| 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. |
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.