Every time I’ve read a subject matter expert engage with Diamond, the result is the same. His facts are so wrong, and so sloppily wrong, that they don’t even know where to start. Your argument here is the most respectful I know of, and you’ve still broken down Diamond’s arguments at every step of the way.
However, I’m left a little discontented. Diamond captured so much attention by asking a really big and important question, and supplying a single rubric to answer it with. Everyone close to the issues he glosses over find his scholarship appalling— *but nobody tries to answer his fundamental question*— in general (why did Europe conquer the global south?) or in particular (why did Europe conquer Africa, say, in the places and times that it did?)
Your conclusion seems to point in the direction of this kind of answer(s), and that’s what I was most curious to hear. What are the human factors that made European societies dominate African ones when they did (after, as you say, failing to dominate them for 300+ years)? Is there an essential pattern to the answers you find, or do you think the interactions of the colonial era were just a more diffuse set of political interactions without any overarching pattern?
GGS is a part of the 'Great Divergence' literature, a subfield of global economic history, where many scholars have provided multiple theories to explain why European societies pulled ahead of the rest of the old world. I find most of them to be unconvincing, except for Joel Mokyr's 'A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy ', perhaps because he focuses a lot more on how specific internal processes in late medieval and early modern Europe produced the advantages that Diamond misattributes to Geography.
Worth reading — but it shows the risk of “big explanations.” Africa’s history isn’t a single story you can reduce to geography. Power, choices, migrations, and systems all mattered — and the newer evidence complicates the neat narrative.
Every time I’ve read a subject matter expert engage with Diamond, the result is the same. His facts are so wrong, and so sloppily wrong, that they don’t even know where to start. Your argument here is the most respectful I know of, and you’ve still broken down Diamond’s arguments at every step of the way.
However, I’m left a little discontented. Diamond captured so much attention by asking a really big and important question, and supplying a single rubric to answer it with. Everyone close to the issues he glosses over find his scholarship appalling— *but nobody tries to answer his fundamental question*— in general (why did Europe conquer the global south?) or in particular (why did Europe conquer Africa, say, in the places and times that it did?)
Your conclusion seems to point in the direction of this kind of answer(s), and that’s what I was most curious to hear. What are the human factors that made European societies dominate African ones when they did (after, as you say, failing to dominate them for 300+ years)? Is there an essential pattern to the answers you find, or do you think the interactions of the colonial era were just a more diffuse set of political interactions without any overarching pattern?
GGS is a part of the 'Great Divergence' literature, a subfield of global economic history, where many scholars have provided multiple theories to explain why European societies pulled ahead of the rest of the old world. I find most of them to be unconvincing, except for Joel Mokyr's 'A Culture of Growth: The Origins of the Modern Economy ', perhaps because he focuses a lot more on how specific internal processes in late medieval and early modern Europe produced the advantages that Diamond misattributes to Geography.
Worth reading — but it shows the risk of “big explanations.” Africa’s history isn’t a single story you can reduce to geography. Power, choices, migrations, and systems all mattered — and the newer evidence complicates the neat narrative.
very true!