George Raudzens

This seems to me to be not so much a reappraisals of Diamond's theories as an expansion on them. The question the Diamond attempted to answer for his friend in New Guinea was why Europeans, and later Americans, had so much good stuff (cargo) while his people did not. The unexpressed question is obviously, are European people just better: smarter, more loved by God, or superior in some undefinable way. Diamond attempted to demonstrate that Europeans benefitted from circumstances that they had not created: the east/west orientation of the Eurasian land mass which facilitated transfer of crops and livestock, peoples and ideas vs. the north/south orientation of Africa and the Americas with those continents split by a tropic zone through which temperate zone plants and animals could not travel; the number of animal adaptable to domestication in Eurasia; the ways in which virgin populations succumb to new diseases; the distribution of resources such as copper, tin and iron ore, and so forth. It was an elaborate and convincing way of saying that black people and brown people were not conquered because they were lazy, stupid or cowardly but because they had not drawn the same cards as Europeans. The essays in this book expand on various points: technology, epidemiology, the motives for colonization. They are written by specialists in various fields. In my opinion they do not disprove Diamonds' thesis so much as point out the history of European imperialism is very complex stretching over centuries and thousands of miles of territory and hundreds of differing cultures from hunters and subsistence farmers in tiny scattered villages to the Incan and Aztec empires. The essays are a little dry, written for specialists rather than a general audience.… (meer)