April Moratorium voting!

I think there's not much to discuss, because it isn't history, and it isn't intended to be history. Whenever it's "discussed" here or in similar circles, it boils down to historians saying "Diamond gets all his facts wrong and doesn't approach things like a historian should," and fans of the books saying "but that's not the point."

GGS is a Big Idea book that is virtually disdainful of recorded events. He uses history as illustration rather than evidence. So what if Diamond gets the actual sequence of events wrong? Pointing it out accomplishes nothing. The book isn't about how Spaniards conquered the Inca; Diamond doesn't care about Spain and he doesn't care about the Inca. That makes him useless as a historian...but he simply isn't writing as a historian (except in the broadest non-academic sense of the term). He isn't writing history. He isn't trying to write history.

Diamond is more interested in his perception that a disproportionate number of technologically and politically complex cultures arose in Eurasia, and is looking for geographic factors that could have tilted the playing field. His argument boils down to, "the east-west axis of Eurasia allows for greater species diversity, which allows for a greater number of potentially domesticatable species (for agriculture, herding, or animal labor), which favors more efficient farming, and therefore makes the rise of more complex political structures more likely."

It's an interesting theory, but (A) it's one of probability, and arguing probabilities regarding the past is absurd, (B) it doesn't account for the fact that developed societies actually did arise in the Americas, (C) it doesn't have much to say about why some developed societies might evolve differently than others due beyond resource availability, and he can't really do that because (D) the core argument is ultimately pop-anthropology and not history.

/r/badhistory Thread Parent