[karpierz]

I think if you view "Guns, Germs & Steel" as a book of hypotheses about world history, with no evidence for their factualness, then the critique isn't valuable. Essentially, you'd be viewing GGS as a fan-fic about world history.

If you think that GGS is making factual claims about the world, and if the supporting evidence provided for them isn't factual, then the claims aren't facts, they're just speculation. This is the point that the critique makes; the assumptions that GGS makes in its theories aren't true, and so the conclusions are just random ideas as opposed to truths.

[CPLX]

I mean I get the concept.

But let’s start with the beginning of the critique. He sets up the GGS hypothesis #1 as saying “Europeans decisively conquered the Americas”

His rebuttal is basically no they didn’t.

Then he links to a bunch of evidence and his thesis seems to be well actually there was a lot more fighting and it lasted much longer so it wasn’t decisive.

I mean, I guess? I thought we were talking about the obvious fact that the entirety of the Americas was conquered by the Europeans and not the other way around.

Of course there’s some subtlety to that. There always is. But, again, they’re speaking Spanish at the highest reaches of the Andes and not Quechua in Spain. And the mass quantities of resources went in one direction. The Incan gold went to Spain and the British Crown Jewels didn’t go to Benin.

So like something notable happened here that’s academically interesting to explore. The critique I’m seeing here is just saying “no it didn’t” as far as I can tell.

I like a “well actually” as much as the next guy but come on.

If you’re questioning the very premise when someone is asking why European military and economic power became dominant things have gotten pretty confused.

[karpierz]

> The critique I’m seeing here is just saying “no it didn’t” as far as I can tell.

The critique is: there's a difference between taking decades to colonize it (hence "decisive") and centuries to colonize it.

If your argument is: "well, the Spanish eventually succeeded", great, but that's not what GGS is saying. Otherwise it'd be a pretty boring book.

[CPLX]

> The critique is: there's a difference between taking decades to colonize it (hence "decisive") and centuries to colonize it.

Cool. Now tell me what the difference is.

This argument just seems silly to me. Is the argument really that it could have gone the other way?

Is there a reasonable counterfactual where the Aztec civilization successfully repelled European colonization efforts and eventually attacked and held European home countries?

Like from a vantage point of the mid 1400s when none of this had happened yet was that an equally likely outcome?

I mean that’s superficially plausible to me. Maybe it was just historical luck of the draw. If that’s what critics think then the critique should say that without hedging.

If not, the next question has to be why.