Whose Development

Charles C. Mann sends a fascinating email to Brad DeLong including this bit of postmodern historical jujitsu:

David Aviles, Ian Ebert and Lauren Tombari all ask (to quote Mr Aviles), "If [Indians] had such a large population, why hadn't they developed as much as other countries?" The answer to this very important question is complicated, but part of it surely is that evaluating relative levels of technological development is not so easy, and that it isn't at all clear that native peoples were less developed in this area than Europeans or Asians. As the historian Alfred Crosby has repeatedly observed, societies tend to measure "progress" in terms of things that they are good at. Europeans were good at making metal tools and devices, so we tend to look for them -- Indians didn't have steel axes and geared machines, so they must be inferior. But many Indian societies were extremely deft about agriculture. Looking at a Europe afflicted by recurrent famine, one can imagine them viewing these societies as so undeveloped that they were unable to feed themselves. It's hard to say which view is correct.

And there you have it. This, of course, meshes nicely with the point that Europeans didn't so much defeat the native population with superior war-making abilities as they did simply take advantage of massive levels of epidemic disease which killed off most of their foes.

Comments

Matthew you seem to have quoted the wrong part of the email. What you have there is not the part about diseases killing most of the natives.

Posted by DIS | September 5, 2007 6:58 PM

Exactly how does Mann's answer count as "postmodern historical jujitsu"?

Posted by vanya | September 5, 2007 7:06 PM

I think this is a matter of someone thinking something is self-evidently bunk, when it fact it isn't self-evident at all.

Of course, soon Fred or Steve Sailer will weigh in on how the Europeans arriving was the best thing that ever happened to the Indians.

Posted by Freddie | September 5, 2007 7:09 PM

Nah.

A few hundred Spanish conquistadors won unbelievably lopsided wars over New World Empires that, even debilitated by novel diseases, could still put orders of magnitude more healthy warriors in the field. Remember your Jared Diamond: Europeans had Guns and Steel as well as Germs on their side (and horses and compasses and sailboats and etc etc).

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 5, 2007 7:12 PM

Postmodern jujitsu is fun in the faculty lounge but it doesn't work too well on the battlefield.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 5, 2007 7:14 PM

I vote we ban the word "jujitsu" -- unless you are referring to the martial arts. Something + jujitsu is the new "think outside the box."

Posted by jim | September 5, 2007 7:25 PM

"A few hundred Spanish conquistadors won unbelievably lopsided wars over New World Empires that, even debilitated by novel diseases, could still put orders of magnitude more healthy warriors in the field. Remember your Jared Diamond: Europeans had Guns and Steel as well as Germs on their side (and horses and compasses and sailboats and etc etc)."

For the first time in the history of the planet Earth:

What Steve Sailer said.

Posted by Petey | September 5, 2007 7:28 PM

A few hundred Spanish conquistadors won unbelievably lopsided wars over New World Empires that, even debilitated by novel diseases, could still put orders of magnitude more healthy warriors in the field. Remember your Jared Diamond: Europeans had Guns and Steel as well as Germs on their side (and horses and compasses and sailboats and etc etc).

See now, here, this is a truly momentous moment, considering that Sailer is making literally the opposite point that Jared Diamond makes in his book. The entire point of that book is that the people of the New World didn't have the raw materials necessary to make guns and steel, or any large herbivores suitable for domesticating. The whole point is that it wasn't a triumph of European intelligence and was instead a fact of the random dispersal of materials across the globe.

Now please, please, show some intellectual courage, and tell us about the genetic superiority of the white man to the Indians, Sailer. Don't make me quote things you've written elsewhere. Have some fucking guts.

Posted by Freddie | September 5, 2007 7:32 PM

The American biotech industry brought an amazing variety of foods to the new and old worlds -- maize, potatoes, tomatoes, etc. It's funny to think that after millenia of American leadership in that field, we might sabatoge ourselves with superstitions about divine disapproval of embryonic stem cell usage and the like.

Posted by Julian Elson | September 5, 2007 7:32 PM

"But many Indian societies were extremely deft about agriculture. Looking at a Europe afflicted by recurrent famine, one can imagine them viewing these societies as so undeveloped that they were unable to feed themselves."

Does Mann really think there were no famines in the pre-Columbian Western hemisphere?

I mean, seriously, is there any material measure by which the Americas weren't inferior to Eurasia in 1492?

Posted by Petey | September 5, 2007 7:32 PM

Surely, the apocalypse is nigh.

Posted by sangfroid826 | September 5, 2007 7:35 PM

"Sailer is making literally the opposite point that Jared Diamond makes in his book."

Sailer may believe the opposite point that Diamond makes in his book, but he hasn't argued the opposite point so far in this thread.

Posted by Petey | September 5, 2007 7:35 PM

I mean, seriously, is there any material measure by which the Americas weren't inferior to Eurasia in 1492?

Ok, I'll bite. There is absolutely no historical question-- none at all-- that in matters of personal hygiene and cleanliness, the American Indians were far superior to Europeans. The Europeans were utterly filthy.

Posted by Freddie | September 5, 2007 7:37 PM

Seriously, Guns, Germs, and Steel it explains all of this.

Posted by Gerry | September 5, 2007 7:38 PM

Charles C. Mann's book "1491" is really good but I'm not convinced by all of his arguments for a huge population in the Americas in 1491. Certainly, Central and Southern Mexico/Guatemala and Peru were densely populated before Columbus, as the vast number of tourist attractions left over shows, but his evidence is sketchier for the United States and, especially, for Brazil. Note that the two largest urban concentrations in the US before Columbus -- that big mound near East St. Louis (Cahokia?) and, I believe, Mesa Verde both collapsed centuries before Columbus -- they just didn't seem able to support as many people as they had accumulated.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 5, 2007 7:38 PM

Gonna go out on a limb here, Petey.
Sustainability?

Posted by Auntie American | September 5, 2007 7:41 PM

Steve,

There were about 150 epidemics over the course of a few hundred years, many of them killing 90% of effected populations. Remember the story of the conquest of Mexico city?

From wikipedia on Smallpox:

"It killed most of the Aztec army, the emperor, and 25% of the overall population. [citation needed] A Spanish priest left this description: "As the Indians did not know the remedy of the disease…they died in heaps, like bedbugs. In many places it happened that everyone in a house died and, as it was impossible to bury the great number of dead, they pulled down the houses over them so that their homes become their tombs." [citation needed] On Cortés's return, he found the Aztec army’s chain of command in ruins. The soldiers who lived were still weak from the disease. Cortés then easily defeated the Aztecs and entered Tenochtitlán, where he found that smallpox had killed more Aztecs than had the cannons. [citation needed] The Spaniards said that they could not walk through the streets without stepping on the bodies of smallpox victims. [citation needed]"

Just take a look. It wasn't guns and steel (though they helped), it was disease that conquered the americas. Imagine a different history, where there wasn't plague after plague killing entire towns and wiping out cities. The invasions wouldn't have been successful.

Mike

Posted by mickslam | September 5, 2007 7:41 PM

Seriously, now. There's really no contest in terms of who was technologically superior. No matter how "deft" at agriculture native Americans may have been, they didn't even have the wheel, much less guns and horses and big sailing ships. (I'm not so sure they were all as clean as Freddie would have us believe, either.) This has nothing to do with genetics or who had the "better" culture or anything -- that's just the way the historical/technological cookie crumbled.

Posted by Traven | September 5, 2007 7:47 PM

Technological progress was more erratic in the New World than in the much larger Old World. The New World Indians were largely cut off from the Old World so they had to invent everything themselves. They invented lots and lots of stuff, but they also missed lots of things that seem obvious in retrospect but weren't obvious at the time -- notoriously, they invented the wheel but only used it for children's toys and didn't use it in wheelbarrows.

Travel within the New World was also more physically difficult, so there was less cross-fertilization of technology from, say, Mexico to Peru than from China to Europe.

Of course, cultural attitudes help too. From the high Middle Ages onward, Europeans were the most curious people on Earth, absorbing Chinese inventions like the compass, paper, and gunpowder, while the Chinese tended to be self-satisfied and paid little attention to European mega-inventions like the mechanical clock.

Another oddity is that Europeans, after the Dark Ages, didn't forget stuff, while the Chinese tended to lose track of how to do things -- e.g., their water clocks fell apart and couldn't be fixed.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 5, 2007 7:50 PM

Re: A few hundred Spanish conquistadors won unbelievably lopsided wars over New World Empires

Well, it kinda helped that those few hundred Spaniards could rely on many thousands of disaffected subjects of those empires as allies, something that has been helpful to invaders seeking to conquer powerful but unloved empires at least since the days of Alexander if not long before.

Re: The entire point of that book is that the people of the New World didn't have the raw materials necessary to make guns and steel

There are sources of iron in the New World. Presumably the Native Americans would have gotten around to iron-forging if they'd had a couple thousand more years. The Chinese and the West Africans were also able to invent iron-forging on their own after all. The New World got a late start and was simply about three thousand years behind the civilizations of Eurasia in technology, and yes of course, they were hobbled by a lack of domestic animals.

Re: Does Mann really think there were no famines in the pre-Columbian Western hemisphere?

Probably there were. But maize is a very fecund crop, and very forgiving of adverse climate conditions provided it can be irrigated in extreme drought. On the downside, maize also lacks some essential major nutrients (certain proteins I think). The native diet was copious but unbalanced (which pretty much describes North American diets even today). There was also a lack of animal protein where fresh game was not comnmon. North of the Rio Grande there was still plenty of wild game, from buffalo to deer and moose. But in Mexico most of it had been hunted out and so the Mesoamerican cultures were chronically protein starved.

Re: The Europeans were utterly filthy.

So was just about everyone at this era in history. I doubt you'd enjoy 15th century India, China or Africa either. And compared to modern sensibilities the Native Americans were pretty unclean too. Though it was an odd feature of very early civilizations, that they tend to do wonders with hydraulic engineering and hence enjoy a degree of sanitation that their daughter civilizations lose. Ancient Ur, Minoan Crete and the Indus Valley peoples of Bronze Age India also enjoyed a degree of sanitary nicety that the world did not reach again until the 19th century.

Posted by JonF | September 5, 2007 7:51 PM

There's really no contest in terms of who was technologically superior.

I agree.

(I'm not so sure they were all as clean as Freddie would have us believe, either.)

Ah. Well lets just privilege your idle, uninformed speculation over the historical research of eminently credentialed academics in the field, why don't we.

Posted by Freddie | September 5, 2007 7:52 PM

"This has nothing to do with genetics or who had the "better" culture or anything -- that's just the way the historical/technological cookie crumbled."

Yup.

The Americas of 1492ad would have been a decent match for the Middle East of 2200bc. But the actual confrontation that went down was more like a 7 game series between the San Antonio Spurs and the Atlanta Hawks.

Posted by Petey | September 5, 2007 7:54 PM

I think all this scientific history avoids many of the political issues.

The conquistadors were very adept at avoiding battle against "orders of magnitude" more soldiers on the battlefield by gathering large numbers of Indian allies that were also angry at the core cities of the Aztec and Incan empires. Pizarro was adept at dividing Incan society along class lines causing political stalemates between priests and nobles, etc. I believe there was also a succession controversey in the Incan empire. I suppose these divisions could have been exacerbated by disease by causing disease or making normal taxes seem onerous during times of plague.

I just think that reading accounts about Pizarro and Cortes show how much their conquests were driven by kidnappings and deals, and rarely by straightforward war on battlefields.

Posted by Space Monkey | September 5, 2007 7:54 PM

Mickslam writes:

"There were about 150 epidemics over the course of a few hundred years, many of them killing 90% of effected populations."

Right, but Mexico wasn't conquered over a few hundred years, but in a couple of years, when it was conquered by a couple of hundred Spaniards (plus their native allies). Lots of the natives were sick, but even a small healthy fraction of an empire of 10 million is a lot bigger than Cortez's Spanish contingent.

And then Pizarro did it again a decade and a half later in Peru.

Germs played a big role but so did Guns, Steel, etc.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 5, 2007 7:56 PM

"I just think that reading accounts about Pizarro and Cortes show how much their conquests were driven by kidnappings and deals, and rarely by straightforward war on battlefields."

One of the benefits of having a couple of millennia of books.

Posted by Petey | September 5, 2007 7:58 PM

"I think all this scientific history avoids many of the political issues."

If I were going to rewrite Diamond's book, I'd entitle it Guns, Germs, and Books.

Posted by Petey | September 5, 2007 8:01 PM

Shame on you Matt, falling for that mumbo jumbo. Writing is the key. Where was the New World's writing? At best, it was the rudiments of what many Eurasian civilizations had developed long, long before. Thus, by Yglesias family law, the Injuns were a pathetic shadow of a civilization. You know this.

Posted by Nicholas Yglesias | September 5, 2007 8:07 PM

The native populations of the New World were completely cut off from Chinese influence. That meant no gunpowder, no printing, no compasses, no efficient horse harness (even if they had had horses), and none of the numerous agricultural innovations that were made in China and later spread to the West. European technological progress was made on a foundation of the accumulated heritage of all Eurasia. I don't see how the New World natives could have competed without access to that vast bank of knowledge.

Posted by sunsin | September 5, 2007 8:44 PM

On the theme of European diseases... I wonder how much more vigorous the native response to the Europeans would have been if the Norse settlements in North America had lasted long enough to spread the major European diseases among the natives? Then the great dying would have taken place at a time when the Europeans were not able to take advantage of it, and four hundred years later the native populations would have recovered and would have had resistance to the diseases.

Posted by sunsin | September 5, 2007 8:49 PM

The disaffected subjects were the result of books? That's some stupid shit you're throwing, Petey.

The Diamond worship is a sign of the times, but it's just not that great a book people, and the conquest is a very complicated beast.

Posted by david | September 5, 2007 8:55 PM

Sometimes being contrarian elevates into farce.

How many diseases did the Americans give Europeans? Syphillis. What else?

Posted by KevinA | September 5, 2007 9:28 PM

David, the books helped maintain political/military strategy which was how the spaniards were able to capitalize on the disaffection.

Posted by yoyo | September 5, 2007 10:02 PM

Sailer says "Note that the two largest urban concentrations in the US before Columbus -- that big mound near East St. Louis (Cahokia?) and, I believe, Mesa Verde both collapsed centuries before Columbus -- they just didn't seem able to support as many people as they had accumulated."

But Mann claims that the Mississippi valley was densely populated well after Columbus - right into the 16th century. Is there archeological evidence for this or not?

Posted by vanya_6724 | September 5, 2007 10:11 PM

Agriculture and civilization started later in the New World than in the Old, and I have no trouble with the idea that Diamond-type biogeographical factors were the root cause.

But that means that there was more time for genetic responses to civilization in the Old World than in the New: roughly twice as much. I mean, why do you think that Europeans were more likely to survive Eurasian diseases? Alleles that gave some degree of protection to the more important Eurasian infectious diseases had had time to rise to high frequency among Europeans, just as defenses against falciparum malaria had become common among people in the tropical and subtropical parts of the Old World, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa.

There was time enough for changes in carbohydrate metabolism, reasonable since the switch to an agricultural diet entailed a trilping of carbohydrates. Northern Europeans are mostly lactose tolerant today while no one anywhere was ten thousand years ago. And there are other changes in carbohydrate metabolism in East Asia (sucrose) and Africa (mannose metabolism) The Old World has new regional versions of genes that regulate insulin: there was less time for such changes in the New World and you have to wonder if that has something with the Amerindian susceptibility to diabetes.

There's more: many things changed over the past few thousand years, not just metabolism and the immune system.

Posted by gcochran | September 5, 2007 10:20 PM

Guns, germs, and books:

The Mesoamericans had plenty of books, due to their having 1) writing systems (and in the case of the Maya, "true" phonetic writing); and 2)large quantities of paper, which they could produce at far less expense than was the case in Europe (where, we might remember, they would have still been writing on expensive animal skins had not Chinese laid paper made its way to Europe via the Islamic world. . .)

Good info on Mesoamerican paper here:
http://www.mathcs.duq.edu/~tobin/maya/

All this as a way of getting to this: If you think the Europeans had an edge by way of books and/or historical consciousness, you know nothing about the ancient Americas.

Posted by sharksy | September 5, 2007 10:29 PM

"The Mesoamericans had plenty of books, due to their having 1) writing systems (and in the case of the Maya, "true" phonetic writing); and 2)large quantities of paper"

The issue is not whether or not there were literate courts in the Americas, nor the comparative state of papermaking. The issue is the point to which you non-sequitor:

"If you think the Europeans had an edge by way of books and/or historical consciousness, you know nothing about the ancient Americas."

And I think you have the crucial point pretty clearly wrong.

Not having been there, I can only guess. But I'd posit the literature / historical consciousness of 1491 America would be somewhere around the equivalent of third or second millennium BC Egypt or Mesopotamia.

Posted by Petey | September 5, 2007 10:47 PM

Perhaps the Indians had made progress in other ways. Thom Hartmann has written of the admiration for the Indian way of life common in the years following the Revolution:

"Over the next hundred years, as more and more Whites encountered Native Americans, the incidence of Whites joining Indian tribes dramatically increased. Derisively termed "White Indians" by the colonists, thousands of European immigrants to the Americas simply walked away from the emerging American society to join various Indian tribes.

Ethnohistorian James Axtell wrote that these early settlers joined the Indians because "they found Indian life to possess a strong sense of community, abundant love, and uncommon integrity…" Axtell quoted two White Indians who wrote to the people they’d left behind that they’d found, "the most perfect freedom, the ease of living, the absence of those cares and corroding solicitudes which so often prevail with us."
http://www.buzzflash.com/hartmann/05/01/har05001.html

Posted by beowulf | September 5, 2007 10:48 PM

Wow, it wasn't until I started reading through the comments that I realized they were talking about Native American Indians and not Indian Indians. It makes a lot more sense now.

Posted by Kyle | September 5, 2007 10:50 PM

And I think you have the crucial point pretty clearly wrong.

Not having been there, I can only guess. But I'd posit the literature / historical consciousness of 1491 America would be somewhere around the equivalent of third or second millennium BC Egypt or Mesopotamia.

Well, I haven't been to 1491 either, but I CAN read Maya writing, so at least one of us is familiar with the evidence. However, for the sake of getting to bed I will defer to your superior guess. I'll check back in in the morning to see if you've made any progress on the fool's errand of trying to guesstimate where American cultural developments might fall on the timeline of Eurasian civilizations. Which is really not the sort of thing any credible archaeologist or anthropologist would attempt, not since the demise of cultural evolutionism many decades ago.

Posted by sharksy | September 5, 2007 11:14 PM

Sam Houston, who was governor of Tennessee, went off and lived with an Indian tribe for three years after his wife died. It apparently cheered him up. Then he went off to Texas.

In general, American Indians were admired the most by the most macho whites, not by the kind of politically correct wimps who these days go on and on about Native American spirituality and respect for the ecosystem.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 5, 2007 11:16 PM

The Mesoamericans had plenty of books, due to their having 1) writing systems (and in the case of the Maya, "true" phonetic writing); and 2)large quantities of paper, which they could produce at far less expense than was the case in Europe

Paper's great-- but unless I'm very much mistaken, the Mesoamericans lacked the printing press. That would seem to be a significant distinction in capabilities.

Posted by Anthony Damiani | September 5, 2007 11:38 PM

"Well, I haven't been to 1491 either"

Oddly, while I haven't been to 1491, I did spend a vacation recently in 1477 Mesoamerica. Excellent tamales. Worth writing home about, but you know what they say about the 15th century Mayan overseas postal service.

"However, for the sake of getting to bed I will defer to your superior guess."

Good judgment on your part.

-----

Look, if you read Mayan writing, then you obviously have an investment in defending Mayan writing.

My point is not to denigrate Mayan writing or culture, nor to exalt Eurasian writing or culture, but merely to comment on the rather obvious differences between the breadth and depth of the history of writing in the two hemispheres at the time of Columbus.

Posted by Petey | September 5, 2007 11:41 PM

"unless I'm very much mistaken, the Mesoamericans lacked the printing press."

The Gutenberg Bible predates Columbus by only 35 years. The "book advantage" of the Spanish over the Indians would have been almost identical if the printing press had been invented in 1555 instead of 1455.

Posted by Petey | September 5, 2007 11:51 PM

"Postmodern jujitsu is fun in the faculty lounge but it doesn't work too well on the battlefield."

Hmm. Worked for Al Q on 9/11.

Posted by Maynard Handley | September 6, 2007 12:17 AM

Which is really not the sort of thing any credible archaeologist or anthropologist would attempt, not since the demise of cultural evolutionism many decades ago.

This is why "credible" archaelogists and anthropologists are no longer taken seriously by people outside the academy. The kind of tortured cultural relativism that would attempt to even half seriously suggest that the Mesoamerican literature tradition, remarkable as it was, was in any way comparable in depth or breadth of knowledge to the 2000 year old culturally diverse literary tradition the Europeans brought with them is really of no use to anyone.

Posted by vanya | September 6, 2007 1:09 AM

While I'm not sure about the book angle (Pizarro was illiterate), I do think cultural knowledge served the Europeans when dealing with the Native Americans who were initially naive about the threat posed by Europeans.

The Incas and Aztecs did not even know of each other, making them overly focused on internal political squabbles. By the time the Incas appreciated the threat of Spain under Tupac Amaru, it was too late. I doubt the Tlaxcala would have cooperated with Cortes if they realized how the Spanish treated the Arawak. The Wampanoag miscalculated that feeding the Pilgrims would help them with their own rivalries.

I think if events played out a little differently, the Incas and Aztecs could have put up a far more robust defense making New World imperialism more expensive and difficult.

Its possible this would not matter due to the disease model, but looking at how different the fates were between the Maoris of New Zealand and Aborigines of Australia, I think the trading knowledge of the Maoris allowed them to better assess and respond politically to the arrival of Europeans.

Posted by Space Monkey | September 6, 2007 1:15 AM

To answer a question posed early on, the quoted material constitutes postmodern jujitsu because it argues that "development" is a historically contingent, value-specific concept that has little use when objectively applied across cultures. You can't think of what it means to be "developed" without assuming certain background notions of what is truly valuable for a society. For example, someone in the US is unlikely to deem a society truly "developed" that does not have the fancy guns, bombs, and death machines that we do, that does not have corporate organizations and financial instruments similar to ours, that doesn't have a TV in every home, etc.

Posted by StJoe | September 6, 2007 1:24 AM

Space Monkey writes:

"but looking at how different the fates were between the Maoris of New Zealand and Aborigines of Australia, I think the trading knowledge of the Maoris allowed them to better assess and respond politically to the arrival of Europeans."

Well, the Maoris were Polynesian farmers who switched to hunter-gatherer mode when they reached the riches of New Zealand (e.g., 500 pound birds). So, they were long more advanced than the Australian Aborigines. Today, there's a huge average IQ gap between them, with the Maoris about 25 points ahead.

Posted by Steve Sailer | September 6, 2007 2:51 AM

A comparable catastrophe facilitated the colonial takeover of Africa -- rinderpest killed off 90 to 95% of the cattle in Africa, circa 1895-1905, a disaster of biblical proportions.

Posted by Anderson | September 6, 2007 9:39 AM

"This is why "credible" archaelogists and anthropologists are no longer taken seriously by people outside the academy. The kind of tortured cultural relativism that would attempt to even half seriously suggest that the Mesoamerican literature tradition, remarkable as it was, was in any way comparable in depth or breadth of knowledge to the 2000 year old culturally diverse literary tradition the Europeans brought with them is really of no use to anyone."

Well, you have to take into account that many of the key codexes of the Aztecs were destroyed by missionaries (there is controversy over whether this was to protect Aztecs who would have been killed if caught with them or to destroy Aztec culture). The book-military connection here is a bit of a correlation-causation problem. The type of thing you wrote here was written 50 years ago by Sinologists (many of whom had a rather pathetic understanding of Chinese and no understanding of Manchu, etc.) who denigrated Chinese culture. Just because people in the West outside of the academy haven't heard of certain works doesn't mean they didn't exist.

Posted by Reality Man | September 6, 2007 10:04 AM

I mean, seriously, is there any material measure by which the Americas weren't inferior to Eurasia in 1492?

Just to throw out one, the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan was one of the largest cities in the world, with an estimated population of about 200,000 at the time of the Spanish conquest, easily dwarfing comparable European capitals. The city was equipped with a sophisticated system of aqueducts which provided the population with fresh drinking and bathing water, and was organized into a series of distinct zone and neighborhoods.

Posted by Stefan | September 6, 2007 10:08 AM

Just a short note on the role of epidemic disease. Where the Europeans were subject to the novel infections, rather than spreading them, i.e., in Africa, guns, books, steel, etc. did absolutely no good in spreading European dominion. Tropical Africa, in particular, was a graveyard for European colonists well into the late 19th century--by which time the germ theory and tropical medicine had made great strides in dealing with European mortality. Disease as a massive influence in human history is not a "post-modern" development as McNeil's "Plagues and Peoples" and Crosby's "Columbian Exchange" had made this point a generation ago. Frankly, there is nothing revisionist at all, in a larger perspective, about Mann's observations. Why they would be controversial in the context of the New/Old world encounter seems to stem from political rather than intellectual concerns to me.
And, by the way, Meso-American civilization, at least, had a literary cannon (what little survived!) rivaling any of the classic Eurasian civilization's philosophical, theological and aesthetic achievements. Whatever you think of the merits of the Aztecs, that we have lost the overwhelming bulk of this literature is a loss for human civilization.

Posted by Matt | September 6, 2007 12:55 PM

Two points:

(1)
"While I'm not sure about the book angle (Pizarro was illiterate), I do think cultural knowledge served the Europeans when dealing with the Native Americans who were initially naive about the threat posed by Europeans."

I think the issue of books is misunderstood. Two things happened in the Americas. Sure, there were initial conquests, but we then had three hundred year or so during which no pushback occurred. During all that period Europe constantly grew in knowledge which, of course, meant that any sort of pushback had no chance. But imagine Europe had not grown in knowledge, had just stood still as it were in 1500. It seems unlikely then, at least to me, that no successful revolution in the Americas would have occured. I mean, my god, the US can't contain Iraq, and that's with satellites, optical communications and air power.

So we have to look at the long term picture, not the first battles. It seems to me the only way this 300yr conquest can be explained is
- the diseases just kept on going and going. This seems unlikely. Wouldn't, after the first generation or two, immunity have kicked in? or
- Europe was a constantly moving target (my point re books) or
- there was something severly problematic with the indigenes, cultural or biological.
My natural inclination would be to peg the problem on a combination of pathological local culture and, the flip side of that, a Europe that didn't stand still. But I'm not an expert and would be prepared to be swayed by good arguments on any side.

(2)
"And, by the way, Meso-American civilization, at least, had a literary cannon (what little survived!) rivaling any of the classic Eurasian civilization's philosophical, theological and aesthetic achievements."

How do we know? I'm not being snarky here, I'm being serious. If none of this stuff survives, how do we know? With Greece, for example, we have stuff attested to by other Greeks, we have material that survives perhaps in Arabic translation, etc. ie we have a fairly large corpus of evidence.
What evidence do we have in the meso-American case apart from what I assume are claims from various locals, at various points in time, that this once existed?

And, specifically, what did it consist of? Of course we had some loony cosmology, everyone has one of those. But what, specifically, were these philosophical and theological achievements?
I'm a non-believer, but I'm willing to see something interesting (albeit a massive waste of time) in the explication of laws of purification as in Judaism or Hinduism, from some few core principles. But I'm unaware of these in meso-America (or, for that matter, China).
Likewise the theodicy problem, again a massive waste of time that, nonetheless, seems to have occupied a great many smart minds, exists in its strongest form in the Judeo-Christian world, but also, playing out differently, in India.

I could imagine, for example, interesting Meso-American tracts on politics, or theory of art, or what it means to live a good life; these being examples of the sort of (occasionally interesting, usually grossly over-rated, IMHO) thing produces by early classical, Indian, or Chinese civilizations. But I am unaware of such.

My gut feeling is that meso-America was maybe at the level of, say, Gilgamesh, and behind, for example, Hammurabi and codified law. If I'm wrong, please enlighten me. Certainly it would be interesting to know how they fit into Murray Gell-Mann's Guttman scaling of the progression of humanity through various cultural practices.

Posted by Maynard Handley | September 6, 2007 2:20 PM

And, by the way, Meso-American civilization, at least, had a literary cannon (what little survived!) rivaling any of the classic Eurasian civilization's philosophical, theological and aesthetic achievements.

Possibly. Unfortunately there is no evidence left either way. And really artistic achievement and quality is beside the point. Meso-American written knowledge was fairly homogenous and reflected only the input, as far as anyone knows, of the peoples living in modern Central America. The European knowledge base, even in 1500, incorporated texts reaching back over 2000 years (Homer, parts of the Bible), the achievements of numerous diverse civilizations - ancient Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and then of course the various contemporary European civilizations. Even poorly educated Europeans were exposed to both Christian and pagan world views and had some idea that there were very foreign cultures and people out in the world. Diamond's point, and I agree with him, is simply that 16th century Europeans by luck of history had access to a wider and more diverse base of world experience than did the Mesoamericans. Just think on a pragmatic level - Spaniards had been dealing with strange utterly foreign people for centuries - Mayans and Aztecs had not. Spaniards had access to records of those encounters - Mayans and Aztecs did not. The fact that Mayan literature may have contained deeper thinking and more beautiful poetry than anything produced by any civilization in Eurasia is completely irrelevant.

Posted by vanya_6724 | September 6, 2007 3:53 PM

So, summing up, the Spainish had the advantage of contact with other cultures, whereas the Incas, Aztecs and others didn't. The big lesson I get out of it is diversity = strength.

Posted by American Citizen | September 6, 2007 4:20 PM

Well, StJoe, one measure of "developed" has to be that one's civilization can successfully withstand an illiterate conquistador and less than 200 of his friends trashing the whole place. By that measure the Inca civilization utterly failed, of course.

Posted by BruceR | September 6, 2007 11:49 PM

These casual dismissals of Mesoamerican literature, which we do have a fair corpus of thanks to transcribing Spanish monks (i.e., the Florentine Codex). We know that far more often these codexes were burned, so what we have is much like much Greek literature where only fragments (Sappho) are preserved, often in quotations from lesser works. Nahuatl (Aztec) literature was not at all "Gilgamesh-ish" with a real flair for lyric poetry and moral philosophy. Think classical Greece on this one. While much of the surviving Mayan work is either monuments to power or highly esoteric (as in parts of the Chilam Balam). These are difficult works to interpret since they were transcribed in a colonial rather than pre-colonial times, but much of the pre-European culture survives in them. I hasten to add that I am by no means any type of expert on Mesoamerican matters but have actually read some of the stuff and it doesn't seem developmentally "backward" to me at all.
As for the 200 guys taking down an Empire--yeah, an Empire decimated by disease and in the midst of a vicious civil war. The conquest of the Inca was, to put it mildly, complex. More troubling to me is the view that technology alone is the core factor rather than one of many factors (like having horses!). It is the modern day equivalent of Belloc's lampooning of the jingoism of his day with the lines "Whatever happens we have got/the Maxim gun, and they have not." Europeans were far less jaunty when the machine guns they had used for such slaughter at Omdurman were turned on them at the Marne, Verdun, etc.
Well, I've said my piece and hope someone with a bit more knowledge on these topics might actually chirp up.

Posted by Matt | September 7, 2007 1:21 AM

I believe that Jared Diamond also mentioned Eurasia having an advantage over the New World in that land mass is distributed on a East-West orientation in Eurasia whereas it is distributed on a North-South orientation in North/South America.

The American orientation is a big disadvantage because of the temperature/climate differentials you have as latitude increases.

Posted by Don Williams | September 7, 2007 12:24 PM