
It's not cherry picking. We have millenia's worth of evidence that people without immunity to Smallpox die at a very high rate if infected. The indigenous population of the Americas had no immunity when exposed to small pox. So they died at a very high rate.
We know the mortality and virulence of smallpox and the other diseases that the indigenous population had never seen. From that you can estimate a death rate and it's clear that the toll would have been devestating. How devestating might be subject of some debate but no doubt that it was very bad.
No, we don't, because we have no remotely accurate numbers on the pre-Columbian population.
The reason we have reasonably accurate measures of the mortality of the Black Death in medieval Europe is some areas kept written records of who died and who didn't. Yet the mortality rate of that is still in dispute.
I'm not sure what part you're disagreeing with. Do you dispute that we know smallpox's mortality rate? Or that we have a reasonable idea of what it (and other diseases) would do to a population with no natural immunity?
But you can go the other way though. If you have the ending number, and some other way to estimate a percentage, that would give you the starting number.
It is a percentage. Smallpox kills roughly 30% of infected people. Doesn't really matter if if 100k, 1M, 10M or 100M are infected. Roughly 30% of them will die.
Like I said, it's a great stretch to extrapolate a few samples to two continents of people. There's a lot of genetic diversity in the Americas, and different lifestyles. Thinly populated areas are not going to spread the disease like thickly populated ones, etc.
Besides, the claimed number was 90% now it's 30%?
Also, look at the way Covid behaves. Despite modern statistics, what a mess of unpredictability and controversy it has. Medieval statistics, which are often little more than guesses, are going to be far less reliable.
> It is a percentage
I know what percentages are. I was simply amused by your claim that the percentage could be determined from the percentage.
>Like I said, it's a great stretch to extrapolate a few samples to two continents of people. There's a lot of genetic diversity in the Americas, and different lifestyles. Thinly populated areas are not going to spread the disease like thickly populated ones, etc.
A few samples? Smallpox has been around for millenia and has caused epidemics with significant mortality where ever it was found. The idea that something about the genetic diversity or lifestyles of the indigenous populations of the Americas is frankly ridiculous. Especially given the numerous and consistent first hand reports that Smallpox and other diseases ravaged the native population.
>I know what percentages are.
Do you? Because you keep talking about the total population or the number of killed when I speak about death rates and percentages.
> Smallpox has been around for millenia and has caused epidemics with significant mortality
No argument there. But "significant mortality" is not a percentage. Accurate records were not made or kept in a way that would provide a percentage. In the case of the American population, there are no records. Just WAGs (Wild-Ass Guesses).
> The idea that something about the genetic diversity or lifestyles of the indigenous populations of the Americas is frankly ridiculous.
Really? It's true for every other population. Do you not know that city dwellers are far more susceptible to epidemics than rural or nomadic tribes? Did you know that Covid infection rates vary from state to state, country to country, in ways that defy easy explanation?
> Especially given the numerous and consistent first hand reports that Smallpox and other diseases ravaged the native population.
What first hand reports in North America? In South America, do you really believe the Spanish Conquistadors kept accurate epidemiological records?
> Do you?
Yes. To compute a percentage you need a numerator and a denominator. The denominator in this case would be the population of two continents, which nobody has any idea of.
If Covid has taught us anything, it is that childishly simplistic extrapolations of statistics across orders of magnitude are fraught with error, gross error, and catastrophic error.
I think this is exactly it. When it first came out it was trendy to quote the book about why certain things were the way they were. Then, people got tired of it and now it's trendy to say "well actually...", To the point on the history subreddit, if you even mention the title, a moderator bot posts a form response saying "well actually..." Without even knowing the content of the post.
I hope we can soon reach a stage where we can accept the book for its good parts, understand it's shortcomings, and have more realistic viewpoints of academic/mass-appeal works and rely less on trends to tell us how we should feel.
I started reading the comment you link to in that subreddit, but I had to stop after it claimed that
> The European conquest [of the Americas] was hardly decisive. Furthermore, the difference between hemispheres wasn’t all that great.
I had to stop because that's the kind of statement on which lots of people -- many of them smarter and more knowledgeable than me -- strongly disagree, often with ideological or religious fervor. I have no interest in or patience for that kind of debate, so I will skip out from this thread.
That said, if you and others think the Wikipedia page on this best-selling, award-winning book is out of date, you should try to update it.
I'm struggling to decide whether to take this critique seriously or not.
You yourself told the parent "many experts disagree with your assessment", when the parent clearly indicated that they simply were following what appears to be the academic consensus on this book, today.
The link I provided has a clear link to further work you can go explore, and make up your own mind. But I sort of suspect that in the three cases of 1) the parent comment, 2) the wikipedia article, and 3) now this statement about the American conquest, you have already decided what you want to believe.
I'm not personally an expert in this field. So I am not going to go and update the wikipedia article. What I am going to do, is to listen to the people who are experts in the field. I actually loved Diamond's book when it first came out, but over many years, I have not found a single academic historian who had good things to say about it. And it's not for lack of trying. As much as the book has received many awards, it is today simply a fact that it has a very fraught reputation in academic circles.
I think one of the challenge with relying on academics of History or anthropology is that, unlike physics, consensus doesn’t necessarily progress towards a more accurate interpretation. I think the post above is suggesting that the linked academic has a agenda that is guiding their analysis. For instance they write that more advanced technology really is just more European. That rather than being more technologically “advanced” Europeans developed technology for a different context. Perhaps it’s inaccurate, but conclusions like these seem to some to be motivated by the need to retell events to achieve/support social justice movements today.
I love reading history, but I am concerned that all historical narratives are illusions - stories we string together from a minuscule subset of the data we’ve captured in writing or other records. This is particularly problematic if people, including academics, see the outcome of their historical interpretations as influencing modern power struggles.
> I think one of the challenge with relying on academics of History or anthropology is that, unlike physics, consensus doesn’t necessarily progress towards a more accurate interpretation.
I think this statement needs some very strong evidence to be even considered in passing. This statement is essentially saying "the entire field is bad at their job".
For individual academics and sources, yes, I agree that one should be vigilant. But the academic consensus is a different matter altogether, and the base assumption simply has to be that the field as a whole moves forward. Otherwise it becomes very difficult - maybe even impossible - to have any sort of evidence-based discussion.
My undergraduate degree was in history from a top 10 university. Only say this to illustrate that I respect and love history. I thought I was going to become a historian. That said, the field has practical limits not faced by the hard sciences. You can’t test or prove your theories in History and many other humanities/social science. The best you can do is provide evidence that an event occurred. It’s the inherent limits of the field. How do you conclusively prove the cause of the French Revolution or the reasons the Japanese surrendered in WWII?
So how can you validate that any reinterpretation is forward progress and not just a change?
> the base assumption simply has to be that the field as a whole moves forward. Otherwise it becomes very difficult - maybe even impossible - to have any sort of evidence-based discussion.
It seems like this "assumption" needs to be qualified with time scales for disambiguating trends from "facts" .. otherwise this is equivalent to saying that academic consensus can never be wrong
> otherwise this is equivalent to saying that academic consensus can never be wrong
No it is not. I said that the assumption must be that the consensus becomes less wrong over time, not that it is never wrong. Those are two very different statements.
Well, academic consensus usually takes a long time to build. And obviously it can take wrong turns (and there are plenty of examples of that historically, often due to work based on incomplete or wrong data - though arguably even if the academic consensus has been wrong on an absolute basis, it has often been "correct" in light of the available evidence).
But nevertheless, it should be obvious today that (probabilistically) the best understanding of the world - for laymen - is achieved by trusting the academic consensus. Anything else quickly veers into anti-intellectual, conspirationist mumbo-jumbo.
> the base assumption simply has to be that the field as a whole moves forward.
Nature doesn't care what anyone thinks our base assumptions have to be. Parapsychology had a decent run academically for a century, and still isn't quite dead.
It's hard to argue that something that took until the 1920s to complete is decisive. The American Indian wars didn't end until 1924. That's hardly decisive.
I think you would need to start be defining “decisive” for this context. Not sure the debate makes sense otherwise. Why does it matter if it was decisive or not?
GG&S rubs academics the wrong way for a couple of reasons:
1) It accepts as a fact that the Europeans had superior technology to the peoples they encountered elsewhere, which is now perceived by many academics to be a form of racism/eurocentrism. (see the discussion in the linked threads about how the Europeans weren't really that advanced)
2) Materialist explanations are out of favor. Everything is supposed to be about culture and ideology and social construction, and everything is supposed to be "contingent" (i.e. not pre-determined by material factors like geography or superior technology - see the discussion in the linked thread about "determinism," which is a bad word).
"supposed to be" is perhaps not quite the wording I would use.
My understanding is that these kinds of materialist explanations are out of favour because they have some genuine shortcomings: 1) they are largely untestable/unfalsifiable, so they veer into pseudo-science, 2) they have a tendency to cherry pick data, and 3) related to the second point, they tend to ignore the importance of the precise historical context (e.g. whether a certain king is particularly ambitious or not, could in certain cases shape the history of a region for decades or centuries to come - this is difficult to accommodate in more systemic theories).
(1) applies to pretty much any kind of historical argument, and historians who emphasize contingency are by no means immune to (2) (I'd say this is a weakness of humanity generally!). (3) is a reasonable argument, but the converse can also apply. I think we should be open to the idea that some historical developments hinge on individual human action, but others don't.
One rather blatant error is the treatment of Easter Island - which the author portrays as a self-inflicted catastrophe. In reality, there are probably three general phases of Eastern Island inhabitation: (one) initial discovery and subsequent deforestation, (two) a long period of relatively stable population, (three) raids by European pirates who murdered or transported most of the population to work as slaves in Chilean guano mines. The third issue is entirely neglected in that book. Not a very good sign, really.
"The Triumph of the West" by Roberts has a different take, putting it down to differences in culture and attitudes. For example, the West had the idea that the universe could be modeled, and discoveries from testing the model could be applied to the universe in general. The West also had notions of rights and freedoms that were absent in other cultures.
Sorry, but this is bull. First: the West was a decidedly very un-free place for the vast majority of its history, certainly during the Middle Ages millenium. To be fair, most places in the world were like this until the advent of Liberalism (in the West), though we also know today that there were places which were anarchic/democratic (e.g. Native American tribes) at a time when 98% of the population of Europe was at the mercy of the whims and arbitrary cruelty of his/her local nobleman.
Second: Liberalism only began in the 1700s, over two centuries after European colonisation of the world began, so it's very strange to attribute that to "notions of rights and freedoms".
After the plague, Europe developed a thriving middle class of merchants, etc., which formed the basis for free market rights.
The Magna Carta (1215) was the first big step towards rights.
Read the book. It's a nice counterpoint to currently popular theory.
Native American tribes were in the stone age, and did not have any consistent notion of human rights that I've read. Keep in mind that also very little is known about the pre-Columbian tribes, as no records were kept (yes I know the Maya had writing, and hence we do know a lot more about them).
What's an example of these "wrong facts", and who is a historian that discredits it? Ironically, your comment is fact-free.
It's a work of synthesis, so it has the problem where every specialist will find something to disagree with. Not to say that this shouldn't be taken into account.
(I have read rebuttals/contradictions of Diamond's other work, e.g. on Easter Island)
Also, why not read the other 4 books on the list, instead of focusing on the one you read and didn't like?
I heard those same opinions and based on recommendations from r/AskHistorians they suggest Why The West Rules - For Now by Ian Morris as a replacement.
Tangentially related, but I find "Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012) takes a very interesting angle.
According to the book, a decisive role for the development is played by political and economic institutions being “extractive” (slavery, serfdom, and encomienda systems) or “inclusive” (universal protection of property rights, not just for the elite).
It seems like England at its colonial offshoots were particularly successful.
Perhaps we can narrow the question to: what was going on with England socially and politically, and how were their colonial practices able to reproduce economic success in faraway places?
I would like to add anything by Alan Macfarlane, particularly his
Huxley lecture, and the core books recommended in the Cambridge
University course on Social and Cultural Anthropology. I'd then
suggest taking the knife of a kind of post-modernist scepticism to all
of that perhaps via a Native American or African eye such as Ekeocha's
"Target Africa" and seeing what a (necessarily) parochial view it is,
to get, as it were, a bigger picture of the big picture.
This was a good survey. The nature of historical books (and especially grand macro books such as these) tends to lead to an acceptance/rejection debate on a particular perspective, which can be tedious, but this did a good job of taking each perspective seriously yet critically.
If the answer doesn't basically translate to "luck" then I'm very suspicious of it.
Similar to evolutionary psychology, it's very easy to come up with just so stories to flatter your biases.
Similarly, anything that suggests it's the "one neat trick" is dubious because we know things are so incredibly complex.
It might be interesting to do the opposite and come up with plausible sounding alternate histories that exclude one particular factor as an exploration of how important different factors are. Arguing against the actual history is very hard though, people really heavily weight what actually happened even if it was pure chance and could have gone either way.
Like modern Europe without the Protestant reformation.
That's the main answer proposed by one of the five books on the list: "Guns, Germs, and Steel," by Jared Diamond. It's one of the best books I've ever read. It reaches its conclusions by considering verifiable facts and methodically reasoning about them. Highly recommended if you haven't read it.
sounds like a luck bias. it's easy to say ah, there are so many variables, and they're extremely difficult to isolate. must be luck. that way we don't have to do the gruelling historical analysis
If you go back far enough, any explanation is going to come down to ‘luck’ in the form of chance circumstances. However, that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still examine what form the ‘luck’ came in.
I heartily recommend Pomeranz’s book, it steers clear of the quasi-triumphalist “the West was destined to win it” discourse, quite the contrary, and because of that it is all the better for it.
From the link, it sounds like recent study has pushed back on Pomeranz's thesis of "coal and colonies":
>So is Pomeranz’s book, his theory about the Great Divergence, now the received wisdom?
>It’s the received wisdom among some historians. However, I would say that the empirical evidence has moved against it in the last 20 years.
>It turns out that in England silver wages were three times those in the Yangtze delta and five times those in India already by 1600. So the latest you can probably put the Great Divergence is 1700, which means that Pomeranz’s story about it being all about colonial windfalls and British coal use is probably misguided.
>One historian, Deirdre McCloskey, has pointed out that if coal was so important, Chinese industries could just have moved closer to coal because they have tons of it.
What I got out of Poneranz’s book is that China started stagnating once it got out of wood to use, around the early 1700s if I remember rightly, I can’t remember that much of a discussion about England and about its coal deposits, hence why I particularly liked it (there are countless other books written by Western writers about England and its industrial revolution).
The question then should be why did they not switch to coal after wood became scarce. England was also rapidly running out of wood to use as fuel before they adopted coal as a source of heat.
That map and this one https://www.researchgate.net/figure/Distribution-of-coal-dep... seem to show a lot of centrally located deposits along with several near the coast. Most coal deposits in England are in the north so they did have to transport it. I realize England is much smaller but it looks to me like China has a lot more coal spread over a wider area. I imagine wood fuel would also need to be transported a long distance after forests near major population centres had been depleted so I don’t think the transportation cost argument holds up.
In my view, the most important book is missing from that list:
De Soto, Hernando. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. Basic Books, 2000.
It shows by experiment and historical analysis, that there's a clear pattern to explain the gap: the legal institution of property being accessible and affordable to everyone, not just the privileged or rich. And if that's introduced, things can change around quickly.
'but the ‘West’ was moving ahead of the ‘rest’ at least by the beginning of the 18th century, and the gulf between them has continued to widen ever since.'
As far as why technological development boomed in Europe, that's not really a story of political ideology, sociocultural norms, or anything like that. For example, the invention of the blast furnance by German ironworkers c. 1300, was probably a key event. Add in the importation of gunpowder from China, and you had the world's most powerful weapons, such as ship-borne cannons.
A lot of history is just blind chance, as well. Manifest destiny claims about the inevitability of history and superior civilizational strategy aren't very interesting, other than as social propaganda aimed at justifying more expansionist warfare.