The Best Books on the Great Divergence
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As far as why technological development boomed in Europe, that's not really a story of political ideology, sociocultural norms, or anything like that. For example, the invention of the blast furnance by German ironworkers c. 1300, was probably a key event. Add in the importation of gunpowder from China, and you had the world's most powerful weapons, such as ship-borne cannons.
A lot of history is just blind chance, as well. Manifest destiny claims about the inevitability of history and superior civilizational strategy aren't very interesting, other than as social propaganda aimed at justifying more expansionist warfare.
But why wasn't China able to take advantage of gunpowder? They invented it. They had the worlds most powerful navy at a point in time that they also had the advantage of gunpowder.
But Europe ended up with all the power. How did that happen?
But one explanation is that China didn't see the need to grow or improve their technology. They could afford to stay stagnant or even suppress technology because they didn't have major threats from nearby states.
Whereas if France/Britain/Italy/etc had done the same they would have been conquered by their neighbors.
Functional institutions and political systems, trust, capacity for co-operation etc are social capital, which had to be built up and developed.
An explanation which ties everything to resources, hardware and luck is "nice" in that it means we can cleanly ignore any possible value judgements about social technologies, which are a sensitive topic.
Economically speaking, colonialism was in many cases a major advantage to the colony, not universally a deprivation. The US, Canada, Australia, etc., all did quite well during or after a period as a colony.
(This is not intended as a moral statement, merely an economic one, which is the topic of the article.)
Well, that depends on your definition of colony. The settlers did well, the indigenous people that were displaced experienced deprivation and worse.
Some definitions seem to focus on the emigrants (and descendents), and some definitions are more about the region being colonized. But the displaced (or killed) people are neither.
The comment to which I replied was talking about weapon superiority. If by "deprivations of colonialism" it meant the indigenous people being deprived, then it would make a lot more sense to say "deprivations of invasion". But that's not saying much: that better weapons are more effective at invasion.
Are the other books listed significantly better in terms of veracity?
I would instead recommend reading the heavily moderated r/askhistorians sub-reddit for a description of that is more in line with mainstream academic thinking. For example https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/a_det...
> The European conquest [of the Americas] was hardly decisive. Furthermore, the difference between hemispheres wasn’t all that great.
I had to stop because that's the kind of statement on which lots of people -- many of them smarter and more knowledgeable than me -- strongly disagree, often with ideological or religious fervor. I have no interest in or patience for that kind of debate, so I will skip out from this thread.
That said, if you and others think the Wikipedia page on this best-selling, award-winning book is out of date, you should try to update it.
You yourself told the parent "many experts disagree with your assessment", when the parent clearly indicated that they simply were following what appears to be the academic consensus on this book, today.
The link I provided has a clear link to further work you can go explore, and make up your own mind. But I sort of suspect that in the three cases of 1) the parent comment, 2) the wikipedia article, and 3) now this statement about the American conquest, you have already decided what you want to believe.
I'm not personally an expert in this field. So I am not going to go and update the wikipedia article. What I am going to do, is to listen to the people who are experts in the field. I actually loved Diamond's book when it first came out, but over many years, I have not found a single academic historian who had good things to say about it. And it's not for lack of trying. As much as the book has received many awards, it is today simply a fact that it has a very fraught reputation in academic circles.
I love reading history, but I am concerned that all historical narratives are illusions - stories we string together from a minuscule subset of the data we’ve captured in writing or other records. This is particularly problematic if people, including academics, see the outcome of their historical interpretations as influencing modern power struggles.
I think this statement needs some very strong evidence to be even considered in passing. This statement is essentially saying "the entire field is bad at their job".
For individual academics and sources, yes, I agree that one should be vigilant. But the academic consensus is a different matter altogether, and the base assumption simply has to be that the field as a whole moves forward. Otherwise it becomes very difficult - maybe even impossible - to have any sort of evidence-based discussion.
Nature doesn't care what anyone thinks our base assumptions have to be. Parapsychology had a decent run academically for a century, and still isn't quite dead.
It seems like this "assumption" needs to be qualified with time scales for disambiguating trends from "facts" .. otherwise this is equivalent to saying that academic consensus can never be wrong
No it is not. I said that the assumption must be that the consensus becomes less wrong over time, not that it is never wrong. Those are two very different statements.
But nevertheless, it should be obvious today that (probabilistically) the best understanding of the world - for laymen - is achieved by trusting the academic consensus. Anything else quickly veers into anti-intellectual, conspirationist mumbo-jumbo.
So how can you validate that any reinterpretation is forward progress and not just a change?
Well, are there academic historians who dispute that fact?
> Why does it matter if it was decisive or not?
It goes against the entire theory of the book - if it's argument was true, why did it take centuries to ultimately conquer the americas?
Like the post as an example. It says the European conquest was "hardly decisive". Which is just so ridiculous that it should disqualify them as a source.
But moving on they try to say that native alliances were the most potent weapon. Which is again just so ridiculous. Small pox wiped out double digit percentages of the indigenous population and devastated their society.
This is the kind of cherry picking I was talking about. It'd be like saying "disease killed a large portion of Jews during WWII". Technically, it's true. A lot of Jews died from disease (in concentration camps). But it avoids asking the question of "were there any aggravating factors (like sudden displacement from homes, famine, violence, etc.) that caused them to become more susceptible"?
Can you give an academic citation for this?
I can't find anything that would support these numbers, they're high even for older work that's since been debunked (and especially not "immediately"). I suspect that there's a methodological error, but I can't say for certain until I actually see how you've come to these numbers.
The reason we have reasonably accurate measures of the mortality of the Black Death in medieval Europe is some areas kept written records of who died and who didn't. Yet the mortality rate of that is still in dispute.
Besides, the claimed number was 90% now it's 30%?
Also, look at the way Covid behaves. Despite modern statistics, what a mess of unpredictability and controversy it has. Medieval statistics, which are often little more than guesses, are going to be far less reliable.
> It is a percentage
I know what percentages are. I was simply amused by your claim that the percentage could be determined from the percentage.
A few samples? Smallpox has been around for millenia and has caused epidemics with significant mortality where ever it was found. The idea that something about the genetic diversity or lifestyles of the indigenous populations of the Americas is frankly ridiculous. Especially given the numerous and consistent first hand reports that Smallpox and other diseases ravaged the native population.
>I know what percentages are.
Do you? Because you keep talking about the total population or the number of killed when I speak about death rates and percentages.
No argument there. But "significant mortality" is not a percentage. Accurate records were not made or kept in a way that would provide a percentage. In the case of the American population, there are no records. Just WAGs (Wild-Ass Guesses).
> The idea that something about the genetic diversity or lifestyles of the indigenous populations of the Americas is frankly ridiculous.
Really? It's true for every other population. Do you not know that city dwellers are far more susceptible to epidemics than rural or nomadic tribes? Did you know that Covid infection rates vary from state to state, country to country, in ways that defy easy explanation?
> Especially given the numerous and consistent first hand reports that Smallpox and other diseases ravaged the native population.
What first hand reports in North America? In South America, do you really believe the Spanish Conquistadors kept accurate epidemiological records?
> Do you?
Yes. To compute a percentage you need a numerator and a denominator. The denominator in this case would be the population of two continents, which nobody has any idea of.
If Covid has taught us anything, it is that childishly simplistic extrapolations of statistics across orders of magnitude are fraught with error, gross error, and catastrophic error.
We have just seen the same with covid, where the entire humanity was a virgin population. And covid mortality was basically nothing compared to smallpox and a host of other Old World diseases.
Notably, the only disease to spread the other way round, syphilis, was very severe too. It took several generations for syphilis to mutate to a more chronic form.
And, notably, even though famine and violence weren't exactly rare during the later colonial conquest of Africa, it usually wasn't the natives who died of diseases, but the whites, who just couldn't tolerate local diseases such as malaria, to which the indigenous population was somewhat resistant.
There is a reason why the only significant white population in Africa is located in territories with more European-like climate, where the disease situation wasn't as dire as, say, in Congo.
I hope we can soon reach a stage where we can accept the book for its good parts, understand it's shortcomings, and have more realistic viewpoints of academic/mass-appeal works and rely less on trends to tell us how we should feel.
1) It accepts as a fact that the Europeans had superior technology to the peoples they encountered elsewhere, which is now perceived by many academics to be a form of racism/eurocentrism. (see the discussion in the linked threads about how the Europeans weren't really that advanced)
2) Materialist explanations are out of favor. Everything is supposed to be about culture and ideology and social construction, and everything is supposed to be "contingent" (i.e. not pre-determined by material factors like geography or superior technology - see the discussion in the linked thread about "determinism," which is a bad word).
My understanding is that these kinds of materialist explanations are out of favour because they have some genuine shortcomings: 1) they are largely untestable/unfalsifiable, so they veer into pseudo-science, 2) they have a tendency to cherry pick data, and 3) related to the second point, they tend to ignore the importance of the precise historical context (e.g. whether a certain king is particularly ambitious or not, could in certain cases shape the history of a region for decades or centuries to come - this is difficult to accommodate in more systemic theories).
It's a work of synthesis, so it has the problem where every specialist will find something to disagree with. Not to say that this shouldn't be taken into account.
(I have read rebuttals/contradictions of Diamond's other work, e.g. on Easter Island)
Also, why not read the other 4 books on the list, instead of focusing on the one you read and didn't like?
https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-West-Origin-Western-Civilizat...
Second: Liberalism only began in the 1700s, over two centuries after European colonisation of the world began, so it's very strange to attribute that to "notions of rights and freedoms".
The Magna Carta (1215) was the first big step towards rights.
Read the book. It's a nice counterpoint to currently popular theory.
Native American tribes were in the stone age, and did not have any consistent notion of human rights that I've read. Keep in mind that also very little is known about the pre-Columbian tribes, as no records were kept (yes I know the Maya had writing, and hence we do know a lot more about them).
According to the book, a decisive role for the development is played by political and economic institutions being “extractive” (slavery, serfdom, and encomienda systems) or “inclusive” (universal protection of property rights, not just for the elite).
Perhaps we can narrow the question to: what was going on with England socially and politically, and how were their colonial practices able to reproduce economic success in faraway places?
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...
As well as Dominion by Tom Holland:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Holland_(author)
* https://historyforatheists.com/2020/01/tom-holland-dominion/
Similar to evolutionary psychology, it's very easy to come up with just so stories to flatter your biases.
Similarly, anything that suggests it's the "one neat trick" is dubious because we know things are so incredibly complex.
It might be interesting to do the opposite and come up with plausible sounding alternate histories that exclude one particular factor as an exploration of how important different factors are. Arguing against the actual history is very hard though, people really heavily weight what actually happened even if it was pure chance and could have gone either way.
Like modern Europe without the Protestant reformation.
Or the British empire without a navy.
Or industrial revolution without coal.
Genghis Khan without horses.
* we accidentally started our civilization on top of oil which would come in handy 2000 years later
Vs
* My ancestors were super smart and did this one thing that I am really overinvested in today
Then there's a kind of Occam's razor that leans towards the luck based explanation.
>So is Pomeranz’s book, his theory about the Great Divergence, now the received wisdom?
>It’s the received wisdom among some historians. However, I would say that the empirical evidence has moved against it in the last 20 years.
>It turns out that in England silver wages were three times those in the Yangtze delta and five times those in India already by 1600. So the latest you can probably put the Great Divergence is 1700, which means that Pomeranz’s story about it being all about colonial windfalls and British coal use is probably misguided.
>One historian, Deirdre McCloskey, has pointed out that if coal was so important, Chinese industries could just have moved closer to coal because they have tons of it.
People in the coal-rich, tree-poor northern steppe did mine coal, but getting it to densely-populated areas would've been expensive.
De Soto, Hernando. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. Basic Books, 2000.
It shows by experiment and historical analysis, that there's a clear pattern to explain the gap: the legal institution of property being accessible and affordable to everyone, not just the privileged or rich. And if that's introduced, things can change around quickly.
this is not true