There is a good book that deals with the question of why it was Europeans that colonized the Americas (and other places) and not the other way round: "Guns, Germs, and Steel" by Jared Diamond https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel
One of the main points is that the geography of Eurasia allowed easier transfer of staple crops and useful animals between cultures. More, higher quality food than elsewhere allowed a better division of labor, and among other things it made it possible to send flotillas across the ocean.
(I should add that all the other points made in the book are also non-racist. There is nothing inherent in European humans that made them the explorers and colonizers; it was simply winning the geographic lottery.)
The central thesis of Guns, Germs, and Steel doesn't hold up that well when you compare it to facts. One point to make is that maize was very readily adopted by North American culture to a strong degree (it took historians a while to realize that North Americans had in fact developed agriculture independently of Mesoamerica). By contrast, there was no major transfer of crops along the Eurasian interior between the independent agricultural discoveries in Mesopotamia and China.
Another thing to point out: the American staple of maize is very nearly a complete provider of essential nutrients (just add beans), which cannot be said for Eurasian crops. And maize is the highest caloric yield crop, followed by potatoes. As 1491 points out, when the Mesoamericans faced the Spaniards, the Spaniards were probably suffering from lifelong malnutrition... and the Aztecs weren't.
The evidence is, in fact, that Mesoamerica in particular won the agricultural lottery, meaning that Eurasian supremacy cannot be based on agricultural superiority.
It's been a while, so I don't remember the details. But he does go on about domesticated animals that are useful in agriculture for tilling fields (mainly oxen, horses as well), and that they enable not just being well-fed, but achieving a large surplus.
He also goes on about how there were no large animals to be domesticated, completely ignoring the bison, and basically just saying the llama and alpaca don't count.
Llama and alpaca really don't count. They are much smaller and much weaker than cattle. You can breed them to be bigger, but there may be limits to that; there may also be a path dependence to it, in that they started in one economic niche and there was no reason for a concerted effort over dozens or hundreds of generations to make them stronger.
Bison are much more problematic IMO for Diamond. The most I've seen on them is that they are surlier than cattle. But it's not like aurochs were cuddly fur friends in the beginning either.
> They are much smaller and much weaker than cattle.
Same with Donkeys.
Totally agree w/ Bison.
edit: It is worth considering the maximum extent of the Inca Empire roughly coincided with the greatest distribution of alpacas and llamas in Pre-Hispanic America, so I think they had a major influence.
I think you treat his thesis in a too m literal sense. He is speaking of broad patterns. There will of course always be various other factors playing a part. If you look at several areas of the world his ideas seem to stack up quite well. The lack of animal domestication in the Americas and its consequences seem like a strong point to me. He also offers a plausible explanation why there was so little domestication.
If you read his latter books, Diamond makes it quite clear that he really does believe that the environmental situation of a culture is the most important factor in its successes and failures. (Collapse is especially egregious in this regard).
One of the main problems of Guns, Germs, and Steel is that it ignores a lot of evidence that is challenging to its thesis. To be fair, some of that evidence wasn't available when the book was first written, but Diamond's more recent comments indicate that he still believes in now-discredited theories (such as Clovis-first peopling of the Americas), and some pieces of evidence are fairly obviously wrong even when he wrote it (such as the fact that most latitudes don't actually have climactic continuity, and the ones that do involve civilizations that were "backwards" for most of history, such as the steppe nomads).
Moreover, Diamond argues that the reason that Native Americans were largely killed due to disease rather than Europeans was because of the much broader range of domesticated animals in Eurasia. Most of these pandemic diseases hopped from livestock to humans and were able to evolve into especially virulent forms due to the high population density. The Americas didn't have the range of animals that could be domesticated, (or the range of plants that could support the high population densities of Eurasia) so similar diseases never evolved there.
> or the range of plants that could support the high population densities of Eurasia
A bit entertaining, because maize (corn) and potatoes come from the Americas, and were adopted over much of Europe (and in northern China) because they were needed to support high population densities.
I'm not an expert, but the argument that Diamond made was that by 1492, every animal on the planet that could be domesticated had already been. It takes a very special combination of traits to make it possible to domesticate an animal and the vast majority of large mammal species do not possess those traits. Bison, for instance, have never been domesticated, nor have deer, even in modern times.
> domesticated animals that are useful in agriculture for tilling fields
One key trait that Diamond mentions is whether a species
is susceptible to dominance - horses evolved with a herd
dominance order, zebra did not; thus horses can be domesticated and put to the cart or plow, while zebra cannot
(modulo a few feral zebra which have been tamed & trained).
The book is well worth reading, and contains a great deal
of content which the margin of this reply is too small to
contain.
I've read the book.
And afterwards I felt very compelled to believe what he had to say, but overtime, more and more examples start pointing to an over simplification of what is possible.
Horses may have herd dominance, but what about the ox? or the donkey? or the water buffalo? or the yak?
There is another great one called 1491: before coloumbus or something, that describes a lot of what the place was like before, it also shows many geoglpyhs.
"Any omnivores better be happy eating whatever[1] and better be super worth it[2]."
1: Narration over pigs in a pen.
2: Narration over a dog pulling a human on a skateboard.
Cats... aren't fully domesticated (well, there's debate). I don't remember the source, but I do remember one study looked at how well dogs and cats dealt with life when humans were removed from the equation. IIRC, dogs are iffy. Sometimes they do okay, but a lot of their behaviors have evolved for cohabitation with humans, so don't work as well when humans are removed and a pack functions purely with dogs. Cats have much less problems, and it was claimed this was because of their only partial domestication.
Another way of looking at it is that being a pet does not infer domestication. I can have a pet rat, rabbit, hamster or one of many different species of bird. That doesn't mean that species is domesticated (it may have a natural timidness that lends itself well to being a pet, at least more than an aggressive animal might). That's not to same some level of domestication may not have been achieved with some breeds of those animals (e.g. rabbits).
Please don't recommend this book. Jared Diamond, while an excellent writer and a solid ornithologist, is a crackpot historian. There's no other word for someone who ignores a couple centuries of work on the question at hand (the influence of geography on history) that would invalidate his ideas and brutally cherry picks his data to match his thesis.
The reason the book is derided as racist is exactly that it tries to generate a mechanistic inevitability for European dominance, the facts be damned.
How can that be racist? What is the alternative non-racist way?
I can only see one alternative and that is “luck”. Luck however os a pretty shitty explanation for anything.
If you rule out luck or geography as reasons for European supremacy then the only thing left is biology, which would most definitly be the MOST racist explanation.
If it were an accurate mechanistic inevitability, then it wouldn't be racist. Constructing an inaccurate one to justify the current distribution of wealth and power is a racist act.
Now, luck and other alternative causes.
Any process in history on the scale of western European dominance is necessarily a sample of one, so describing a sequence of events is the only way to work with it. Whether that sequence of events seems lucky or not is irrelevant. Indeed, a "lucky" confluence of many factors is often required for a particular large scale shift to occur.
The only time you can talk about luck or chance usefully in history is when you have many similar situations, and a few of them come out quite differently for some reason. Empirically, we say that those are "less likely," but that is a way of summarizing things.
And you are leaving aside culture. If we accept that the general set of behaviors and approaches of a group differs from other groups, then that's a vital component of any historical description or explanation. Why, when the Maori obtained firearms, was one of their first acts to go massacre a nearby island's population, while when the Hawaiians got them, the result was a war of unification? Any explanation of that is going to involve cultural differences.
How western Europe went from being a backwater with, as Jared Diamond would put it, less "cargo" than much of the rest of the world up to the 15th century to having more is very complicated, and much of it involves culture.
> Constructing an inaccurate one to justify the current distribution of wealth and power is a racist act.
Good thing it doesn't try to justify anything.
> Why, when the Maori obtained firearms, was one of their first acts to go massacre a nearby island's population, while when the Hawaiians got them, the result was a war of unification?
All I know about that "war of unification" is what I just read on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unification_of_Hawaii, but "the introduction of European weapons gave some Ali'i an advantage over others, and they began aggressively taking over their neighbors" sounds pretty much the same as "go massacre a nearby island's population".
What's the difference you are trying to construct between these two cases of people going out and killing their neighbors?
You're right. Justify is not the right term. Explain the existence of. But mechanistic inevitability is considered justification in our culture for accepting what is and moving on. We don't inveigh against the injustice of not being able to levitate out of our seats when we wish.
For Polynesia, the difference is that in one case they used force to impose a political structure on the population. In the other they completely wiped out the population.
Well, for starters, the book sets out to explain how Europe conquered the world by describing the superiority of Eurasian agriculture. Which misses the mark by failing to explain how the consistently poorest, least advanced, and least populated portion of Eurasia conquered the consistently richest, most advanced, and most populated portions of the world.
Even the explanation of how the Old World conquered the New World falls flat, because (for example) the Spaniards could not have conquered Tenochtitlan were it not for their 20,000 Tlaxcala allies, and, even then, the battle was not a slam dunk.
The real answer is that the growth of political power tends to be on the basis of a transitory superiority in some regard (usually, but not exclusively, military weaponry). Europeans happened to have had their time to shine in the first era to make intercontinental empires possible. I guess you'd call that "luck," but that ignores the fact that there are deeper reinforcing situations in political, cultural, and socioeconomic spheres that cause small advantages to become big ones.
One in particular is that the rules of the universe are consistent, and can be modeled. The behavior of the model would then apply to what was being modeled.
This is the basis of nearly all scientific progress.
Other views of the universe are that everything is a special case and model results are therefore not applicable. Creationism is an example of such a viewpoint.
One of the main points is that the geography of Eurasia allowed easier transfer of staple crops and useful animals between cultures. More, higher quality food than elsewhere allowed a better division of labor, and among other things it made it possible to send flotillas across the ocean.
(I should add that all the other points made in the book are also non-racist. There is nothing inherent in European humans that made them the explorers and colonizers; it was simply winning the geographic lottery.)