World History

Unit 4: The Emergence of Modern Nations

Chapter 15: European Exploration, Expansion, and Absolutism

33. Thu, Jan 9, 2014

The anthropologist Jared Diamond, when working in Papua New Guinea, was once taken aback by a question posed by a Papuan: why is it, the man asked, that Diamond and company had so much "cargo" — i.e., manufactured goods and technology — while the natives of New Guinea had so little? Diamond rephrased it another way: why did Pizzaro conquer the Incas, instead of Atahualpa conquering Spain?

The textbook here gives the usual explanations: the Europeans had guns, horses, and of course disease. But like almost every other textbook, the book doesn't really explain why it is that the Europeans had these advantages when no one else did. And it probably is the single most dominant and determining question of our age. Talk about the bones of the modern world: why is it that a few white-skinned people went everywhere and ruled just about all the darker-skinned people on the planet?

To this question there have been many answers, and up until the last generation or two, they all ran basically like this: Europeans conquered everyone because they were just better. More white, and therefore more pure. More scientific, and therefore smarter. More warlike, and therefore better suited for conquest and rule. More Christian, and therefore more blessed by God.

Diamond (although apparently not without his own white-male biases) proposed a quite different explanation: the Europeans were just more lucky. Sometimes this came about in quite direct fashion — at the time, few understood disease, and so the conquering plagues that ran ahead of the conquistadors were entirely by chance. (Without such plagues, Cortez and Pizarro would have been slaughtered; the Aztecs and Incas, while less-advanced, vastly outnumbered them and had a level of political organization equal to any in Europe. In fact if Cortez hadn't gotten truly lucky, the plague might not have been enough, and the Aztecs might rule Mexico to this day.) Other times, Diamond hypothesizes, the Europeans were simply fortunate in their choice of ancestors.

Diamond points to a wide range of factors, too many to discuss in depth here. (His award-winning book "Guns, Germs, and Steel" is actually rather engaging and is readily obtainable, should you be interested in fully exploring the issue.) However, several notable factors can be simply identified, in particular agriculture, continental orientation, and domestication of animals.

• Recall our discussions of the river valley civilizations. What were the factors that led to agriculture in those places? What were agriculture's benefits and detriments?Recall also our discussion of the Black Death. How did such a disease arise?
• Of the major domesticated animals — horses, cattle, dogs, pigs, chickens, etc. — only one (dogs) were native to the Americas, while the majority of the species in Africa could not be domesticated. (Try harnessing a hippo [or better yet, don't: they are the single most dangerous animal in Africa — DrMcM].) How might having these animals available boosted the success of Eurasian civilizations compared to African and American peoples?
• Of the major domesticated crops, the Americas and Africa again got the short end of the stick: the Americas had corn, which is filling but nowhere near as nutritious as wheat, and Africa in general does not have ideal conditions for grain production (the Sahara too dry, the jungles too wet, etc.). Moreover both Africa and the Americas are oriented north-south, meaning those latitudes that are suitable for grain-based agriculture are not wide. Europe and Asia (specifically China) have much broader agricultural regions, allowing more production of similar crops. How did these factors boost European and Asian populations?
• If you have civilizations growing steadily in terms of population, knowledge, and overall power, at (extremely roughly) the same rate, which civilization will have the advantage: the ones founded earlier, or the ones founded later?
• Why do you think all the other theories about European superiority got started?

(The $64,000 question is why China, which had a lot of these advantages and in fact beat Europe to many of them, did not take over. We can discuss that a bit more in Chapter 18, but for the moment, we can also consider China's unity: China did send out one major exploratory expedition, but mostly because it could, and soon lost interest. In contrast, the European countries started exploring because they had to gain an edge over each other.)

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