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Elden Lord Godfrey posted:Considering prehistory is littered with the remnants of archaic homo sapiens who became extinct due to climactic shifts, hunter gathering is extremely vulnerable to climactic shifts. this is somewhat tautological—we wouldnt consider it a climax if it didnt take place shortly before their final denouement
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Mar 10, 2024 14:43
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Carillon posted:I'm not a scholar of anything, but I was always surprised at the vehemency towards Diamond, because I was assigned Ecological Imperialism in college. It's not like a perfect 1-1 or anything, but from what I remember Crosby has a lot of similar arguments at times. I always got the vibe that, basically, Diamond is like the one successful pop historian who isn't complete garbage, with something resembling an understanding of material conditions and setting out to actively refute the blatantly racist ideas of history, but he's still a pop historian.
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Mar 10, 2024 16:58
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Ghost Leviathan posted:I always got the vibe that, basically, Diamond is like the one successful pop historian who isn't complete garbage, with something resembling an understanding of material conditions and setting out to actively refute the blatantly racist ideas of history, but he's still a pop historian. I think I qualify as a relative Diamond apologist, because my main association/memory of him is conservatives at the time it came out being loving furious that his theory for how Europeans colonized the Americas wasn't "their superior intellect and capitalist institutions" but instead "they hosed sheep until they were able to carry some truly nasty diseases." That said, I also have a very distinct experience with the book where I was reading along and going "ok ok this is reasonable' up until the moment he got to trying to explain the divergence between European and Chinese technology, a subject I know more about than the conquest of the Americas or diseases, I went 'well this is a bunch of utter nonsense.' And as far as I can tell, for nearly everything he says, specialists in that subfield go "well this is loving nonsense." That said, here's a more thorough and interesting take from the ever-useful askhistorians https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/a_detailed_rebuttalalternative_to_the_one_that/dk6htc0/
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Mar 10, 2024 17:32
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Yeah Diamond wrote his books as a direct response to the extremely racist pop-history that was gaining traction in the 90s and his theory "Europe won because they had a good start location" is close enough that everyone can easily grasp it and discard the racist theories. "Collapse", his second book, wasn't as good and was a lot more 'pop' then 'history'.
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Mar 10, 2024 17:51
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The population at large should simply do without history, to avoid the issue with pop history.
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Mar 10, 2024 18:00
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I get some of the flack Guns, Germs, etc. Gets but I feel the central thesis of "Europeans weren't superior they just got really lucky with geography." is fairly sound.
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Mar 10, 2024 18:14
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Yeah I was guarded in my initial post but as a young man that book did a lot to help me deconstruct the racist ideas I was raised with. And yeah I know enough not to treat anything as gospel but the general concepts seem pretty well supported and accepted by actual scholars
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Mar 10, 2024 18:54
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I feeling there's not much GGS does as a book that isn't done better, with more rigor and less vibes-based reasoning, by _1491_.
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Mar 10, 2024 18:56
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1491 loving rocks. GGS isn't a good book, I want to be clear. I say that I'm a relative Diamond apologist because at least its way less racist than the books it was responding to, but both the explanations he provides do not work and some of the events he tries to explain didn't happen, which is a big loving problem as a piece of history. His arguments feel convincing because they are not as absurd as the explanations you get in an American public education, they are less moralistic and more materialistic. But it's bad history. I really need to emphasize that his version of the conquest of the Americas is in fact not accurate, and his explanation of the great divergence is bad enough that he should have just not addressed the topic at all.
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Mar 10, 2024 19:11
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One of the biggest problems with Diamond is that he is really bad at historical methodology. He has some interesting things to say about livestock and animal domestication, which makes since given that his background is in zoology, but when it comes to the parts of the book where he is trying to work with historical primary sources, he's really bad at it. One of the most glaring examples (although he does this repeatedly) is how uncritically he uses the account of a single Spanish priest in describing the conquest of the Aztecs. He block quotes this priest at length, and doesn't make any real attempt to probe the weakness and biases of the source (of which there are many), and he also does not bring in alternative primary sources for comparison. Now, there aren't a ton of options for other primary sources for the conquest of the Aztecs, but there is certainly more than one, including sources from Spaniards with different perspectives and views, and some sources from indigenous authors (although these are only preserved in later copies, and they are admittedly difficult to interpret), both of which he totally ignores. You also simply cannot approach the account of a Spanish priest as though it is a neutral account of events, and even though he might of made a cursory disclaimer about bias, his narrative is drawn straight from this source without any attempt to contextualize or critique it. This is far from unique to Diamond, many non-historians who try to write history books fall into the same pitfalls of relying heavily on a single primary source, and not being critical of what primary sources say. An extreme example I can think of is a book that a statistician wrote where he tried to calculate the growth rate of early Christianity, but he assumed that all the numbers that he saw in Classical and Patristic sources were accurate, and he did his calculations based on those numbers. But they aren't, and he didn't consider that many of the sources he was working with were making up their numbers, or that numbers may have been garbled in chain of copying that preserved those sources to the present. Avoiding these pitfalls is the kind of thing you learn in an introductory historiography/historical methodology class, but Diamond never took one of those, and far more importantly, he never thought it was important to learn about historical methodology before he wrote a history book. There are plenty of history books written by non-historians who spent time thinking about and learning about historical methodology before writing their history books, and their works are almost always way better than those by non-historians who arrogantly think they don't need to learn anything about historical methods before they start writing history books. I am not aware of any historians who have attempted to write books about zoology without learning about zoological methodology before beginning their work, but for some reason lots of non-historians think they can write history without bothering to learn anything about the methods and tools of historical research.
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Mar 10, 2024 19:34
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I mean GGS isn't a scholarly book, you can find it in airports - but what's wrong with it? I assume like any 30 year old nonfiction book a lot of the empirical stuff is outdated or supplanted by now, but what parts of the main thesis have been rebutted? I remember there was a fairly big debate regarding the crop and calorie arguments a few years after its release.
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Mar 10, 2024 19:34
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Tulip posted:I think I qualify as a relative Diamond apologist, because my main association/memory of him is conservatives at the time it came out being loving furious that his theory for how Europeans colonized the Americas wasn't "their superior intellect and capitalist institutions" but instead "they hosed sheep until they were able to carry some truly nasty diseases." >The european conquest of the Americas was hardly decisive and the plagues weren't that bad Dude, what the gently caress is your threshold for a 'decisive' conquest or a bad plague, the planet literally cooled in a measurable way due to the mass deaths reducing carbon emissions. More than 90%+ of the population died!
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Mar 10, 2024 19:36
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Tulip posted:1491 loving rocks. As a follow up to my previous post, I will note that Charles Mann, the author of 1491, wasn't trained as a historian either, his background is in journalism. But unlike Diamond, he clearly made a real effort to learn the methods of historical research, and it shows in the far more varied sources he uses, and the much more careful and considered way he uses them.
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Mar 10, 2024 19:46
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Tunicate posted:>The european conquest of the Americas was hardly decisive and the plagues weren't that bad Diamond portrays the conquest of the Americas and the deaths by disease as functionally instantaneous. Cortes and his native allies defeat the Aztecs in one military campaign and that's north america sown up by 1525, Pizarro defeats the Inca at one battle and that's south America in a package by 1535, and that's all the history. The reality is that there's a lot more back and forth, the Yucatan had independent kingdoms resisting the conquistadors til 1696, the Mapuche took like 300 loving years to conquer, the Comanche didn't even exist until the 1700s and proved an existential threat to New Spain, Mexico, and Texas in the 19th century. Really the issue is the same one you're repeating here: compressing 300+ years into one event, when a serious treatment sees a long series of events. To talk about the Comanche again, we can't talk about 90% of Comanche dying of disease in 1500 because there was not a single Comanche available to die in 1500, and the disease events that utterly rock them are in 1848 and 1849 - completely discontinuous with the narrative that Diamond is telling. As that historian you're reacting to is saying, getting up to 90% deaths is not a single one thing that happens, it is a series of epidemics, sometimes spread by totally organic connections but sometimes spread by deliberate germ warfare, frequently spread by the use of concentration camps and sieges and the destruction of food systems, that cumulatively add up to 90% over the long run but turning that into a single, one event is, well, basically just skipping the work of history.
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Mar 10, 2024 20:35
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I love the Comanche. Dudes got access to horses and basically went "Hey let's become The Mongols" and Mongoled all over the place.
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Mar 10, 2024 20:40
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Tulip posted:Diamond portrays the conquest of the Americas and the deaths by disease as functionally instantaneous. Cortes and his native allies defeat the Aztecs in one military campaign and that's north america sown up by 1525, Pizarro defeats the Inca at one battle and that's south America in a package by 1535, and that's all the history. The reality is that there's a lot more back and forth, the Yucatan had independent kingdoms resisting the conquistadors til 1696, the Mapuche took like 300 loving years to conquer, the Comanche didn't even exist until the 1700s and proved an existential threat to New Spain, Mexico, and Texas in the 19th century.
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Mar 10, 2024 20:57
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Yeah there were multiple mass death plague events over the 400 years or so; however it seems like the first one(s) that spread in the early 1500s were extremely devastating. Although there aren't ya know, extensive written records it's hard to get precise figures but thanks to the early conquistadors being like "hey, there's a ton of people here" and the later ones being like, "wow, there's nobody here but a lot of arable land, weird, eh?" seems to point that way.
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Mar 10, 2024 21:51
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sullat posted:Yeah there were multiple mass death plague events over the 400 years or so; however it seems like the first one(s) that spread in the early 1500s were extremely devastating. Although there aren't ya know, extensive written records it's hard to get precise figures but thanks to the early conquistadors being like "hey, there's a ton of people here" and the later ones being like, "wow, there's nobody here but a lot of arable land, weird, eh?" seems to point that way.
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Mar 10, 2024 22:00
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Orbs posted:That's possible, but the latter could also point to the extensive colonial efforts to draw in more settlers and investment, more than there actually being nobody there.
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Mar 10, 2024 22:07
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Nessus posted:I don't follow, it sounds like a lot of these regions had been cultivated and had been fairly recently abandoned (if perhaps not like literally last week, or even last year). Do you mean that the expansion moved so fast that those areas didn't have time to revert to wilderness with much less sign of previous habitation?
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Mar 10, 2024 22:09
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I figure I might as well ask this while this topic is going on. Like most Americans I know the basics of our history with Native Americans. "Broken treaties, war, disease." But I wanted to read actual history books on the subject. Perhaps it's just because I'm American or these books are more popular/numerous, but it seems like the Natives were most devastated by the United States in the 1800s? Obviously, there were conflicts with Europeans before then but things like concentrated attempts to destroy all their food, drive animals to extinction, and steal all their land and force them into reservations, that all was going on in the mid to late 1800s. So is it correct or totally incorrect to say that the US government was even more brutal and had a longer lasting effect on the Native peoples than the European Empires did?
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Mar 10, 2024 22:14
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NikkolasKing posted:I figure I might as well ask this while this topic is going on. The Spanish enslaved natives and worked them to death. You can't make simplistic comparisons with what happens in the 1800s, because for one the set up between the frontiersmen and the Plains Indians was very different from what was happening in Central and South America - the Spanish destroyed powerful urban civilisations at a time when settlement of the plains wouldn't've even been feasible. It sort of swings both ways, like the issue of "the black legend", Spain wasn't as bad as we've portrayed them, that's English and American slander to make themselves look good - but honestly the Spanish were really, really horrible.
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Mar 10, 2024 22:27
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E: Nevermind
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Mar 10, 2024 22:27
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NikkolasKing posted:I figure I might as well ask this while this topic is going on. I think the question isn't really well-framed enough to even start giving an answer. Like the ultra-pedantic way would be interpreting 'longer lasting' as "who started first", and the spanish started doing their poo poo way earlier than the US government even existed
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Mar 10, 2024 22:32
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Ras Het posted:The Spanish enslaved natives and worked them to death. You can't make simplistic comparisons with what happens in the 1800s, because for one the set up between the frontiersmen and the Plains Indians was very different from what was happening in Central and South America - the Spanish destroyed powerful urban civilisations at a time when settlement of the plains wouldn't've even been feasible. It sort of swings both ways, like the issue of "the black legend", Spain wasn't as bad as we've portrayed them, that's English and American slander to make themselves look good - but honestly the Spanish were really, really horrible. Tunicate posted:I think the question isn't really well-framed enough to even start giving an answer. Fair enough. If it isn't comparable or if they were catastrophic to different people in different ways, that makes sense. It's just trying to delve into Native American history has given ne no shortage of books on America's genocide in the 1800s. Maybe it's just that term Indian or Native American.
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Mar 10, 2024 22:40
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I don't think there's an objective comparison or any point in even trying to come up with such a thing. Even if you desperately wanted to, just saying the United States or Spain or whoever is not useful because we're talking centuries, where policies shifted many times, and then treating everything as formal central government policy is incorrect. Starting right from the beginning--Columbus got up to all kinds of poo poo the Spanish government did not approve of and tried to stop. And then later Spanish governors are doing more or less the same thing without serious objection. Imagine if you could, somehow, scientifically assess the Spanish were 18% more horrible in their colonies than the French. Okay. Does that tell you anything of value? I don't think it does.
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Mar 10, 2024 22:49
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If you're only looking at natives that lived west of the Mississippi and north of the Rio Grande they are of course going to be more focused on the USA because the Spanish treated them as a buffer between Mexico and the French/English colonies whereas the Americans saw them as a barrier to expansion. E: and outside the California coast I guess, the Spanish did a pretty thorough genocide there in the 1700s sullat fucked around with this message at 23:14 on Mar 10, 2024 |
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Mar 10, 2024 23:03
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NikkolasKing posted:I figure I might as well ask this while this topic is going on. Ehhh, I don't think it's that clear cut. There are a few different things going on here, the first being that from what evidence we have, it seems that what is now the continental US and Canada just did not have as many people as the rest of the Americas pre-contact. While some parts of it were relatively densely populated, especially the coasts, Great Lakes, and Mississippi, a lot of North America was supporting relatively small populations of people engaged in mixed foraging and small-scale agriculture. In contrast, Mexico and Central America at the time is one of the most populated areas on the planet, with huge levels of urbanization and enormous populations. The thing is, the earliest colonial powers in the 15th and 16th Centuries, eg Spain and Portugal, are looking for and specifically targeting these densely populated areas. They want large populations that can be used for labor and as a tax base, and highly organized, hierarchical societies that they can plug themselves into at the top. Once they have that is when the carnage really begins, as they restructure these societies into extractive enterprises. The Iberian powers pretty quickly turn their conquered territory into misery engines where human beings go in one end, and wealth comes out the other. This is the most destructive in the Caribbean, where the entire native population is effectively wiped out within a century, and they invent African chattel slavery to keep the machine running. On the continet they try a different strategy, but it's also pretty bad. They basically put all of Central and South America through enclosure, where people are forced into either living as effective serfs or with limited autonomy on smaller and smaller plots. Meanwhile, disease and everyday violence just keeps going through these populations. In the North, things are pretty different and colonization takes a totally different form. By the time the UK, France, and the Netherlands are looking at establishing colonies, Spain and Portugal are already a century into this process and have invented African slavery and racism. They have also already claimed the largest and wealthiest native polities that were easy to conquer, and are now struggling with expanding into less densely populated areas. So, when the late-coming powers arrive in North America, the only value they can easily see is the land itself. There are no large, hierarchical societies they can co-opt, so they don't even really try. Instead, they just kind of push people West as they crawl across the continent gobbling up more land. By the time the US exists, this process has been going on for 150 years, and they have already foces huge changes on the population of the continent. While the population of the Eastern Seaboard was small compared to Mesoamerica, it was still a lot of people, and forcing all those people West creates a cascade effect, where they come into conflict with the people already living where they are being forced into, introducing more diseases, etc. When the 1800s roll around and the US is on its Manifest Destiny bullshit, the people it begins betraying and massacring and putting onto reservations are already the victims of centuries of displacement and epidemics. Almost all of the famous peoples of the Great Plains who resisted colonization in the 1800s had only lived there for a century or two, they were originally from the Mississippi before being forced out! So no, I don't think the US can really be said to be worse or more brutal or whatever. More purposeful and possibly more nakedly genocidal, but look up Potosi if you want to have nightmares.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:14
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FishFood posted:Ehhh, I don't think it's that clear cut. There are a few different things going on here, the first being that from what evidence we have, it seems that what is now the continental US and Canada just did not have as many people as the rest of the Americas pre-contact. While some parts of it were relatively densely populated, especially the coasts, Great Lakes, and Mississippi, a lot of North America was supporting relatively small populations of people engaged in mixed foraging and small-scale agriculture. In contrast, Mexico and Central America at the time is one of the most populated areas on the planet, with huge levels of urbanization and enormous populations. Thank you for the very thorough reply. I know I kinda blundered in here so I appreciate the help. Would you have any suggested reedings to learn more about what was done to the indigenous people pre-United States? Would 1491 and (that reddit thread suggested) Beyond Germs be good starting points?
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Mar 10, 2024 23:36
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Definitely read 1491 and 1493. I know nothing of Beyond Germs.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:39
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Yeah, 1491 is kind of the gold standard pop history book. In the 15ish years since it was published its central arguments have only been bolstered by new evidence. It's really, really good. I also really like "Last Days of the Inca" which came out at around the same time and focuses on a pretty specific event, but I think it gives a good idea of the different forces that were at work in the early days of colonization. I have some good textbooks laying around at home on the subject as well, but I'll have to dig them up a little later.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:53
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Grand Fromage posted:Definitely read 1491 and 1493. I know nothing of Beyond Germs. theyre the seed from which you grow beyond meats
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Mar 11, 2024 00:43
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NikkolasKing posted:Thank you for the very thorough reply. I know I kinda blundered in here so I appreciate the help. Would you have any suggested reedings to learn more about what was done to the indigenous people pre-United States? King Philip's War: The History and Legacy of America's Forgotten Conflict King Philip's War: Civil War in New England, 1675-1676 Read the first before the second or the latter might not be coherent.
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Mar 11, 2024 01:18
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I liked "A vast long winter count" although it is mostly focused on the natives of the continental US. It's a more dry history book than 1491 which, like a lot of pop history, is also about the author's journey and various archaeology anecdotes, whereas winter count doesn't get into that at all.
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Mar 11, 2024 01:19
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I really like the book Comanche Empire by Pekka Haimalainen. He's written other books about Native American groups like the Lakota that I've heard grumbling about, but I've never checked them out, so I don't know the deal. It was also weird learning about a Native American group that was imperialistic in its own right, so weirdly it was less of a shame for that particular group to eventually collapse because you can't really have peaceful coexistence with a group with an economy based around horse theft and kidnapping.
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Mar 11, 2024 01:52
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SlothfulCobra posted:It was also weird learning about a Native American group that was imperialistic in its own right, so weirdly it was less of a shame for that particular group to eventually collapse because you can't really have peaceful coexistence with a group with an economy based around horse theft and kidnapping. It's kind of like how the Aztecs are (or were) generally taught as tragic victims of the Spanish (which they were, but not in the way that its taught) when they were just as vicious and imperialist as the conquistadors and were just one power in their region. Without the epidemics it would be way more clear that the various polities viewed him as a useful wild card in a regional power struggle.
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Mar 11, 2024 02:01
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I can't believe these groups of humans are engaging with activities common to groups of humans.
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Mar 11, 2024 02:02
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SlothfulCobra posted:I really like the book Comanche Empire by Pekka Haimalainen. He's written other books about Native American groups like the Lakota that I've heard grumbling about, but I've never checked them out, so I don't know the deal. That book is on my To Buy list along with a few others focused more on America's dealings with Indians. Glad to hear it's good. I just bought "Tecumseh and the Prophet" a few days ago. And still to buy includes, not counting Comanche Empire: Chief Joseph & the Flight of the Nez Perce The Heart of Everything That Is: The Untold Story of Red Cloud, An American Legend The Apache Wars The Northern Cheyenne Exodus in History and Memory
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Mar 11, 2024 02:18
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SlothfulCobra posted:I really like the book Comanche Empire by Pekka Haimalainen. He's written other books about Native American groups like the Lakota that I've heard grumbling about, but I've never checked them out, so I don't know the deal. I also read Comanche Empire and was using it as a source here; the grumbling about both that and his other works is that its not seen as particularly deep or innovative compared to other historians of the same era. I'm not nearly versed enough in this particular field of scholarship to really say, though I will say I found it pretty disappointing on other grounds. NikkolasKing posted:Thank you for the very thorough reply. I know I kinda blundered in here so I appreciate the help. Would you have any suggested reedings to learn more about what was done to the indigenous people pre-United States? 1491 is great, haven't read Beyond Germs, can very readily recommend Why You Can't Teach United States History without American Indians, which is an anthology of essays about Native Americans in the US/Canada region that is aimed first at high school teachers so that they have a bunch of essays about periods that they can give to their students. Some of the early essays have been some of the academic articles that have most stuck with me of all the ones I've ever read.
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Mar 11, 2024 02:25
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Tulip posted:1491 is great, haven't read Beyond Germs, can very readily recommend Why You Can't Teach United States History without American Indians, which is an anthology of essays about Native Americans in the US/Canada region that is aimed first at high school teachers so that they have a bunch of essays about periods that they can give to their students. Some of the early essays have been some of the academic articles that have most stuck with me of all the ones I've ever read. That book sounds really neat, especially after looking at the list of chapters. I haven't been in school in a long time but when we learned Civil Rights Era stuff it left out everything about AIM, Second Wave Feminism, etc.. So it's cool to see a chapter on the first thing in this book. Also the chapter on Native Women in the American Revolution sounds really interesting. Thank you.
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Mar 11, 2024 02:54
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