Hacker News Reader

I think parts of it are deeply controversial, but Guns, Germs, and Steel argues this was because Europe had higher population densities for longer + more domesticated livestocks providing a more potent breading ground for deadly diseases. I also think that disease being a factor hardly removes culpability from the conquers, there are plenty of quotes of some of them saying things about how the plagues were a gift from god and similarly terrible things. I also am not an export, but I believe there was some transfer in the other direction, particularly syphilis.

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's possible that syphilis was brought back to Europe from the New World by the Spanish. That hasn't been proven though.

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 ...

From what I've read, native populations had less frequent interactions with livestock (through which many diseases arise) and less concentration in poor-sanitation settings (e.g. urban centers without sewers), both of which gave European settlers more exposure to transmissible pathogens in the centuries before settlement.

The usual explanation is that the Europeans lived in much closer proximity with livestock... smallpox probably came from cows, etc.

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)

> I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street. Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share?

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.

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.

They didn’t find out what was going on until the 20th century… Before that they thought it was God’s judgment on the heathens or something.

They sent blankets used by infected people. They didn't understand germ theory, but they understood contagion.

Didn’t the first documented cases of this occurs a hundred of more years after most of the natives had already died (18th vs the 16th century)? By the time Europeans started colonizing NA most of locals had already died to the diseases spreading from the south.

In my reference, I acknowledge that how I used "they" was ambiguous. I meant people practicing war before germ theory.

If we ignore this example, we still have dead and infected bodies/livestock being catapulted into cities.

I acknowledged that much, but my point is they had no idea that these “new people” had no immunity and that the sickness would tear through the population so effectively. Moreover, “they” isn’t “all Europeans”—we need to be careful who we blame or else we verge on racism ourselves.

You should probably know that there is literally not one fully confirmed case of this ever happening.

https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/3qslhq/where...

There's one, at Fort Pitt during the French and Indian war, as documented by multiple letters, as described in your link.

Which particular people? Was it like military people under orders from European leaders?

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.

There is exactly one documented case of deliberate attempts to spread smallpox among the Indians, from the British during the French & Indian war.

https://www.history.com/news/colonists-native-americans-smal...

First, it was a two-way street. Syphilis, for one, is believed to have originated in the new world and have been brought to Europe post-contact.

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.

IIRC that certain aspects of how livestock were raised in Europe contributed to a long history of more virulent illnesses so that when the European population eventually met the North American it was the North American that suffered.

> Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share?

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.

IIRC a lot of Eurasian diseases were a result of long-term close contact with domesticated animals. Guess which side of the Atlantic didn't really have domesticated animals....

CPG Grey has a great video on this exact subject:

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.

Fwiw that's based on "Guns, Germs and Steel" which is not very respected as an academic work

So, I just went down a rabbit hole of criticisms on Guns, Germs, and Steel... it's largely coming from the far left and far right. Very few moderates.

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.

Uh, go to a place like r/badhistory where they actually cite sources for their problems with it for a start

Actual academics have problems with it

I went down another rabbit hole on r/badhistory.

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.

-----

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?

IDK, I'm generally on r/badeconomics which is the best one of the badX gang, but as far as I saw, badhistory was very informal but generally fine?

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

I don't read r/badhistory but occasionally r/AskHistorians instead (where why GG&S is bad is literally in the FAQ), and in perusing old threads there, I came across this take that might be interesting to you: https://old.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/4o1n26/i_wan...

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.

Thanks a ton for sharing that. This is -- so far -- the highest calibre of this debate I've seen.

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.

Yeah, in my experience there's a lot of misinformation floating around r/badhistory. It's not uncommon to have some comments halfway down (below all the highly upvoted snark and attempts at humor) that point out the inaccuracies in a post, so that's something at least.

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.

You're not looking at any of the criticisms I've seen, then. Here's a brief summary, off the top of my head:

* 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.

Most of these points don't seem central to Diamonds thesis as I interpreted it.

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.

If it's just guns, you have to account for the number of failed attempts, and the century-long military effort it took to hold territory. Cortés got his ass handed to him repeatedly in military conflicts.

> century-long military effort it took to hold territory

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.

A lot of what he says in it is uncontroversial stuff that he didn't come up with himself. But you don't get much academic respect for things others have said before you, even if you succeed at bringing it to a new audience (especially if you don't pepper it with source references, which I don't recall GGS doing!)

Being a wildly successful popularizer is always risky for an academic. The most serious criticisms I've seen have been about tangential stuff.

I think the other, more important, factor CPG Grey mentions in the video is domesticated animals.

Sorry. You're correct. I haven't watched the video in a bit.

I think the key is density in Europe vs North America. Europe was living in densely packed cities with domesticated animals in close proximity, while North America had smaller communities and less domestication. As a general rule, this makes disease spread and zoonotic viruses much less likely.

> I've always wondered why this wasn't a two-way street. Wouldn't native people also have diseases to share?

Cities are a breeding ground for diseases. America wasn’t densely populated at the time.

Population density and totals, and their proximity to animals and their waste, matter. Extensive trade and empire building exposes people to new pathogens and allows new ones to develop, as well.

Well, syphilis went the other way