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On another note, what would have happened if humanity didn’t do a big disease swap back in the 1500’s. Could a flotilla of South American ships have showed up i
by purple-again 9y ago
On another note, what would have happened if humanity didn’t do a big disease swap back in the 1500’s. Could a flotilla of South American ships have showed up in Italy in the 1700’s and caused massive death across the Old World?
- IIAOPSW 9y agoHere's your answer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
- tom_mellior 9y agoThere 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 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.)
- lawlessone 9y agoThere 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.
- emj 9y agoCGP grey has a great video based on that book: http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/americapox http://www.cgpgrey.com/blog/americapox , there is also a follow up on the related subject of animal domestication https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOmjnioNulo
- soperj 9y agoThey say domesticating carnivores are a complete dead end and still feature dogs and cats in their video...
- kbenson 9y ago"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).
- antognini 9y agoMoreover, 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.
- soperj 9y agoThey did have a large range of animals that could be domesticated... they just didn't domesticate them.
- antognini 9y agoI'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.
- soperj 9y agoBased on what definition of domestication? There are both deer and bison farms. Also wasn't the Turkey domesticated soon after the arrival of Europeans?
- dmckeon 9y ago> 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.
- jcranmer 9y agoThe 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.
- soperj 9y agoHe 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.
- scarmig 9y agoLlama 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.
- soperj 9y ago> 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.
- skookumchuck 9y agoAn alternative explanation is "Triumph of the West" by Roberts which gives cultural reasons.
- tom_mellior 9y agoWhat kind of cultural reasons?
- radicalbyte 9y agoSurvivor bias, I assume (haven't read the book).
- skookumchuck 9y agoOne 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.
- madhadron 9y agoPlease 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.
- jernfrost 9y agoHow 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.
- jcranmer 9y agoWell, 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.
- madhadron 9y agoIf 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.
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- rgejman 9y agoOrson Scott Card wrote a decent but weird scifi book on this premise called "Pastwatch: The redemption of Christopher Columbus." It contains a really graphic description of how a time traveling character convinces the Mayans to trust him by pulling spikes out of his penis. Weird but interesting. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastwatch:_The_Redemption_of_Christopher_Columbus https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pastwatch:_The_Redemption_of_C...
- philipodonnell 9y agoBased on Guns, Germs and Steel, Europeans had so many terrible diseases because of the close proximity to animals that carried the ancestors of those diseases: pigs, cows, sheep, chickens and because they spread those diseases around much easier due to the geography. Native American (hemisphere) didn't have the animals to do the same thing (just some native turkies and ground mammals I think). If the first Native American ship had shown up in Europe and then gone home, the exact same diseases would have done the exact same thing.
- Symmetry 9y agoAre we saying that Europeans never discover the Americas or that there just isn't any transfer of disease? The first is sort of implausible. As ship building techniques improve in Europe the ease of finding the Americas would tend to increase. Without Columbus the Portuguese were going to run into Brasil while trying to sail around Africa pretty soon. Without the Portuguese then northern European fishing fleets would pursue Cod into Nova Scotia at some point. Technological progress tends to build on itself so bootstrapping from what were similar to bronze age city states without the bronze to ocean crossing flotillas would probably take closer to 2,000 than 200 years. If we just remove disease then colonialism proceeds differently and more slowly but still proceeds. Agricultural settlers have a tendency to push back hunter gatherers everywhere for population density reasons and I think that would be true of Europeans wanting to start farms in the colder parts of North and South America just as it was in Russia's expansion east across the continent or anywhere else. Hungry people living in Malthusian conditions are almost invariably assholes to people who are different from them. Without the introduction of malaria in particular there's a much denser settlement in many parts of the Americas. Influenza killed off a large proportion of the native inhabitants across the Americas but often they recovered their numbers if Europeans didn't move in. The introduction of Malaria essentially made large scale agricultural civilization impossible in large swaths of the US South, Mexico, the Caribbean and the Amazon basin except for people who had developed a partial immunity by living in areas suffering from that disease for many generations. People talk about the people of Jamestown starving because they were lazy or looking for gold but really it was mostly because they were suffering from "Tertian Fever" and unable to work. The native Virginians were suffering in the same way but sadly didn't leave written records. Malaria was eventually eliminated in the US in the early 20th century. I can't find a good historical online map of malaria but it more or less corresponds to the current range of the Ae. aegypti mosquito. https://elifesciences.org/articles/08347/figures https://elifesciences.org/articles/08347/figures I expect that there would still be colonialism but that it would look a lot more like colonialism in South Asia, Indonesia, and the Philippines - happening later and incompletely.
- soperj 9y agoMany, if not most, of the native americans weren't hunter gathers. Always wondered how malaria was eliminated from north america, any additional insight into that?
- BurningFrog 9y agoIf the Americans had been immune to the old world diseases, the Americas would most likely not have been colonized, and would have been full and equal players in world history ever since. That world is very hard to imagine.
- astine 9y agoThat seems like too much of a simplification. Neither India nor China were especially vulnerable to European diseases yet they still came to be dominated.
- BurningFrog 9y agoYeah, but that was centuries later, and probably in part due to the riches gained in the New World. China especially was only dominated well into the late 1800s. You can see that more as a symptom of Chinese decline. Note that Japan made the transformation to modernity quite well. But you're of course right in that we'll never know what would have happened. The Americas were way behind in military technology, but they could have caught up in a generation or two, with huge amounts of gold and other riches to trade.
- mbroncano 9y agoEuropeans were superior technologically in a number of relevant fields, from navigation to metalurgy, that were directly impacting their warfare effectiveness. The diseases just made the conquest far quicker and more importantly cheap, both in pecuniary and human terms.
- skookumchuck 9y agoEuropeans also had writing, which enabled military leaders to benefit from a thousand years of military history. Consider that an organized Roman legion could (and did) defeat barbarian hordes, equally armed, ten times their size. That's what strategy and tactics will do. Pizarro's swords and muskets didn't defeat the Inca army. It was strategy and tactics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Cajamarca
- jcranmer 9y agoBarbarian hordes could (and did) defeat Roman legions, equally armed, twice their size. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Adrianople https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Adrianople
- skookumchuck 9y agofrom your link: "More recent scholarly works mostly agree that the armies were similarly sized" Since that battle occurred fairly late (378 AD) it wouldn't be in the least surprising that the barbarian "hordes" had learned how to fight in a more coordinated, tactical manner than a mob rushing the legions.
- mbroncano 9y agoExcellent point, it seems that the pen is mightier than the sword after all.
- soperj 9y agoAnd yet they didn't accomplish these things in other areas. Africa, and a lot of south east asia for instance are not populated by huge swaths of people of European descent.
- zapita 9y agoThe "great disease swap" is a myth. By far the greatest cause of the destruction of indigenous American cultures was intentional actions by European settlers: massacres, war, starvation, displacement, kidnappings, alcoholism, and economic dependency. Disease also played a role (although in many cases it was spread intentionally to accelerate depopulation or help win a war), but in modern narratives that role has been enormously emphasized, allowing us descendants of settlers to conveniently avoid taking responsibility for the institutionalized genocide that is at the heart of our culture.
- astine 9y agoThis is a strong assertion. I'd like to see a more complete argument for it. In a lot of cases what Europeans did would have been impossible without an initial spread of disease. For example, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he was preceded by a plague that upset the political order in a way that made it possible for him to insert himself into it. It's unlikely the Inca would have been as easily conquered (if at all) without that plague. Likewise, when the Plymouth colony settled in Massachusetts, they moved into the homes of recently deceased natives. Had the original natives been alive, they never would have been able to settle there. That's just a couple of examples and this whole thread is about civilizations that disappeared completely just prior to European colonization, too quickly for the Europeans to have done it through conquest. > allowing us descendants of settlers to conveniently avoid taking responsibility for the institutionalized genocide that is at the heart of our culture. This is a silly thing to say. European settlers obviously weren't angels, but conquest and colonization is a common thread through most civilizations worldwide, including pre-Columbian American civilizations. (Both the Inca and the Aztecs were empires after all.) The difference with European expansion was simply the scale of the process.
- zapita 9y ago> This is a strong assertion. I'd like to see a more complete argument for it. I understand. This came as a surprise to me too, and it took a lot of my own research before realizing how much the scientific consensus is changing in just a few years. This is covered at length by modern historians and geographers, who are revisiting the work of previous generations, and realizing that much of it is distorted by the political and ideological biases of the past centuries. As it turns out, a large share of history we take for granted is basically cargo-culting. Here are a few pointers to get you started. William M Denevan: The Pristine Myth. In this work Denevan acknowleges the role of disease, but highlights the many other causes of death which have been overlooked or intentionally downplayed in the past. Link: http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.html http://jan.ucc.nau.edu/~alcoze/for398/class/pristinemyth.htm... Sherburne F. Cook: The conflict between the California Indian and white civilization. Here Cook tallies up specific death numbers by cause in California. Spoiler alert: disease was not the main cause of death, neither in early conflicts with the Spanish, nor in later conflict with the US Army. (A reminder: the primary role of the US Army for a long time was killing Indians, another topic modern Americans are not too comfortable discussing). Link: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ck1w556 https://escholarship.org/uc/item/7ck1w556 Benjamin Keen: The White Legend Revisited. In this work Keen explains that historians "accept uncritically a fatalistic 'epidemic plus lack of acquired immunity' explanation for the shrinkage of Indian populations, without sufficient attention to the socioeconomic factors... which predisposed the natives to succumb to even slight infections." (spoiler alert: by socioeconomic factors, he means the adverse effects of war, colonization and the destruction of traditional lifestyle). Link: https://www.scribd.com/document/264650329/B-White-Legend-Revisited https://www.scribd.com/document/264650329/B-White-Legend-Rev... And a few longer reads: Ned Blackhawk. Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. David E. Stennard. American Holocaust: the Conquest of the New World. Winona Laduke. The Militarization of Indian Country > In a lot of cases what Europeans did would have been impossible without an initial spread of disease. For example, when Pizarro invaded Peru, he was preceded by a plague that upset the political order in a way that made it possible for him to insert himself into it. It's unlikely the Inca would have been as easily conquered (if at all) without that plague. Likewise, when the Plymouth colony settled in Massachusetts, they moved into the homes of recently deceased natives. Had the original natives been alive, they never would have been able to settle there. That's just a couple of examples and this whole thread is about civilizations that disappeared completely just prior to European colonization, too quickly for the Europeans to have done it through conquest. This is a strong assertion. I'd like to see a more complete argument for it. :-) More seriously, the way you present these facts is a good illustration of the problem I'm describing. For example, you are correct that the Plymouth colony found native colonies already weakened by disease spread by earlier traders. However, they did not just "move into the homes of recently deceased natives". They pressed their advantage and waged total war against the tribes, in several cases killing entire villages including women and children. Then they moved in. This is amply documented, but oddly absent from the popular narrative which we were tought in school. So, as you can see, even when disease has played a role, the way that role is depicted is problematic, because it creates a narrative where violence is swept under the rug. You yourself just perpetuaded that narrative in your comment. Pre-empting your request for more documentation, here is a quote from a participant in one of the massacres: those that scaped the fire were slain with the sword, some hewed to pieces, others run through with their rapiers, so as they were quickly dispatched and very few escaped. It was conceived that they thus destroyed about 400 at this time. It was a fearful sight to see them thus frying in the fire, and the streams of blood quenching the same, and horrible was the stink and scent thereof, but the victory seemed a sweet sacrifice, and they gave the prayers thereof to God, who had wrought so wonderfully for them. Link: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Plymouth_Plantation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_Plymouth_Plantation > > allowing us descendants of settlers to conveniently avoid taking responsibility for the institutionalized genocide that is at the heart of our culture. > This is a silly thing to say. European settlers obviously weren't angels, but conquest and colonization is a common thread through most civilizations worldwide, including pre-Columbian American civilizations. (Both the Inca and the Aztecs were empires after all.) The difference with European expansion was simply the scale of the process. You are engaging in whataboutism. What other cultures are guilty of is irrelevant, this isn't an innocence contest. My culture (descendant of the Europeans who colonized North America), which presumably is yours too, is guilty of not acknowledging the central role that institutionalized genocide played in our history. As long as we don't come to terms with that past, honestly and openly, we will be crippled as a society, and even worse we will be blind to the role of that past in modern problems. Do you really think our modern crisis, from gun violence to the resurgence of white supremacy, have nothing to do with our history of killing people to take their land, and building a political system celebrating those who managed to secure the most land in the process? To me it's obvious that there is a connection. By refusing to acknowledging where we came from, we are robbing ourselves of the chance to control where we go.
- jernfrost 9y agoNo, because the old world had far more deseases due to the extensive domestication of animals. The new world could not have decimated the old.