The Rise of North America and Jared Diamond:

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

As has been pretty well known, the book Guns, Germs, and Steel lays out the thesis that the rise of Europe was due to the violent competition of European states with each other.

Except in the 20th and 21st Century two of the most powerful states in the world are not in Europe, but in North America, where large-scale violent competition between states has been rather limited. The USA has had several armed conflicts with Mexico, carving half of it off, and twice invaded Canada, while there were also smaller individual instances of Mexican and US raiders targeting other states.

Yet relative to say, Europe or Asia, or even South America, North American history has been relatively pacific in an inter-state sense. There has been all of one major war between separate states in North America, and the primary set of wars on this continent have been civil wars. Thus, by the Diamond thesis North America should have stagnated.

Yet again in practice today there is one continent whose internal and external politics directly affect all the others: North America, where on the whole the various states have had in some ways much more in the way of prolonged periods of peace than endless violent jostling. Wouldn't this in fact be the most major undercutting element of Diamond's thesis? The North American continent is primarily dominated by three countries, Canada, the USA, and Mexico, as well as smaller states to the south. On the whole the continent's history is not one of endless competition between evenly matched states but rather the extermination of natives, and the emergence of megastates that spanned huge areas of which the USA emerged as the greatest single global influence.



It would seem, too, that as the global rise of North America had to do with the twin disasters of the two world wars in weakening all the other Great Powers in Europe, Eurasia, and Asia, that this further undercuts the thesis by having the one oasis of stability and the absence of endless competition be the area that became the single strongest one by default. The rise of North America, ultimately, was due to avoiding major damage and the risks of endless competition, which would seem to argue that if anything the root to a truly peaceful and prosperous world really is in the end of more violent competition rather than the encouragement of it for some simplistic viewpoint that war makes things alive.

Comments

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

It is possible that both views are correct, that the set of criteria required to gain and exert influence has changed since the time when Europe "rose" and the more modern rise of the North American nations? Perhaps the conditions required to exert influence on a global scale in those centuries were the same required and honed in interstate competition and conflict, and the world has changed so that the toolkit required to exert influence today is one crafted in the absence of competition?

If so, and America's great successes are founded upon a base of fortunate timing, it would make for an interesting conundrum; as that time of little to no competition has long since ended.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

No, as the view that competition created the conditions for Europe to rise should have meant that India, East Africa, and South America would have all emerged as separate power centers.

[dexeron.livejournal.com]

Nod. Just a thought. So back to the original point then, if a LACK of competition is what created hegemony for the North American nations, are there troubling implications to the modern world's ample supply of competing players?

[fierceleaf.livejournal.com]

The only positive outcome of war is a stimulus for fundamental science and experimental technologies.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

Lack of Nazis?

[fierceleaf.livejournal.com]

I meant a war as an abstraction. The WWII was a tragedy in which we can accuse Nazis. But this doesn't help with millions of killed during battles and in concentration camps.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

Then lets make Nazis an abstraction. If there actually ever were evil people or an evil system that needed to be gotten rid of, and war got rid of it, then what happens once may have happened at other times.

[fierceleaf.livejournal.com]

Nazis deserved to be destroyed. But it is a good thing for the US that there was no devastating war on its territory.

War itself is horror and slaughter.

[terminator44.livejournal.com]

Keep in mind it was WWI that created the Nazis in the first place.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

WWI also created the Soviets.......

[terminator44.livejournal.com]

It created a lot of things. Its influence on the world even to this day is gravely underestimated.

[pastorlenny.livejournal.com]

I don't think this was the thesis of Guns, Germs and Steel.

[telemann.livejournal.com]

+ 1

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

If I had to point to as broad a thesis as I could in GG&S, it would be...

"The non-equal technological pace of the various societies is due to inequalities in material resources available to them, and the non-equal way in which the spread of innovation is effected by geography"

[404.livejournal.com]

But what abut countries that do have abundant resources, but the political system is Kleptocratic, thus the resources are wasted or outright stolen?

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

Hard to make it applicable.

Diamond's thesis is about the broad pace of technological change and its variations over the past 50,000 years. It's about answering why wheat agriculture spread so fast across Eurasia, but maize agriculture spread so slowly out of central America. It's about why Spanish And Portuguese adventures were able to trounce all over Amerindian empires, but the Greenland Norse died out where the Eskimos survived.

The workings of a modern (though autocratic) economy in a largely flat world over the short term just aren't part of the thesis.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And it's an oversimplistic analysis, if the word analysis is not watered down by referring to it as one, that ignores a huge number of historical realities that undercut it even in a modern sense to create what's essentially babble masquerading as history. For instance the claim that the Chinese monolithic system restricted creativity, which is complete bullshit if people actually look into what China's imperial system actually was able to do, especially relative to savage, ignorant, squalid Europe where people treated the plague by waving a cross and annointing oil over someone's forehead.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> For instance the claim that the Chinese monolithic system restricted creativity, which is complete bullshit
> if people actually look into what China's imperial system actually was able to do, especially relative to savage,
> ignorant, squalid Europe where people treated the plague by waving a cross and annointing oil over someone's\
> forehead

I think you've missed the point. The very fact that China was responsible for so many early innovations, and was so much more technologically advanced than Europe for so long, forces us to wonder what happened that reversed that trend, such that a few hundred years after it invented gun powder it was asymmetrically dominated by foreigners using that innovation to greater advantage. Part of the answer in Diamond's opinion was that great turning inward after the political forces behind the treasure fleets were discredited and ousted, and such a turning inward could only happen on such a scale because of the potency and sweep of Chinese Imperial power.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It's actually not that simple, given that comparing China to "Europe" is hardly a fair barometer, as it depends very strongly on what we qualify by Europe. Comparing China to say, Italy, leads to a different impression than to China or Russia or China or Germany or China and the UK and France. The moreso since the industrial revolution only gave *some* European states a decisive advantage by the 1830s, hardly some immediate time of stagnation or falling behind.

[rowsdowerisms.livejournal.com]

Please don't mention Thomas Friedman. I'm about to have lunch.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Which is horse puckey, given that the most powerful states in the modern world rose despite, not because, of geography.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

Geography is the #1 explanation of why intensive agriculture spread slower in the Americas than it did in Eurasia.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

It is not the number one explanation, as there are a huge number of other factors that differentiate "The Americas" from "Afro-Eurasia", first among them that by any standard in 1492, one of every five humans was an inhabitant of the Americas altogether when the only things they had to do that with were literal manpower and stone tools.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> It is not the number one explanation, as there are a huge number of other factors that differentiate "The Americas" from "Afro-Eurasia",

The truth that there are a large number of factors, does not mean that some particular factor is not the largest. I (actually, Diamond) has a good reason for this assertion.

> one of every five humans was an inhabitant of the Americas altogether when the only things they had to do
> that with were literal manpower and stone tools.


I kind of gather that you either haven't actually read GG&S, or you have forgotten the better part of it.

The question is, why did technology progress at different rates among the various different societies. You offer as a 'factor' when considering one facet (the spread of intensive agriculture in the Americas as opposed to the spread of intensive agriculture across Eurasia) that in the Americas they didn't have all the technological resources that were had in Eurasia.

But dude, that's not the answer, that's the QUESTION.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

This was how Diamond explained the rise of Europe over say, China. I suppose it is asking a bit much of a bird-watcher to actually look into potential weaknesses in overly simplistic analyses reliant on geography.

[caerbannogbunny.livejournal.com]

First, as a culture, North America (Canada, US, and Mexico) were culturally European until the 19th century. As far as warfare goes, the US had and has had repeated conflict throughout it's lifespan with only very rare periods when the proportion of combat veterans in charge of the military (and often at the higher levels of civilian leadership) being low. However, the concept of an American (or Canadian) economy on a war footing is nowhere near what the Europeans have gone through.

Generally, except for the American South during the Civil War and the original states during the revolution, the United States has been a state with a conflict oriented military and leadership body and the luxury of an isolated, mostly "peacetime" economy which is something of a "low stress" means of maintaining a military presence.

Another aspect you neglect is the fact--until post WWII--the primary focus of the US Federal level has been international politics, economy, and conflict. Only recently (in proportion) has the Federal level of the US government seemed to change focus toward the domestic political situation and the ongoing conflict between state's rights and the Federal level. This means the Federal level was a professional, standing body primarily focused on international conflict, cooperation, and the reasons behind warfare for a century or two.

So, the rise of North America is most likely due to a combination of conflict-oriented culture inherited with the people and political systems created and a degree of isolation from direct danger while engaged in conflict abroad.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Uh, no. The USA and Mexico have been generic New World states, Canada has been Westminster on the St. Lawrence. The USA inherited from the British Empire a social system more akin to Latin America, reliant on a huge mass of slaves imported from Africa, with its elite determined by slaveholding. The Civil War only partially changed this aspect of society, while Mexico of course has almost had civil wars as the national pasttime. The USA and Mexico both by comparison to Canada are rather more violent and unstable, the USA having a love and fetish for using its army as an occupying force, and both Mexico and the USA had a lot more violence directed at natives.

To claim the antebellum US military and for that matter the US military up to the post-WWII era was geared to combat is so silly as to not even bother justifying with a response. It shows a fundamental ignorance of US history and social structure and how it actually works. To use one example, the USA of 1940 had an army the size of Romania and no armored forces whatsoever. That I assure you is not a combat force, that's a pretty paradiing force for ceremonies at the most generous.

[caerbannogbunny.livejournal.com]

"Uh, no. The USA and Mexico have been generic New World states, Canada has been Westminster on the St. Lawrence."

So, Canada inherited a European political bent. Not only that, but they inherited a tendency to go to war as if they were a European country under the command of a European country... Just not with the high levels of risk of conflict at home. If anything, the Canadians are more generic North American States than the other two because those two have actually had more recent and large-scale armed incursions of each other...

"The Civil War only partially changed this aspect of society, while Mexico of course has almost had civil wars as the national pasttime."

Okay, so Mexico inherited a European bent and the European history of continuous conflict at home rather than abroad in the original European model instead of the US and Canadian models of conflict abroad?

What are you arguing?

"To claim the antebellum US military and for that matter the US military up to the post-WWII era was geared to combat is so silly as to not even bother justifying with a response. It shows a fundamental ignorance of US history and social structure and how it actually works. To use one example, the USA of 1940 had an army the size of Romania and no armored forces whatsoever. That I assure you is not a combat force, that's a pretty paradiing force for ceremonies at the most generous."

First, which war?

Second, I was talking about command structure (civil and military) as well as maintenance of a cadre of experienced military veteran commanders. By tradition, until very recently, the US practically dismembers it's ground forces after every victory.

Okay, not traditionally, but the "peace dividend" isn't a new thing.

This actually means--for each conflict--there's a tendency to re-assemble the US military based on the current conflict and recent experiences (as carried around in the heads of the senior military commanders who are typically combat vets of the last war).

So, for example, the US Army in 1940 had an Army the size of Romania being led by primarily experienced combat veterans, running wargames based on foreign experience in France and China to identify what equipment was needed, what operational units would be formed, etc. It also had a large base of military-age manpower to pull from, and established a massive number of camps for training under the same retained cadre.

In other words, in the New World model, the lack of need to maintain a standing army but retention of military cadre--like Nazi Germany--allowed the US and Canada to create military forces for the current conflict more ably than many European countries--like Romania--who were forced to go to war with what they had and then try to change slowly. About the only three wars I can think of off the top of my head where the US Army fought with what they had on hand are Grenada in 1983, Desert Shield/Desert Storm in 1991/1992, and the Korean War in the beginning.

Even then, in Korea, it was a mass recall of combat vets and then training/retraining through a cadre system with gear upgraded as it came in.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1) No, Canada was a Dominion of the British Empire that only became a state in its own right in the 20th Century, much later than the USA and Mexico did, while Canada, being the ass end of the continent, had almost nobody living there whether natives *or* Europeans.

2) No, Mexico developed a New World model of state that was very different from European states, first and foremost from the working to death of large numbers of natives, second from evolving a race-based caste system built on manual labor, third from having a far vaster territorial expanse than all European states of the 1840s bar the Ottoman Empire and Russia.

3) All of them. The old USA was vehemently, almost ludicrously soldier-phobic, and its army learned how to dig trenches and build bridges, not how to know how to load and fire rifles or drill at regimental and division levels. This is a crucial distinction of the USA from all other states of the time bar the UK, with somewhat less reason. The US Army invariably with the major exception of the US Civil War and WWI before the 1950s was around 10,000 at the most, and distributed at that in far-flung garrisons and even more bureaucratically sclerotic and top-heavy than the modern variety. This system was in fact a gateway to disaster, inflicted needless battlefield defeats the USA never need to have done with a proper military system, and is one that frankly put only worked because the USA was smart enough never to go to war with a serious enemy that would expose how pitiful the system actually was.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> Thus, by the Diamond thesis North America should have stagnated.

Uhm.... no.

The "Diamond" thesis (there are several, but the one pertinent here) is that Europe expressed a Goldilocks balance between isolation on the one hand, and monolithic political control on the other. the typical examples of stultification by isolation being Tierra del Fuego, the Australian Aborigines, and various Islanders. The main example of stultification by political monolithic action being China and its turn away from exploration when politics shifted away from the successors to Cheng ho (though Japan's history with Gun use is also mentioned). Diamond's point was that in Europe, each nation state would have access to the technological innovations of its neighbors (lack of isolation), and no central authority could force the whole of Europe to give up technologies for cultural reasons ( lack of political monolithic-ness).

The "Europe becoming masterful via excessive conflict" thesis is an older, pre-Diamond one... one that Diamond is supplanting, rather than re-enforcing.

Now, if we wish to extend such judgment to the modern situation, the question can't just be about the isolation or political homogeneity of actors in North America, but it has to about actors in the world, since post 18th century technology makes continental geographical divisions essentially irrelevant to the spread of innovation.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Which is again countered by the Americas where there was a central authority, the USA, and where North America is the most powerful single continent on the planet. The claim that monolithic systems limited Chinese technology has a major issue in that it's easier to name the things not originating in China than the ones that do. European states also did not evenly progress technologically and the largest European state by land area has traditionally also been its most impoverished and underdeveloped state.

The claim that European trends tended against monoliths is also flawed. Even leaving out Russia, in 1914 Europe was nearly a monolithic society and at its peak, while post-WWII it was divided between the American and Soviet Empires.

China turned away from sea voyages for fear of conquest by the very nomads that actually conquered them. It was no more a doom of China to do this than the USA giving iup voyages in space.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> Which is again countered by the Americas


Diamond's explanations are not, nor are they meant to be, in any way predictive of the post-industrial world. They are meant to explain original asymmetries between clashing societies in the pre-industrial world.

For instance, local agricultural success depends on the local inventory of domesticatable plants and animals. An area with few candidates for domestication (such as Australia) is understandably less likely to be a center of agricultural innovation. This explains why aborigines who had lived in Australia for 50,000 years depended on agriculture less (and had lower population density, and less complicated societies) than people who had been living in mezoamerica for a mere 10,000 years.

But such local inventories are irrelevant in an interconnected world where species in one corner can be discovered, transplanted, and exploited on the other side of the world in a matter of years, or months.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

And yet the Polynesians were growing an American crop, while the primary differences between the two continents are fuzzied in no small part by the global reverberations of the Columbian Exchange, as pre-1492 the Old World was rather more alien to its modern descendants than they often realize.

[chron-job.livejournal.com]

> And yet the Polynesians were growing an American crop

True, but I'm not sure what the point is?

[sophia-sadek.livejournal.com]

Obviously, you have not seen the civil conflict in LA.

[404.livejournal.com]

I have not read Diamond's book, but the easiest way to explain why Canada and the US, and to a lesser extent Mexico have thrived while European nations are on the sideline to the most part are: 1) access to cheap human and material resources, 2) political systems based on representative democracies, 3) no real longstanding grievances (peoples/groups or nations) against one another, and 4), an ocean to separate North America from the bickering of European nations.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

1 is somewhat true of all these states, 2 only debatably applies to parts of the USA and for large chunks of Mexican history, especially its most stable phases not at all to Mexico, 3 is a bit of an overstatement, and 4 is only partially true, as this also applied to Japan and that didn't exactly leave Japan isolated from that bickering. Or China, Gujarat, the Mughal Empire, Bengal, Tamilnadu, the Sikh Empire, Songhai, the Kingdom of Kongo, the Swahili Emirates, and so on.

[lyssna.livejournal.com]

political systems based on representative democracies

This confuses me? Most of Europe consists of representative democracies.

[404.livejournal.com]

They do now, but ~150 years ago Europe was a hodgepodge of of great and petty monarchs, whereas the systems of Canada, the US and were based on representative forms of governance. Mexico has a more checkered past with military strongmen dominating government.

[luvdovz.livejournal.com]

Suddenly, Canada sounds like a good example now! ;)

[404.livejournal.com]

So does the US, for all the people that called Andrew Jackson "a military chieftain," he respected the US system by retiring to private life once his term was completed.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Most of those claims had to do with things like his essentially functioning as a warlord and waging wars in say, Florida, that amounted to full-scale land grabs to prevent slaves having a stronghold to challenge the state holding them in slavery and presenting the government with a Fait Accompli. A very prosaic reason the USA never had issues with military putsches like other states was that the USA very consciously chose to have small armies and if you're talking the sheer expanse of the USA, 10,000 soldiers who barely have enough forces to face a Western-style army in the short term isn't going to cut it to take over the sheer expanse of the USA. By comparison the forces of say, Mexico, happened to be rather larger in a quantitative sense (though often poorer in the qualitative sense. Admittedly with a Santa Anna as a "hero"......).

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

With the biggest single state in Europe being Russia, while the unification of Germany and Italy added two new absolute monarchies to the European system. Democracy in a practical sense in Europe was limited to the UK and France for a very long time.

[abomvubuso.livejournal.com]

The argument that strife toughens you and makes you more resilient and competitive is only 1/5 of the story about civilisational success. Niall Ferguson postulates another 4/fifths, but even he doesn't have the full story.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Except we have plenty of counterexamples where strife does nothing of the sort. One of my favorite is actually the Kingdom of Prussia, which rose purely from a military POV and led Germany into a long national nightmare of total and complete failure, only after Germany embraced economic harmony did it begin to achieve the potential it had which was always there.

[peamasii.livejournal.com]

I haven't read the whole book yet (although my wife has, and she always agrees with me) but it seems that Diamond's focus is on developments from prehistory up to the colonial age and into the early industrial age. If that's correct then the US's birth of a nation is an extension of European colonialism / imperialism, and only in the 20th cent. the US's rise to hegemony really comes to the forefront, only after WWI. The two world wars wiped out more than 75% of Europe's wealth, and the US only surpassed Europe economically after that happened. Since WWII ended, the economic growth has been parallel in Europe and the US, so I don't it's a case where one is stagnating and the other is benefiting from peace.

In the current situation, if the US quit all military exploits, their hegemony would degrade rather quickly. The size of the US military in proportion to the economy is much larger than any previous hegemon's, and its contraction mirrors the unsustainable trajectory of the 19th century british empire. The argument can be made that the american hegemony is already in decay over the last decade, whereas the european hegemony had degraded completely during the two world wars. It seems that it could be inferred that the next hegemon to replace the US might be something like a united Eurasia or perhaps a pan-american group of nations. Economically growth has become unsustainable in the West and is trumped by the BRIC economies. What's unclear as yet is whether future hegemony will depend on energy resources, capital concentration, or sheer military might. As the criteria for trade wars and military conflict constantly change, it would be difficult to say which factors will be of greatest importance in the distant future.

[underlankers.livejournal.com]

Well, in a sense that actually makes sense, as the USA was less an instance of rising and more being the only true superpower left by default and circumstance. That's never an enduring basis to build on, no matter how the USA tried to rig it.