I know the imperialists weaponized their diseases and intentionally tried to spread it and that may be the difference.
Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's always struck me as remarkably convenient and quite unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some wondrous land without their own disease. Oh really now ... we're talking the Caribbeans here.
Even the Wikipedia page on the matter (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Influx_of_disease_in_the_Car...), does it cite epidemiological sources with someone looking at like bone sample DNA? No. It's economic and social science. Excuse me for questioning the qualification of economists for being able to authoritatively make confident statements about historical virology.
It may be true but I'd like more evidence than convenient stories by the descendent of a conquerer about how by sheer coincidence his/her ancestors were actually not guilty of genocide and as of by miracle, North America became a land without people; it just happens to follow Frederick Jackson Turners Frontier Thesis a little too closely to be called a coincidence.
Not all diseases are equally harmful, right? Perhaps the indigenous populations of the Americas simply lacked a disease as deadly as those brought by the Europeans.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_syphilis :
The first recorded outbreak of syphilis in Europe occurred in 1494/1495 in Naples, Italy, during a French invasion ...
Also it's generally believed that syphilis didn't exist in the Old World before 1492, so there's at least one disease that probably made the opposite journey.
However, the disease narrative doesn't absolve the Europeans. Nobody forced the European powers to colonize the Americas. If they'd packed up and gone home, even if the Americas had still been decimated by smallpox, they would have bounced back, given the opportunity. Human populations tend to do that.
(The Black Death is sort of an exception, it suppressed European population for a long time, because it kept coming back, killing a bunch of people, and then going away again. But- Europe thrived during that period, the Renaissance was coterminous with very bad bubonic plague outbreaks)
Cities are a breeding ground for diseases. America wasn’t densely populated at the time.
But Europe, Asia, and Africa combined was a much bigger population pool, so more opportunities for mutation and transmission leading to more types of infectious diseases.
They did: syphilis! But the Europeans had far more diseases to share because there was far more animal domestication going on in the Old World. And most of our diseases came as a result of that animal domestication, so they had already spread through the population which developed immunity in the millennia between the first human infection and the Columbian Exchange.
> Usually the smallpox theory is presented in a way that removes agency and culpability from the conquerers. It's always struck me at remarkably convenient and quite unbelievable; they were an idyllic people in some welder land without their own diseases, oh really now ... we're talking the Caribbeans here
Typically I hear "the smallpox theory" presented as "Europeans killed 90% of Native Americans including by disease" as though Europeans collectively set out to exterminate Native Americans. To be certain, there was a lot of brutality and genocide and even some deliberate spread of disease, but no European could have credibly believed that the disease would spread throughout the new world to such effect.
Certainly not, but once they figured out what was going on, they certainly aided and abetted the spread of these new diseases.
If we ignore this example, we still have dead and infected bodies/livestock being catapulted into cities.
https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qslhq/where...
Maybe someone could help me understand -- with such a prolific practice it must have been diaried and such? What are the best primary/secondary sources detailing the practice.
I've heard the "they gave blankets but they knew the blankets had smallpox infection". But we presumably know who the they were.
Presumably a lot of the colonists were sick as well. But not sick enough that the indigenous population noticed and stayed away.
I guess people's capacity for evil is always greater than one can imagine.
https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smal...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JEYh5WACqEk
In short, you need cities to develop these types of viruses. Cities where the virus can just keep killing, without ever hitting a dead end.
The far left says it's a cop out on racism, blaming white evil on natural conditions. The far right says that it's too PC, that plenty of other places had the right conditions and gives no credit to culture or innovation.
So both the far left and far right want to take credit from chaos and put it on the people: either to hate them, or to take pride.
This in and of itself is not proof of anything. But if something pisses off far left and right at the same time, I tend to think of it as a green flag.
Actual academics have problems with it
There's definitely plenty of holes in the theories of GG&S, if that's what you mean by "academics have problems with it" === "it is not a perfect theory."
But overall, it seems most of the points hold more than enough water to be worth merit. None of them perfect, but vastly better than throwing the whole thing out.
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Also, holy crap I'm giving you the benefit of the doubt here, but the first few threads I went into were... blatantly far left (as Reddit tends to be). Seriously though: spiraling into tangents of communism, your classic woke/sassy "dunk" lingo, clearly had some external bias bone to pick. I'm not sure r/badhistory is a community worth considering the acme of academia, only based off my short interactions with it. But maybe the worst just came up first?
Like, sure there's probably a bias to the left but it's not the hellhole of r/badphilosophy for instance there. They won't advocate for nonsense stuff,just use the terminology from social sciences
While I think you are probably more likely to sympathize with restricteddata than anthropology_nerd, I do think that anthropology_nerd's comments may be able to elucidate a little bit why GG&S provokes such hostility among academics.
I think both parties are talking passed each-other, having missed a very, very important statement:
> You recommended people read GG&S with a grain of salt, but the vast majority of casual readers lack that salt when it comes to understanding the flaws in the book.
Whether or not this salt is there seems like the addition / omission from which each side argues. With salt, it's a fine enough book. The broad strokes are close enough. Without salt -- as in "I'm a professional because I read this book" -- it probably gets really, really annoying.
I definitely agree that nuance is important, and the book should put more effort into not presenting itself as fact. But it's pop-history. It wouldn't be pop if it didn't, and what would be pop would be even worse IMO.
But a large part of the problem with r/badhistory, and r/AskHistorians as well, is that it seems like most of the users don't realize that being better at history than most of Reddit is an extremely low bar. There's certainly some good stuff that ends up there (well, in r/AskHistorians, less so in r/badhistory), but there's still a lot of junk as well, and too many people act as if the stuff there is equivalent to published work by professional historians.
* Jared Diamond posits an explanation of megafauna extinction in North America that's heavily predicated on the Clovis-first hypothesis and the overextinction hypothesis. The former hypothesis is very thoroughly discredited, and the latter is also generally disfavored, especially in the it's-the-primary-cause way that Jared Diamond uses it. (Specifically, it should be noted that the megafauna extinction in North America also coincides pretty closely with the Younger Dryas, whose climatic effects were most pronounced in North America).
* The primary north-south/east-west transmission hypothesis doesn't actually hold that well up to evidence. The two things I'd note are a) local topography has a major effect on climate that's not accounted for, and b) if you look at the transmission of cereal crops, there's very little transmission between the Mediterranean/Mesopotamian basin and China basin but universal spread of maize along the vertical axis of the Americas--the complete opposite of what the theory predicts.
* I don't have a link handy, but I've seen someone more versed in the history of infectious diseases point out that the killer diseases that Diamond identifies don't appear to have actually become epidemic in the manner that Diamond asserts.
* Diamond also places way too heavy on emphasis on the unreliable accounts of the conquistadors in explaining how the Spanish conquests happened.
In short, the main problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel is that... it gets the facts wrong. And people have brought these complaints to Diamond previously, so it's not like he's aware that there are facts which destroy his thesis, and Diamond's response is to double-down on the thesis without trying to explain why the countervailing facts might be incorrect interpretations or whatnot, or providing other nuggets of insight to bolster his thesis, just continually reassert that he's right.
Try reading Charles Mann's 1491. It goes into more well-researched explanations of pre-Columbian cultures that would help you understand why Diamond's thesis is wrong.
They do negate some of the spurious theories, but the central theory (IMO) is that there's a whole lot of luck involved in global domination, and that luck is not evenly spread.
The one about germs being less of a killer is definitely very interesting though. That's totally central, though -- if not germs doing the killing -- it'd just fall back onto guns. If you happen to dig up the link, I'd love to read through it.
Centuries, actually. Indigenous peoples in the Americas were able to hold out against European, and later successor state, attempts to acquire their territory until around 1900.
Being a wildly successful popularizer is always risky for an academic. The most serious criticisms I've seen have been about tangential stuff.
If we're just speculating though, I wonder if the fact that one group was traveling by boat could have insulated the disease transfer a bit. Most really bad diseases would run their course by the time a sailing ship made it back across the ocean and certainly people knew to quarantine ships with sick people on them in Europe. For a disease the ship crews were resistant to reach the Americas they just had to visit a village, where to go the other way it had to survive an in built month plus quarantine which is plenty of time for most diseases to show up
It should also be noted that human populations are incredibly resilient to epidemics. In the absence of "other things", populations suffering catastrophic virgin soil epidemics will typically rebound to pre-epidemic levels in decades. It's not a sufficient explanation for the centuries-long decline of indigenous American populations. The black death was no less severe and successor epidemics continued throughout Europe in the 15th century, yet we see nothing like the demographic collapse of the Americas post-contact.
We have a more recent example in Hawaii. Hawaii was not subjugated by any foreign power until the 1890s. That being said, the Native Hawaiian population pretty much collapsed from a high of 300,000 in 1770 to 20,000 in 1920.