Freakonomics had a similar fall from grace. It was the uber-NPR look how worldly I am thing to reference, and now people are pointing out that holy shit it was racist and poorly supported.

So are most people.

It's ok if you need a man bra.

I was hoping for more money.

Paying $47 for an article from "Capitalism Nature Socialism" would be something I could do for the irony if I were rich.

I wish I had a compact, cogent statement of my concern regarding the corruption by celebrity of everything (here's someone to love, now hate, in the cause of proving myself right), but let's just pretend.

...I certainly haven't read anything long and tedious like that since I had kids.

I just had the one, but also the same.

Jared Diamond's other work has some serious problems, but the best critiques of GG&S that I've read have been here, and I found them ... pretty lame.

I'm not going to pay for the linked item, but it gets off to a bad start. It points out that Diamond is deterministic -- and yes, historians are rightly skeptical of deterministic explanations -- but it otherwise talks about Diamond as though he is contradicting Correia on matters that Diamond doesn't even address. I'm always suspicious of critiques that insist that the author shouldn't write about things that interest the critic rather than things that interest the author.

5: https://www.unm.edu/~dcorreia/David_Correia/Research_files/Correia_F**K_CNS.pdf

F**k Capitalism!

Came here to say exactly 8.1. The critiques I've read of Collapse or his writing about people in PNG were much more compelling than the critiques of GG&S. It's hard to see how the basic thesis of GG&S can be wrong.

9. Thanks. I'm still not going to read it.

8.last reminds me of peer reviews I've gotten.

Do your peer review articles accidentally say "shouldn't" when the reviewer meant to say "should"?

No.

"I know now I should hate him"

Why? How? Says who? Was a tribunal established?

I recall a similar statement about Scott Alexander, a while back.

Diamond's a geographer, and GG&S did environmental determinism and broad-brush synthesis at a time when academic geography was reacting *extremely* hard against work of that sort. He's also just about the most famous geographer, and talking about the shape of continents is what most people assume all geographers do, so many geographers take his popularity extra hard. Early on in geography grad school, I said GG&S had turned me on to the discipline. Got me some deeply horrified gasps in response.

Thanks, peep. There are certain kinds of bad arguments that fascinate me, and this is one of those.

Correia invents Diamond's argument based on nothing in Diamond's work. According to Correia, Diamond says:

We must focus on physical geography and on climate if we want to understand why the world is divided into rich and poor.

But Diamond's topic isn't why the world is divided this way. Diamond examines how the wealth got distributed geographically. There's nothing in Diamond that contradicts, say, Marx on the division of wealth. Diamond doesn't address that issue.

That seems like a distinction that is really easy to explain, and Correia is obviously a literate person. How do smart people's brains come to work in such a way that they can't grasp such a simple matter? I have theories ...

Look at Correia here, quoting Jeffrey Sachs, who he chooses to conflate with Diamond without explanation:

If it were true that the poor were just like the rich but with less money," he wrote, "the global situation would be vastly easier than it is. As it happens, the poor live in different ecological zones, face different health conditions and must overcome agronomic limitations that are very different from those of rich countries. Those differences, indeed, are often a fundamental cause of persisting poverty.

The problems of poor people are systemic problems, and are not dependent on individual circumstances. Particularly for a non-conservative, what could be more obvious? But Correia takes issue thusly:

Karl Marx anticipated Sachs. "In times long gone-by," he wrote in Capital, Volume 1 in a brilliant parody of determinist apologia, "there were two sorts of people; one, the diligent, intelligent, and, above all, frugal elite; the other, lazy rascals, spending their substance, and more, in riotous living... Thus it came to pass that the former sort accumulated wealth, and the latter sort had at last nothing to sell except their own skins. And from this original sin dates the poverty of the great majority that, despite all its labor, has up to now nothing to sell but itself, and the wealth of the few that increases constantly although they have long ceased to work."

Nothing in the Sachs quote is contradicted by Marx. In fact, to the extent that they share the same subject matter, they are in complete agreement.

So while Correai's argument is useless, it raises a really interesting question: How do you wind up with a brain that is broken the way that Correai's is?

@17

Marx: Materialistic Determinism.
Diamond: Okay. Geography affects the relative development of civilizations.
Correia: No! Not those material factors!

Doesn't reading Marx take a long time? Even compared to reading Guns, et al.

And to answer my own question: I propose that the foundation for this sort of thinking is narcissism. Correia is interested in Correia, and to understand what other people are saying or doing, we have to evaluate them in terms of what is interesting to Correia. If it doesn't fit with Correia's thinking, it does not exist. It's all about meeeeeeeeeeeee ...

I think Diamond gets a bad rap for roughly the reasons above, but he is pop-science sloppy and broad-brushed, and that's a bad way to write in politically sensitive areas if you don't want to make people really mad. But overall I think his broad thesis makes sense, and the book isn't particularly racist/imperialist/colonialist -- there are points to critique, but more better-than-average on that front than the reverse.

I think sadly Diamond had one good book in him.

I'm sorry for going on about this, but I am just spellbound by this type of thing:

The climate is indeed changing and transforming in ways not conducive to human or nonhuman life. The idea of a climate catastrophism, however, so prevalent in the rhetoric (disguised as science) of historical climate change research, displaces and defers this urgency. If our fate is apocalypse, after all, what good is grassroots organizing? Moreover, the false panic of an apocalyptic rhetoric provides the rationale for ignoring the suffering of the marginalized and the disenfranchised.

At the outset, we establish that climate change that is "not conducive to human or nonhuman life." That's a fact, as Correia sees it. Two sentences later, this exact fact becomes "the false panic of an apocalyptic rhetoric." Why? Because Coreia isn't interested in climate change. He wants to talk about other things.

And that one book is the 30 page Reader's Digest version of GGS.

23: One was cut properly and polished, and all the others are Diamonds in the rough?

21: I think it's groupthink based on envy. Correia knows he's writing for an audience that hates Diamond, and won't care that his arguments make no sense. They will love him for daring to be so rude to their enemy.

Diamond's problem is that he always goes for the deterministic explanation. This leads him in some very stupid directions, but with his subject matter in GG&S, determinism turns out to have a great deal of explanatory power.

Historians often rightly focus on how biases lead to junk science, but people often fail to recognize that scientific advance -- good science -- is also a product of culture and bias.

but he is pop-science sloppy and broad-brushed, and that's a bad way to write in politically sensitive areas if you don't want to make people really mad.

I don't necessarily disagree, but I'm not aware of an example of this (regarding GG&S). I get why, for instance, Steve Sailor is pissed off by Diamond, and I am groping toward an explanation for the Correai-like disputes. Diamond's thesis itself in GG&S is going to be a problem for some people, and there's no sugar-coating this.

I'm pulling this out of my vague memory of when we talked about this last time, which itself was ten years after I read GGS, but doesn't he have some ad hoc deterministic explanation for why European were successful colonial powers in Asia, which can't be explained by his primary thesis? He doesn't spend much time on it, but I think there are a couple of super dumb pages.

But overall, I think the negative lefty political reaction to GGS is somewhat confused. First, it's perceived as exculpatory of colonialism because it offers a structural explanation rather than blaming it on bad acts by colonial powers. I don't think it really is exculpatory -- it's not an excuse for the bad acts, it's an explanation for why they were successful.

And then there's a thing where historically, geographical/"scientific" explanations for how colonialism happened have tended to be some kind of ranking of the capability of people based on where they were born -- either the absolutely most straightforward racism, or slightly more complicated things about warmer climates being enervating and depriving people of initiative, that are all still racist. And I think the GGS thesis is precisely not that, and is a reaction against that: an attempt to come up with a geographical/structural explanation that isn't about variations in human capability. But people who are primed to react against geographical arguments because they tend to be racist, seem to have lumped the GGS argument in with the rest.

I'm appreciative of peep & pf in this thread, bc I've been a bit baffled by the fall from grace of GG&S. It just seems very, very true that the book is un-pc in more or less the original sense of the term, and so people need to find reasons that he and his thesis are wrong, rather than them being naturally occurring*.

About a month ago there was a thread on Twitter that was supposedly devastating, but the actual meat of it was "Cortez' victory was contingent, therefore GG&S is bullshit." Really--that's not me strawmanning it. The slightly longer version was that he only won bc he found local allies who were in the midst of warring against the Mexica, without whom he wouldn't have won. But of course that specific victory wasn't sine qua non to European conquest of the Americas, and the reasons are very much guns, germs, and steel. Aztecs armed with wood clubs and possessing gold were never going to hold out, no matter how unified in opposition.

But if you're in circles that take as given that GG&S is risible, you don't need strong or even coherent arguments to be called smart. TBH it's a tendency I find very common in activist spaces, where "do the reading" doesn't mean "engage critically with arguments" but rather "accept as gospel certain approved claims, while rejecting as heretical disapproved ones."

*obv not claiming it's flawless, but relative to Freakonomics it's a work of genius

30: My own memory on this is similarly uncertain, but I think he basically loses interest in the world after the year 1500 or so. I do think he gets falsely criticized for his failure to explain recent history, when that isn't his subject matter.

You see the same thing with Collapse, where people object to his failure to deal with the depredations of colonialism. The book is explicitly about the period that precedes the arrival of the colonialists. (There are other more salient critiques of his treatment of the situation with the Rapa Nui.)

Correia's incoherent citation of Marx against Sachs is a really good example of 31.

A couple days ago Bret Devereaux puzzled over a historian who approvingly posted a child's answer to the question "Why didn't Islamic empires conquer Europe?" with "Because Europe was too poor & backwards to bother with." (The former is a paraphrase, the latter close to an exact quote.) Devereaux points out that, in fact, the Umayyad Caliphate tried at least 3 different times, indicating they thought it was worth bothering with. People who sympathize with those colonized by Europe understandably appreciate the zinger written by the kid, but it doesn't excuse an actual history professor (who's since taken her account private) saying that it's factually correct, but this is where we are in the discourse. And it's not entirely unrelated to all the people who've taken Putin's side in Ukraine because they think anyone who's anti-West must be good.

I ended up being just a tiny bit environmentally deterministic in my geography dissertation--do not worry! I was very caveated and careful!--and it was very notable how explosive that bit was compared to whatever-all the rest of what I was up to. Geographers have been working through their disciplinary guilt at serving the project LB identifies in 31.2 for a long time.

30, 33: I think every author is tempted to take their thesis at least a little beyond its natural stopping point. And it wouldn't surprise me if his editor encouraged him to come closer to the present for purely commercial reasons. But it's perfectly reasonable, given his premise, to say that what matters is/was the starting conditions for European colonization*, and the contingent outcomes post-1450 aren't in any precise way dictated by the former.

*FWIW, I don't think there's any great mystery on the Europe/China thing: Europe, for its own reasons, spent 250 years getting really good at colonization, and when it came time to knuckle China under, it was (collectively) stronger. China's colonization cycles looked different, and there were never going top be junks sailing up the Thames to demand favorable trade**, but the power imbalance of the Opium Wars wasn't predetermined by geography in any meaningful way.

**in part of course because England didn't have much to offer China other than silver & gold

This entire thread is making me feel like I guessed on Final Jeopardy and guessed right!

19. Engels: "Men make their own history, but they do not do so under conditions of their own choosing." I don't read that as materialistic determinism, but as a statement of the bleeding obvious, that existing conditions constrain the options available in any given time or place. Marx/Engels were mostly interested in economic constraints, whereas Diamond emphasises geographical ones. In neither case should it be seen as an earth shattering insight, but denying either seems childish.

@33: My issue with Collapse was the implicit (or possibly explicit - it's been a long time since I read that book) analogy to peak oil. Collapse was published in 2005 - exactly as the concept of peak oil burst into popular consciousness. But the incredibly fragile societies, so fascinatingly described in that book, did not appear to me to be plausible cautionary examples.

Yeah, 30 is right, GG&S should have just tried not to explain why it was Europe and not other parts of Eurasia, because it's pretty clearly contingent and not geographically determined, and he just looks dumb when he tries to explain it. But that's a pretty minor criticism in the grand scheme of things.

It's interesting thinking of some of what's discussed in 31 in the context of my local area history (Midwest between the Ohio and the Great Lakes), where there was a nearly complete genocide of the local inhabitants due to guns and germs, but essentially prior to the arrival of any European settlers to the area. Smallpox spread up the rivers and killed most people and caused a societal collapse, and then the Dutch gave the Iroquois Confederacy guns and the Iroquois killed everyone who was left. Something along the lines of GG&S explains this very well, while the typical criticisms of GG&S seems to really struggle.

Begun, the Beaver Wars have.

34.2 An actual history professor of the Roman Empire, his understanding of Islamic sources leaves a lot to be desired (one of his latest blog posts relied heavily on Patricia Crone's work which is very problematic). Those were basically raids, granted if they were successful the Umayyads would have exploited them and pushed hard into Western Europe beyond Spain but they were not the occasion of some grand Umayyad plot to conquer western Europe beyond Spain.

The second of the seiges he mentioned was a huge undertaking even at the lower estimates of the forces involved.

I haven't read any of Diamond's books; I feel like I should at some point read at least GG&S and Collapse, because the subject matter comes up a lot in my world, but holy shit those books are long and I don't feel like I'm likely to get much out of the investment of time in reading them.

That said, from my understanding I think the people upthread are correct that GG&S isn't really that problematic. Conceptually it's basically a popularization of Alfred Crosby's work, which was groundbreaking in its time and is still pretty widely respected. Crosby was an historian and his focus was more on the period of contact and colonization, but the basic themes have been taken up by geographers and anthropologists as well and extended in various directions, and Diamond is one example.

Collapse is a lot more problematic, and there's a lot of dispute over whether his choices of case studies even make sense for what he was trying to argue. Again I haven't read it so I can't really judge. I get the sense that his account of Chaco is probably wrong, but in a subtle way that would require actually reading the book to tease out.

My next blog post in my depopulation series will talk about Crosby and other important figures from that period of scholarship. I don't know when I'll get around to finishing it though. In the meantime people might be interested in some backstory.

43 Tours? This all needs update scholarship but I'm with Gibbon on this. It was a glorified skirmish and the entire theater was a sideshow to the other conquests that were going on in the Islamic empire at that time.

But of course that specific victory wasn't sine qua non to European conquest of the Americas, and the reasons are very much guns, germs, and steel. Aztecs armed with wood clubs and possessing gold were never going to hold out, no matter how unified in opposition.

This makes me think Diamond wrapping up the guns/steel factor together with the germs factor may have led to a widespread confusion on all sides. Cortez's victory was very much a case of germs rather than guns aiding European conquest. The Aztecs won the first few military encounters and kicked the Spanish out of Tenochtitlan ignominiously (the "noche triste"). That would have been that except that the Spanish had inadvertently introduced smallpox during their brief stay in the city, and after it spread like wildfire and incapacitated the Aztec military they were able to come back in and take over.

There's a link to a tweet that talks about Tours and attacks on Constantinople. It's just a tweet, so I read it.

In general I think military/technological superiority is a vastly overrated factor in European conquests in the Americas, and to the extent Diamond emphasizes it he's wrong. There are lots of examples of indigenous groups holding their own militarily against European colonizers, sometimes for centuries (e.g. the Mapuche in Chile). Disease, on the other hand...

Well, obviously sailing technology was important.

Yeah, it's not that technology had no impact. Navigation especially was super important.

There's a longstanding debate about whether the kinds of guns sixteenth-century Europeans had were actually superior to indigenous weaponry. I'm unsure where I stand on it.

You can stand on more of a musket than you can of an obsidian sword.

Depends on the size of the sword.

That would have been that except that [...]

That for Cortez, perhaps, but it's not as if he was sui generis. More would have come.

I mean, you're absolutely right that the diseases did most of the work, but they weren't the sole thing the Europeans had going for them. And that's part of the point: not only was it not monocausal, but it was a suite of factors that were in many ways interrelated.

I think it's worth recalling that the phrase GG&S was IIRC coined by somebody else. It's not as if Diamond wrote the book and his editors told him to narrow it down to the top 3 factors to put in the title.

I am very rarely skeptical of books that I have read. I just don't have the knowledge to do so. That is the reason I am reading the book; to learn something new. Unless there are some glaring logical flaws or the book is not internally consistent or something; they got me. Then when somebody says the book sucks, maybe they are right! How the fuck would I know?

By the 17th century guns are clearly better though, right?

Iirc, GG&S is also pretty into horses as an important part of the military situation, mostly because they're scary rather than particular tactics.

By the 17th century guns are clearly better though, right?

No, the debate really goes all the way down to the invention of machine guns in the late nineteenth century, which clearly were better than anything else and allowed the Euro-American states to finally conquer the remaining holdouts like the Mapuche.

@52

Which is why the Spanish immediately began using obsidian swords and stone clubs in their European wars.

25: There really was such a Reader's Digest version in the form of the articles Diamond published in Discover Magazine in the early nineties. It was the livestock/disease/mechanized agriculture part of the argument, very convincing to a middle schooler and came with a bonus alternate history depiction of an Inca(?) warrior riding a tapir.

I would like a suitable tapir please.

I'm really not committed to either side of this "were guns actually better?" debate, btw. There are strong arguments on both sides and it was probably a mixed bag depending on specific circumstances. Guns were definitely effective in some cases, like Champlain's battles with the Iroquois circa 1600.

What's the non-gun explanation for the Beaver Wars?

The frustrating thing about Diamond is that his arguments really are complex works of synthesis so it's hard to evaluate them without having actually read the books. You would think that would be true of most authors but it isn't necessarily.

Also the Musket Wars?

63: Disease hollowed out the Midwest and allowed the relatively unaffected Iroquois to swoop in. In this reading the specific weapons they had weren't particularly important.

One point in favor of the theory in 66 is that they were eventually stopped by the Ojibwa and Sioux, who didn't have guns but also hadn't yet been affected by disease.

Pittsburgh isn't Midwestern and is in the Beaver War zone. Let's be accurate.

I'm not as familiar with the Musket Wars, but Wikipedia notes that an alternative theory is that the introduction of the potato led to a logistical revolution that freed up more men to go to war.

Adam Smith notes the superiority of potatoes over either wheat or oats in The Wealth of Nations. His reasoning is that poor Englishmen, who live off wheat bread, are stronger and better looking than poor Scots, who eat oats, but the strongest men and most beautiful women in England are impoverished Irish workmen and prostitutes raised on potatoes.

Economics has really been Freakonomics all along, hasn't it?

55: The words "guns" and even "steel" don't really belong in the title, if we mean for the title to be an ideal summary of the book rather than a punchy headline. Maybe people would be less put off if he'd called it, "Horizontal Continental Axis and Domesticatable Plants and Animals."

Economics has really been Freakonomics all along, hasn't it?

I mean, he wasn't wrong. Potatoes are great and Irish people are hot.

@62

Between 1492 and 1884, when the Maxim gun was invented, Europeans conquered or vassalized most of the world. Many of the conquered regions, like India and the Middle East, had far more comparable military technology. And yet they still got crushed.

You can get to guns and steel through "accelerated economic and technological development resulting from exploitation of domesticable plants and animals", which is his argument as I recall it. But it's a later step, not the fundamentals.

"Guns, Germs, and Steel Guitar" will be my retrospective on how Texas fared during Covid.

@70 The English are just ugly. The Irish are a far more attractive people. My daughter attends a predominantly Irish school and my sister's son attends a predominately English school. My mother has repeatedly commented on how much better looking the children are at my daughter's school.

Also 70 is funny.

76: Based on a detailed review of Midsomer Murders, I think it's because of less incest in the Irish. Only cousin marriage, not the creepy stuff.

The first time I saw that quote I somehow ended up speculating about Smith's frustrated lusting after the notorious Tater Minxes of London.

Is the theory that indigenous people didn't adopt guns when they were available? Or that they did despite the guns being a downgrade? It all just sounds so wildly implausible.

80: The latter; one of the biggest weaknesses in the theory (often pointed out by its opponents) is that indigenous people clearly wanted guns and took every opportunity to get them. They clearly saw a lot of value in them, which does suggest that they were in fact superior to the alternatives.

The lesser claim, which I recall GG&S talking some about, is that the big advantage of guns was not so much that they were more efficient at killing, but that explosions are scary and demoralizing. But scaring and demoralizing the enemy is important!

Europeans of the time also clearly thought guns were superior. The Spanish had a longstanding policy against supplying them to Indians for security purposes. The English and French had no such qualms, and considered them useful trade items in the fur trade because they made it easier to hunt for furs.

So yeah, I don't know. I've mostly been arguing the anti-gun side here because people are less familiar with it and it's interesting, but I'm far from convinced it's correct.

I'm really not committed to either side of this "were guns actually better?" debate, btw. There are strong arguments on both sides and it was probably a mixed bag depending on specific circumstances.

The argument I recall from European history is that guns weren't better than a longbow except it's much faster to train a new recruit/conscript to use a gun than to use a longbow.

85: Yeah, one of the major anti-gun arguments from the American literature is that a skilled archer can shoot a lot of arrows in the time it takes to reload a musket. Which is definitely true! But the pro-gun side responds with that ease of use argument and it's a good one.

So maybe the battle scenes in The Woman King weren't that unrealistic after all!

It's just weird to me that debate is "guns were better" vs "guns weren't better" rather than about whether we properly understand the reasons why guns were better. The argument in 81 seems awful convincing on the former argument, while leaving a lot of room to have the latter debate.

@86

It wasn't just guns. In the early period, the Spanish had steel armor and steel weapons. It doesn't really matter how often you can shoot, when the arrows won't penetrate. And a weapon is better when it can be used by less-trained, more-replaceable personnel to equal effect. As the Ottomans learned at the Battle of Lepanto.

81: Most rural people I know want way more guns than they could possibly use.

Maybe the question should be rephrased -- guns were definitely better, but how much better were they? How big a deficit in number of fighters could guns overcome?

91 is right, probably.

They clearly saw a lot of value in them, which does suggest that they were in fact superior to the alternatives.

I think a large chunk of all of this is that weaponry is decisive under 2 basic circumstances: utterly overwhelming weapon superiority (eg Maxim gun), or evenly matched forces where one has a distinct weapon advantage.

Drill, tactical sophistication, morale--in most battles those matter more than quality of kit, as long as both sides are on remotely similar footing. What pre-automatic guns do is allow forces to level up relative to their opponents, whether it's in size of force or other factors. But they're not wunderwaffe, which is why the Ojibwa and Sioux--in their own territory, with disciplined forces--weren't overwhelmed by their presence.

Maybe the Sioux had other reasons? The first musket was acquired by a chief named "Wilting Weasel."

I think longbows tend to sidetrack these arguments, btw: it was a highly specialized weapon that couldn't actually be deployed under every circumstances and that didn't spread across militaries. So the relative parity of the longbow with the musket tells us little about more commonly used bows.

Also, I understand why we're talking small bore arms here, but AIUI, it was the cannon that definitively altered war because of the implications for siege warfare. A stronghold that was largely impervious to pre-gunpowder siege was suddenly helpless against cannonade, and so you get this almost quantum space between simple defenses intended to deter mobile forces from raids and massive, elaborate star forts and such. Castles like those on the Rhein become worthless once the artillery gets good enough.

94: I assume that was a Boy named Sue situation.

In support of the point in 50, Crosby talks about the Canary
Islanders, who held out for centuries with literally Stone Age
tech. He argues that the islanders were not isolated from the
Eurasian disease pool, unlike the Americans.

@97 What do you mean they "held out for centuries"? The first attempt at conquest was in 1393. They defeated the local king and took 170 captives. Three islands were conquered by 1405. The last island was conquered by 1496. Given the transportation infrastructure of the era, the Spanish seem to have conquered about as fast as economically possible.

@93 The bar for "utterly overwhelming weapon superiority" is much lower than "Maxim Gun"

I remember an old SF short story - probably would look overclever if I found it again - that told the story of an invading army in a science-fictional style, then in the last line revealed it was Pizarro in Peru. It gave some focus to the armor, a scene with the general telling everyone to keep their helmets on because the alien life-form that just killed someone "can't bite through steel".

Spaniards can't bite through steel either. Probably.

It's also very much plausible that even early guns are overwhelming before you adapt to them, and then a small advantage afterwards (that can be overcome with the right training and tactics).

Guns frighten horses, but you can accomplish the same effect without the smoke using elephants.

I guess that usually the guns and horses were on the same side.

"Guns, Germs, and Her Emails" would be a good title for a book about the US from the 2016 election to January 6 told in reverse chronological order.

Heh.

Ok, apologies for posting on a book I last read 20-30 years, without checking. My "held out for centuries" is completely wrong, but what Crosby did say is that on Gran Canaria, the first attempts to settle were around 1300 and were fatally unsuccessful. The Spanish made their all-out invasion in the late 1300's and were successful (Crosby says 20 years for Gran Canaria), but he credits the victory not to weapons but their ability to resupply and bring in more troops. The fights themselves were pretty competitive, once the islanders has fled from the flat areas and went into the hills.

I also misremembered his point about disease gradients -- the Guanche in fact suffered diseases and were eventually wiped out largely by them. Crosby compares the invasion of the Canaries with the ones during the Crusades. With the disease gradient they completely supplanted the Guanches, but without the Europeans disappeared from the Holy Land afterward, in spite of conquering the are militarily a few times.

Time to read the book again...

I read things like Correia writing:

> "More than anything, Diamond and Sachs have reestablished the scientific bona fides of environmental determinism, which is being aggressively taken up as an explanatory framework among historical climate change scientists. This new "scientific" version of climate determinism took center stage at the 2012 American Geophysical Union in San Francisco. There, researchers from West Virginia University described the results of a recent tree ring data from Asia in which, they argued, a particularly wet period in the 13th century corresponded to the rise of Ghengis Khan and the spread of the Mongols. According to researchers, wet conditions would have been particularly advantageous to nomadic Mongol herders. Well, maybe, but like for most of Diamond's assertions, there are any number of explanations. It is more than likely that the rise of the Mongols had something to do with the enormous size of Khan's army..."

And I think: Wetter weather means more grass, which means more animals, which means more nomadic Mongols--and more grass also means that Mongol armies can move farther faster, and with less loss.

Not to mention the fact that Correia appears to be some kind of global-warming denier as well...

Gnoled Darb

If the climate keeps getting warmer, we'll need more glass in front of the art to protect it from soup.

Diamond's a geographer

I thought he was some sort of biologist (primate specialist? physiology?) who decided he was now a geographer when he wrote GG&S. My recollection is it was his first big general book outside of his original academic focus and that it's still the general book of his that holds up best.

Anyway, I'm not going to re-hash the GG&S blog conversations from almost twenty years ago, and so many academic critiques of it mix things I would agree with and things I find completely unconvincing or not even responsive to the book's arguments. At some point I concluded that I only care about my own critique of it, which I guess is somewhere on the narcissistic to solipsistic spectrum since I'm not planning to write it out.

Speaking of books that have been criticized here, I've started reading Cadillac Desert. Out of historical interest. I'd be interested in reading a retrospective critique of it if there is one.

A biologist is a just a geographer who noticed there's shit spattered on some of the rocks.

108: I'm just struck by the obvious fact that Correia very obviously thinks that Genghis Khan's first name was Genghis and his surname was Khan, which reminds me forcibly of Phoebe thinking Spiderman was Jewish because his name sounds Jewish, like Goldman or Silberman.

Induction is difficult.

Diamond was originally a bird physiologist, IIRC, who became interested in biogeography when doing fieldwork in New Guinea. He seems to have moved pretty thoroughly into geography once he became a popularizing author rather than an academic, though.

An important piece of context for the guns debate: the anti-gun theory really developed because despite the stereotype, when you look closely the European conquest of the Americas, especially in its early periods, was a lot less successful than you might expect based on European technological advantage. Cortez and Pizarro were the exception, not the rule. Many entradas failed spectacularly, even (perhaps especially!) when they were exploring areas with societies at much lower levels of social and technical complexity than the Aztecs and Incas. This was especially the case in North America, where there were numerous entradas in the sixteenth century but the Spanish established only very tenuous control in a couple of areas.

But how could this be? They had guns! Smaller numbers than the Natives, obviously, but that was also the case in Mexico and Peru. Historians have come up with various theories, one of which is "maybe the guns they had weren't so great after all, at least in this context." As we've gone over, there are plenty of flaws in this theory and it's probably not the main factor even if there is some truth to it. The mystery is still more or less unsolved.

What's the basis for assuming that those expeditions should have been more successful so that failure is what needs explanation rather than the other way around?

It's not like the Europeans were sending their best or whatever the phrase is.

Nothing, really, beyond the comparison to Cortez and Pizarro. I actually think the most likely explanation is just that those two were exceptionally lucky and benefitted immensely from a perfectly timed smallpox epidemic (probably the same one), and in general this kind of conquest is very hard and failure should be expected.

That's a very contingent and not very structural explanation, though, so unsatisfying in certain quarters.

Cortez also had the difficult to replicate advantage of being possibly confused for a god: https://www.pbs.org/conquistadors/cortes/cortes_d03.html

As you might expect, that's highly contested these days. It's quite plausibly a retcon by post-Conquest Nahua elites trying to explain how the whole thing happened.

James C Scott has a 2013 review which is generous to GG&S and hates the later books. I had thought that was representative, and had missed the full blown Diamond haters.

"""
Diamond's was not a simple, self-congratulatory 'rise of the West' story, telling how some peoples and cultures showed themselves to be essentially cleverer, braver or more rational than others. Instead, he demonstrated the importance of impersonal environmental forces: plants and herd animals amenable to domestication, pathogens, a favourable climate and geography that aided the rise of early states in the Fertile Crescent and the Mediterranean. These initial advantages were compounded by interstate competition in metallurgy for armaments and navigational devices. His argument was much praised for its bold and original synthesis, and much criticised by historians and anthropologists for reducing the arc of human history to a handful of environmental conditions. There was no denying, however, that Diamond's simple quasi-Darwinian view of human selection was 'good to think with'.
"""

https://pugpig.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v35/n22/james-c.-scott/crops-towns-government

Cortez, Cortez, Cortez. Shut up, shut up, shut up.

91: How big a deficit in number of fighters could guns overcome?

You know there's a whole genre of YouTube video dedicated to exploring this proposition? "10,000 US Marines vs. 2 million Spartans" via the magic of cheap CG battle scenes.

One thing I learned at UnfoggedyCon was that some Southron governor, barely a year after John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry, which included as part of the conspiracy a scheme to arm hundreds of slaves with purpose-made pikes, decided to also have a bunch of pikes made to arm pro-Confederate militias until sufficient rifles could be acquired/produced. I'm too tired of life to refresh my memory on the exact details, but that kind of action, on the part of both the state and anti-state conspirators, seems to indicate that, as late as the second half of the 19th century, some plurality of those directly involved in Western war-making were *not* convinced that only firearms, and their superior deployment, were determinative of victory. See also Stakes, Pungi, Deployment by the NLF of

Natilo!

I don't have a pike, but I do have a bow. In theory, I could buy real arrows and it would be a deadly weapon. And I can hit the side of a small barn from maybe 40 feet away.

If you search for "pike" on Etsy, you get lots of fish-related stuff. But if you search for "spear", you'll see a very wide selection of spears.

I got about halfway through Collapse, but the tone of the whole thing seemed a little too similar to Emperor Palpatine's mock concern in Return of the Jedi: "Oh, I'm afraid the deflector shield will be quite operational when your friends arrive climatic conditions and certain of your cultural proclivities will be quite determinative of your society's eventual failure."

The "cultural" part is becoming just too obvious to bother writing down an explanation for.

Moby!

In case anyone has been wondering, I've been continuing to rot into my mattress like the fellow in "A Rose For Emily". Stupid work is making me commute in 3 days a week, and of course no one is masked in the office or on the bus or downtown anymore. Still haven't gotten COVID (or at least, not a symptomatic case). My sister's health has been fairly good, although she's had some problems with dangerously low blood sugar, which are hopefully under control. I had a unusually intense anxiety attack a couple of months ago, mostly due to obsessing over how much I despise the anti-choice forces, but I've tried to set that anger aside more often and spend more time with the cat. The mood in Minneapolis is still pretty grim, I would say. The police have basically decided to sublimate all of their anger at Chauvin's prosecution into fucking with homeless folx more and more. Most recently in my neighborhood, something like 50 cops blocked off a dozen square blocks for a few hours so they could violently destroy a homeless encampment a block up the street from me. And it's not just me that feels this way. Lots and lots of people are sickened by what's happened in the past two years. The gangsters down at city hall may think that they slid back into power last year with no problem, but people, especially the young people, have not forgotten or forgiven anything.

Glad your avoiding COVID and your sister is feeling well.

Hmmm, was looking for a long contentious thread on this during which at some point led me to cite the Koppen-Geiger Climate Classification and have failed in finding it (despite some very specific search terms). Assumed there was a new hoohole of some kind that has developed. I did notice in many Archives links the comments show as "0" but are in fact there if you click. *However* there do seem to be some chunks where the comments are missing or at least currently not accessible*. Not sure if the GGS discussion is in that category, but for instance for this page of the archives, 3/6/2012 - 3/11/2012 the comment links are all empty (could be a personal problem for me, but tried it on several devices).

Did some quick checks and the comments hole appears to extend from post 10000 (8/29/09) to 12290* (7/13/12). Somewhere in the range going backwards the #of comments appears again but does not correspond with where the comments themselves reappear. My search/samplng technique certainly not definitive, but in establishing the range noted I saw no comments from that period, and comments always there outside of that range other than*.

*And 12291 and 12292 not there, but from 12293 they seem to be steadily there.

I'm wondering if I should try to get a grant to do a study on the relative hotness of Welsh and Breton women, so conclusions could be drawn (by some sort of actual scholar -- I'm just gathering raw data) about the impacts of genetics vs. diet. Make ogling respectable again!

I was probably the exact target audience for GG&S -- 80thish but not 95th percentile on intelligence, curious for an interesting account, nearly entirely uninformed about the underlying scholarship. I didn't just read the book, I gave a couple as gifts. Along those same lines, I'm very interested in Darb's new book (and keep thinking of people I could give copies to), but expect to be overchallenged by it in a way that Diamond's books didn't. OK, I've talked myself into trying it.

A fragment of a thought: Cortez and Pizarro conquered rich centralized states, and with each intermediate success of their projects acquired some means for the next. Wandering around trying to find and conquer the seven cities of Cibola, or 'conquering' the Iroquois 'empire' were just fundamentally different projects. The 'wealth' acquired in King Philip's War was land, because the genocide was successful. No rooms full of gold in that.

The real treasure was the people they killed along the way.

133: I remember that thread! I was having one of those extended arguments where I did not quite understand what we were arguing about enough to be sure there was a real disagreement. With Doc Slack, or maybe Lord Scastock at the time, who was making a point about what exactly a Mediterranean climate was that had me puzzled.

If you can grow olives, it's a Mediterranean climate.

@125

And the Russians are presently arming Ukrainian separatists with with Mosin Nagants designed in the 1890s. I doubt that indicates that, as late as 2022, some plurality of those directly involved in Western war-making remain unconvinced that 20th and 21st century weapons, and their superior deployment, are determinative of victory.

But seriously, folks.

Why is the point that the Europeans enjoyed a massive advantage in military technology so fraught? What uncomfortable conclusion follows, that this point is contested so?

that this point is contested so?

Have you met us?

Granted it's not exactly the same thing as a pike, but didn't several combatants start World War I with lancers carrying actual lances into battle?

139 I'm not on team guns aren't better, but I suppose the factual point that biowarfare -- mostly unwitting -- did the bulk of the job lessens the already very questionable legitimacy of the Conquest. We've inherited a vestigal and always ridiculous view about how armed struggle reveals the wishes of the Almighty. In this view, the Conquest was an extended Ordeal by Combat. Small pox is like Commodus stabbing Maximus with a poisoned blade before their fight in the Coliseum: cheating that would have robbed his victory of divine sanction, had Maximus fallen first. Audiences understand this, and, additionally, that by doing so, Commodus was showing that he understood that he didn't deserve divine favor.

141 My grandfather, USMA '33, was initially in the cavalry, and participated in an exercise where a long line charged, sabers drawn. Many of his father's artifacts are in a museum, and include a Toledo-made cavalry sword, that he acquired in the Philippines in 1898, possibly on Moro. (The curator let me wave it about.)

I suppose the factual point that biowarfare -- mostly unwitting -- did the bulk of the job lessens the already very questionable legitimacy of the Conquest.

There's that perspective, but there's also a countervailing idea that the impact of disease makes the Conquest more legitimate, because it means the demographic declines that enabled the conquistadors to succeed were due to accidental introduction of pathogens rather than deliberate violence and cruelty. You see this in certain strains of Spanish historiography especially.

Batman doesn't use guns is the main thing though.

due to accidental introduction of pathogens rather than deliberate violence and cruelty

That's how Taco Bell keeps defending itself.

There weren't any major epidemics from pre-Columbus travel to the Americas, right? I suppose neither Vikings nor Polynesians were coming from dense cities. Maybe the more surprising thing is that Polynesians didn't catch new diseases from South America?

There weren't any major epidemics from pre-Columbus travel to the Americas, right?

Not as far as anyone knows, but they're hard to detect archaeologically so it's hard to be sure. It's epidemiologically unlikely, though; travel times were long and traveling parties were small so it would have been hard for an acute infection to survive long enough. Also, as you note, the populations in question were not coming from high-density environments with lots of endemic disease.

Maybe the more surprising thing is that Polynesians didn't catch new diseases from South America?

They may have! There is at least one archaeologically documented case of syphilis from Easter Island. The chronology is very broad though so it could well date to after European contact.

You can get STDs so bad they show up in your bones?

Citation for the Easter Island case. Note that this was confirmed by DNA analysis so it definitely is syphilis rather than one of the other treponematoses with which it is often confused.

Way to anticipate questions.

Anyway, yes, syphilis is one of the few infectious diseases that causes bone lesions that are visible archaeologically.

Ooh, I did a brief Google for Easter Island and Syphilis figuring that was the most likely option, and didn't find that paper. Thanks!

It seems the Viking settlements in Greenland and Iceland weren't large enough to sustain endemic smallpox, but there may have been an early 1400s outbreak in Greenland. But even if it spread to the Inuit, it's a long journey to get to cities, so it probably wouldn't have spread out of control.

Not strictly pre-Columbian, but in 1994 the Canadian archaeologist Robert McGhee proposed that unrecorded epidemics spread from poorly documented contacts with European fishermen and whalers starting ca. 1500 led to population collapse and cultural change among the eastern Inuit. His evidence was equivocal and he got a lot of pushback, so no one else has pursued this line of inquiry AFAIK.

I did a brief Google for Easter Island and Syphilis...

I just got a really dubious looking travel agency.

In Greenland at least, weren't the Vikings the first people settled there permanently(-ish)?

Wikipedia says they were the first on the south part, but not the whole thing.

Obscure disease papers reminded me to look and see if any new "1889 pandemic was CoV-OC43" papers had dropped. And yup, there's another recent paper arguing for it. Nothing conclusive yet, but it just keeps looking more and more likely.

155: Not the first, but it was uninhabited when they got there. The Inuit arrived a couple hundred years later.

Yes, and they were using a fake ID that said "Thule."

158: At least in Western Greenland? Last I looked it seemed like there was a more continuous presence in the far north of Greenland? At any rate I had trouble being confident there weren't Inuit or related groups in the Nares strait area when the Vikings arrived to Western Greenland.

At any rate the nearest current population on Greenland when the Norse arrived would have been very far away.

Still, they could have been having sex with the same walruses.

No, competition for walruses North of the Norse settlement was an important part of the downfall of the Norse settlement, but that didn't happen until much later.

It all worked until the walruses learned to be jealous.

66, 67 (sorry): why weren't the Iroquois equally susceptible to European diseases?

I thought I remembered GG&S saying that it was a matter of chance that Europe outfought China when colonization became possible, given the many centuries in which eastern half of Eurasia had it way more together than the western half did. Maybe that was Braudel?

162 oh sick!

why weren't the Iroquois equally susceptible to European diseases?

Good question! I'm not sure there's a good answer. Could be pure contingency, could be something about the nature of their contacts with Europeans or their social organization etc. They definitely did get hit by some epidemics but for whatever reason were able to bounce back easier than most of their neighbors.

There's no evidence for walruses spreading STDs, but tuberculosis was apparently introduced to South America by seals.

165: I found a GGS copy and Diamond goes with "fragmented geography allows innovation" in the epilogue, p416

"""
For much of this book I have emphasized the diffusion of technology that takes place in the absence of formidable barriers. But China's connectedness eventually became a disadvantage, because a decision by one despot could and repeatedly did halt innovation. In contrast, Europe's geographic balkanization resulted in dozens or hundreds of independent, competing statelets and centers of innovation. If one state did not pursue some particular innovation, another did, forcing neighboring states to do likewise or else be conquered or left economically behind. Europe's barriers were sufficient to prevent political unification, but insufficient to halt the spread of technology and ideas.
"""

Which, maybe, but sticking with some contingency would have been better. Funny reading this quote just after a book on the Manchus, which emphasized that in many ways they were just another Eurasian land empire.

169: Yeah, that definitely sounds like special pleading. All the major Old World cultural regions have oscillated back and forth between political fragmentation and centralization to varying degrees over the centuries. Also, like, lots of places have high-barrier geographies and political balkanization but didn't go on to conquer the world. New Guinea, for example.

125. The main purpose of pikes, at least from about 1500, was to stop cavalry charges from getting in among your musketeers/crossbowmen/archers and causing chaos at close quarters. In the fullness of time, improved bayonets made them redundant, but if you had a limited supply of muskets and cavalry charges were still a thing, I can imagine pikes being quite useful in the short term.

re: 171 etc

This is more of an aside, but, ages ago, Youtube threw up via some random recommendation algorithm, videos by a nerdy bloke in the UK who makes historically accurate reconstructions of various historic weapons,* and then tests them.

He had a run of videos where they tested longbows on historically accurate armour from approx. the period of the 100 years war, where English longbows were supposed to have wreaked havoc on armoured knights. The interesting outcome was that, in basically no cases, could they get the arrows to penetrate armour even when they set the experiments up to favour the bowman.

Plate armour, especially with cloth outer layers, was basically impervious to arrows. In fact, there was lots of really interesting engineering on the armour that became clearer in terms of function as they tested it, e.g. grooves/lips that served to carry splinters from arrows away from the face, ridges that meant it was almost impossible for the arrow to deliver the full load of kinetic energy, etc. So the interesting question is how long bows worked against mounted knights. Obviously, there's a lot of value in harassing people, arrows penetrating through gaps in armour (armpits, eyes, etc). But all of the testing suggested that the basic model that armour was being penetrated by arrows was basically false.

* he makes them for private clients, but also as props for movies, for reenactors, etc.

Hi.

re: 173

Good point.

Didn't the horses have armor too? Neck guards and so on, and of course the saddle with the knight in it covers a lot. The ass is exposed, but I bet a horse could manage okay with a couple of arrows in its haunches.

Apparently the horse armor is called barding, and did cover pretty much the whole horse: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barding

169: that it's in an epilogue seems pretty solid evidence for the "his editors made him say something about it, even though he had nothing to say" theory.

I think having full plate armor and making your house barbed was too expensive to be widespread. So if you have 1,000 barbed knights and 5,000 partially protected lesser soldiers, wounding or driving of the 5,000 leaves the barbs vulnerable because they can't fill the spaces to keep a line.

For the guns and butter argument, I'll recommend "Thundersticks". It's a history of the introduction of guns into the native culture of what is now the US. Selling guns started an arms race. Intertribal anarchy meant that if your enemies, i.e. any other tribe, had guns, you had to get guns. Guns were definitely superior. In the north, the tribes traded furs for guns. In the south, they traded slaves.

In GG&S, I always liked Diamond's discussion of Australia. As far as his theory goes, Australia was on track but well behind much of the world in developing agriculture and technology. He gave an interesting vision of what an advanced indigenous civilization might look like.

I'm going to check out that book. There's also "Thunderstick" which is billed as a "double D western" but is not porn.

I bet a horse could manage okay with a couple of arrows in its haunches.

I would take that bet, and would be interested to know if you would be willing to sit on the horse in question while we tested your hypothesis out. If you stab a horse, it generally reacts pretty badly.

If you have 300 archers firing at a block of 30 approaching cavalry they can put one arrow into every seven square inches of that block by the time it reaches them. Now, some of those are going to get through the armour, and then you have injured horses swerving and trying to turn aside or turn round and flee. Some of them are going to fall and become trip hazards.

I was once thrown from a horse because he wanted more Oreos than my dad had brought.

More of a pony, but same deal.

Even if your armor and your horse's barding are likely to keep out most or all arrows, I bet all but the most revved-up cavalryman would think twice about charging into a hail of arrows - you never know. (Sort of like suppressing fire.)

From the article in 176:

During the Late Middle Ages as armour protection for knights became more effective, their mounts became targets. This vulnerability was exploited by the Scots at the Battle of Bannockburn in the 14th century, when horses were killed by the infantry, and by the English at the Battle of Crécy in the same century where long-bowmen shot horses and the then dismounted French knights were killed by heavy infantry. Barding developed as a response to such events.

So it sounds like shooting horses was indeed the effective approach during the 100 Years' War itself.

185: indeed. And there are some very interesting points from that.

First, we're talking about very late in the Middle Ages before metal barding even appears at all in Europe. Maximilian I is an Early Modern monarch. Mediaeval wars in Europe are not fought with barded cavalry.

Second, therefore, we're into the gunpowder age - we aren't worried about plunging area fire from longbows so much as massed direct fire from arquebuses.

Third, it's not widespread, because as m'learned friend points out in 178 it's terribly expensive. Human plate armour is bad enough. Horse plate armour? The article implies very strongly that this is something that very rich and powerful nobles had for prestige reasons, and mainly for use in tournaments, rather than a widespread item of equipment used in combat.

"But the Eastern Romans and the Persians had cataphracts! Armoured lancer/archers on armoured horses! Belisarius had them in the sixth century! They were amazing!"

Yes, they did, and it's interesting to wonder why that innovation didn't spread into western Europe.

Maybe it's about state capacity - because a cataphract army is historically the army of a very powerful, capable, centralised state, like Byzantium or Persia but not like mediaeval France.

And perhaps, speculating, that's because they need to be very well trained, and trained to act as a unit - to charge and caracol in various complex and coherent formations - so they need to be professional soldiers who train together, not just armoured landowners who turn up occasionally.

And it's also worth considering that the cataphract is a terrifyingly unstoppable battlefield weapon - armoured mobility with ranged firepower, really the closest a horseman can get to being a tank, you absolutely don't want to be in the way of a cataphract charge - but he's really only good at winning battles, and winning battles is actually not the most important part of being a mediaeval (European) soldier. Mediaeval armies fought almost no battles. Mediaeval wars were won by successful sieges and destructive raids. You can't win a siege with a cataphract charge, and they're slow and clumsy compared to hobelars or mounted infantry when you're executing a chevauchee.

Also, I have issues with that description of Bannockburn. Yes, maybe lots of English horses were killed by the Scots infantry, but not with arrows. The Scots didn't have very many archers, and they played no significant role in the battle. They won with pikemen.
And barding won't make pikemen ineffective against cavalry, because, well, look at the bits of the horse that barding does and doesn't cover. Plus the effectiveness of pikes against cavalry is purely that horses don't want to get stabbed with pikes and will therefore not charge them. Putting a load of metal on the horse will not change its preferences with regard to the desirability of being stabbed.

Mediaeval loon triple post: the wiki article also notes that the Chinese had armour for their horses made out of stone. WTF China.

Why would someone need to protect a stone horse?

The acids in tomato soup can do a surprising amount of damage.

But that doesn't work, because in the period in question no one apart from indigenous peoples in the Americas had access to one of the fundamental technologies underpinning the development of the flingable tomato soup projectile, viz. the tomato, and indigenous peoples in the Americas didn't have horses, stone or otherwise.

Fossils are stone, but I think that horse fossils are mostly just teeth.

191 Hence the origins of the Tomatina in Valencia commemorating when the Aztecs attacked Cortés and his men by pelting the Spaniards with ripe tomatoes. Unfortunately for the Aztecs they soon ran out of tomatoes and had to resort to stones which didn't work as well against the armored Conquistadors leading to their inevitable defeat.

And yes, on thinking about it for more than 10 seconds, it would probably be hard to effectively ride a horse getting shot in the ass with arrows. I managed to stop thinking at "Well, that probably wouldn't actually kill
a horse," but a live horse that's losing its tiny horse mind probably does you even less good than a dead horse.

You don't even want to be on a horse with insufficient Oreos.

Have we even named all these horses?

We're waiting until they get back from their egg-fixing class.

Maybe it's about state capacity - because a cataphract army is historically the army of a very powerful, capable, centralised state, like Byzantium or Persia but not like mediaeval France.

How long did cataphracts remain in use in Byzantium? The capacity of the Byzantine state fluctuated a lot over the course of the medieval period and could be something of a natural experiment to test this hypothesis.

There's a much more awesome way to test these hypotheses but good luck with the irb.

Wikipedia suggests that Byzantine use of cataphracts did indeed fluctuate with state capacity:

References to Eastern Roman cataphracts seemed to have disappeared in the late 6th century, as the manual of war known as Strategikon of Maurice, published during the same period, made no mention of cataphracts or their tactical employment.[citation needed] This absence persisted through most of the Thematic period, until the cataphracts reappeared in Emperor Leo VI's Sylloge Taktikon, probably reflecting a revival that paralleled the transformation of the Eastern Roman army from a largely defensive force into a largely offensive force.

...

As with the original cataphracts, the Leonian/Nikephorian units seemed to have fallen out of favour and use with their handlers, making their last, recorded appearance in battle in 970 and the last record of their existence in 1001, referred to as being posted to garrison duty. If they had indeed disappeared, then it is possible that they were revived once again during the Komnenian restoration, a period of thorough financial, territorial and military reform that changed the Byzantine army of previous ages, which is referred to separately as the Komnenian army after the 12th century.[32] Emperor Alexios I Komnenos (1081-1118) established a new military force from the ground up, which was directly responsible for transforming the aging Byzantine Empire from one of the weakest periods in its existence into a major economic and military power, akin to its existence during the golden age of Justinian I. However, even in this case, it seems that the cataphract was eventually superseded by other types of heavy cavalry.

On the guns subthread, I think there's a degree of that thing where history gets flattened out into an undifferentiated past there. We remember the late 19th century, engagements like the battle of Omdurman, and project that degree of technological overmatch back into the gunpowder era. But this is really late - it's 20 years before the First World War, and it's really modern. The British/Egyptian side is bristling with modern rifles and machine guns, and specifically, second generation Maxims, and it's hanging off a logistical network so good that David Beatty could toss Winston Churchill a bottle of champagne from his river gunboat, because the British have literally built a railway to get into the field. And this is overmatch *against an enemy who has plenty of firearms and who has previously crushed British units with Gatlings*. The firepower revolution (breechloading rifles, smokeless high energy powder, supersonic loads, machine guns, quickfiring field artillery...) of the late 19th century is revolutionary.

Also, even in the gunpowder era, you can't really isolate one weapon from the whole package of capability. A hell of a lot of fighting around the world during the rise of the empires was between forces that had guns. It's absolutely possible that having guns would be a big advantage over your neighbour who doesn't, but having an army that uses state-of-the-art combined arms tactics and the tax that supports it is a knockout advantage over you. Some places internalized this very rapidly, others didn't - the Maori went extremely fast from pre-gunpowder, to gunpowder, to moving from walled forts to entrenchments to protect themselves against artillery, and eventually to organizing a full time army and proto-state (the "King Movement"), and it's no coincidence such a large percentage of modern New Zealanders identify as Maori, the administration is bilingual, and the founding myth of the state is a treaty relationship.

(The extreme example is up on the North-Western Frontier - the locals end up being left alone as a formalized autonomous zone precisely because they got modern rifles and adapted their methods of warfare.)

On the germs subthread, 165 is a really good point and I have the impression there's a disjuncture between different historical micro-specializations here. If you start off from a high count worldview and have to postulate big unrecorded epidemics to match the demographics of the documented era, you're going to struggle to explain why proto-state Iroquois armies are manoeuvring around in the late 18th century as precious allies of the British. Why aren't they all dead? (Similarly if you start from a strict low count worldview you'll also have problems explaining the shape of the French & Indian War, just different ones. Siri, show me a site of historical work that has both intense political relevance and a poor evidentiary base.) Which brings us to the whole thing about military history having cooties.

As for 142/143 I'm not sure I've ever encountered the second option (epidemics did it and that's OK) in the wild, much more the first (epidemics did it and that might as well have been deliberate in a moral sense), but I suspect what's doing the work is just fitting the evidence or lack of it to one's general outlook. By the way, isn't this:

It's epidemiologically unlikely, though; travel times were long and traveling parties were small so it would have been hard for an acute infection to survive long enough

a strike against epidemics generally, at least up north in the future United States?

I suspect that Collapse is just a worse book, btw.

having an army that uses state-of-the-art combined arms tactics and the tax that supports it is a knockout advantage

Now do Russia and Ukraine, 2022.

201 is right - the solidly anti-Blackadder point that imperial wars tended not to be fought against people who were four feet tall and armed with dried fruit, but against armies of intelligent, healthy adults. A lot of the time there was very little difference in weaponry - many Indian armies in the 18th and 19th century were very similarly equipped to the British and French. The Lakota at LBH were an army of rifle- and pistol-armed mounted soldiers, just like the Seventh Cavalry.

The big difference between a modern state and a pre-modern state seems not to be that the modern state can win the first battle - a lot of the time it didn't - but that the modern state can keep going after losing it. If your army is your male military-age population, led by your king, then losing the battle means losing the army, losing your state capacity, and losing the war. If it's a trained two-legion army led by a consul (or a wali or a tribune or a general or whatever) and you lose it, that's unfortunate, but the government back home will just raise another one and they'll keep coming.

Density in much of the US, and certainly in the Mississippi and Ohio river valleys, was undoubtedly much much higher than in Greenland and the far north arctic islands. Same is true if you compare Iceland and Greenland to say Denmark.

So a few weeks ago I had a bad fall coming out of the shower (actually coming out of the bathroom into my tiled bedroom floor with insufficiently dried feet and also a few too many beers). I had an MRI a couple of days ago and was just at the orthopedist. Completely ruptured posterior cruciate ligament. The hospital is one of the best in the country but the injury is rare enough that they don't operate on it there. So tomorrow I'm going off to the top-rated sports medicine hospital and hope they can do something for me before the major sporting event here happens and they're all blocked off for potential injuries.

Oops, wrong thread

203: THE ANARCHY has numerous stories of the general form "Shah So-and-So had brought in mercenaries from some western country to organize a modern army at ruinous expense, and succeeded in defeating this or that EIC ally, his beloved younger brother, at the Battle of Wherever. However, although it was a victory their losses were higher than expected, and when the EIC and its allies returned with reinforcements, they were brought to battle at Thingy and following their catastrophic defeat, the Shah was tortured to death with an enormous quantity of bees while fleeing dressed as his own favourite dancing boy. Governor Hastings condemned both the murder and the horrific excesses committed on the civil population by ill disciplined auxiliary cavalry but somehow bought his fifth landed estate immediately afterwards"

207 BTW, William Dalrymple's podcast is excellent.

201: You will enjoy my next two blog posts! They'll cover the "high-count hegemony" of 1966-1983 and the subsequent backlash, and they'll go into a lot of these issues in detail. To address a few specific points you raise:

The firepower revolution (breechloading rifles, smokeless high energy powder, supersonic loads, machine guns, quickfiring field artillery...) of the late 19th century is revolutionary.

Indeed, one interesting thing I learned from Battle Cry of Freedom is that even at the start of the Civil War the guns used by the US Army were kind of shockingly terrible by modern standards. Firearms technology improved immensely over the course of the war, and like many other aspects of the war had important continuing effects on subsequent warfare around the world.

Some places internalized this very rapidly, others didn't - the Maori went extremely fast from pre-gunpowder, to gunpowder, to moving from walled forts to entrenchments to protect themselves against artillery, and eventually to organizing a full time army and proto-state (the "King Movement"), and it's no coincidence such a large percentage of modern New Zealanders identify as Maori, the administration is bilingual, and the founding myth of the state is a treaty relationship.

There's an interesting contrast here to Hawaii, which developed a robust administrative state very rapidly but after unifying the islands focused on diplomacy and economic integration rather than military power and ended up losing the vast majority of the indigenous population to disease.

If you start off from a high count worldview and have to postulate big unrecorded epidemics to match the demographics of the documented era, you're going to struggle to explain why proto-state Iroquois armies are manoeuvring around in the late 18th century as precious allies of the British. Why aren't they all dead? (Similarly if you start from a strict low count worldview you'll also have problems explaining the shape of the French & Indian War, just different ones. Siri, show me a site of historical work that has both intense political relevance and a poor evidentiary base.) Which brings us to the whole thing about military history having cooties.

Right, these are both important weaknesses of the high- and low-count positions, and reasons that the more recent trend has been toward detailed studies of particular areas rather than trying to come up with continental- or hemispheric-scale estimates based on general assumptions. The Iroquois in particular are an important case study because the nature of their communities makes them an unusually good fit for rigorous archaeological reconstruction of population numbers. This line of research in the late 1980s was an important part of the backlash to the most extreme high-count estimates.

I'm not sure I've ever encountered the second option (epidemics did it and that's OK) in the wild

As I mentioned, it's mostly encountered in Spanish historiography, particularly the "White Legend" reaction to the "Black Legend" that puts most of the blame on the behavior of the conquistadors. I associate it mainly with the Spanish doctor Francisco Guerra, who did a lot of interesting work on medical and disease history in the Spanish colonies but wasn't the most unbiased observer.

By the way, isn't this a strike against epidemics generally, at least up north in the future United States?

To some extent, yes, but the flattening of history comes in here too. Improvements in shipbuilding and navigation cut travel times over the centuries and made epidemics spread more widely. The cholera pandemics of the 19th century, spread by steamships, are one of the best examples but there are others. In general, and another point against the most extreme "protohistoric virgin-soil pandemic" type of high-counter theory, early European exploring parties were composed of men of military age who had survived the endemic childhood diseases of Europe and were unlikely to spread epidemics, though it did happen occasionally. The best documented virgin soil epidemics in most areas didn't come until settlement and the presence of women and children.

Just looked at your blog which I hadn't looked at in while. In terms of the garbage-in/garbage-out are there reliable counts of *something* pre-contact? Like say bison or deer populations? (Not clear how useful those in particular would be for estimating other things, but it seems sensible to start with things you know you can estimate and then build a picture out from that.) The obvious thing that seems both useful and relatively easy to get solid numbers on would be pollen from domesticated crops.

One thing that surprised me in your post was that in the examples you gave the "low" and "high" numbers just aren't that far off. I was expecting something like a factor of 100, not a factor of 2 or 3. A factor of 2 is basically agreement, not disagreement, no?

I guess the problem is that 90% and 45% are off by a factor of 2, but are qualitatively really different. But that just means you shouldn't be trying to estimate death rates from pandemics by estimating the pre-contact population and comparing to post-contact population. You need to somehow directly try to look at death rates.

Is that in the blogroll? I don't remember the link

Searching for blog cha/co can/yon pulled it up and is easy to remember.

Got it. There goes my afternoon.

211: Good points. And I think the region-specific counts are on the right track bc you're a lot more likely to be able to get a handle on the event that marked a big change that survivors experienced rather than what the pre-event condition was that was, definitionally, less salient to survivors.

Take this as a very broad analogy: people who actually did experience Roman collapse projected that onto the Roman/Italian experience, while Romans/Italians saw a lot more continuity.

I'd add here that I'd imagine that Native stories would be especially useful here because they'd capture these events, whereas it's hard to tell stories about a long term status quo.

In terms of the garbage-in/garbage-out are there reliable counts of *something* pre-contact?

Not really, which is part of the problem. Anything you end up trying to count in the absence of written records ends up running into the same sorts of problems. Not that people haven't tried. And yes, game animal populations and evidence for domesticated plants are both things people have looked at, but getting actual totals is just really hard since the record is necessarily incomplete to an unknowable degree.

One thing that surprised me in your post was that in the examples you gave the "low" and "high" numbers just aren't that far off. I was expecting something like a factor of 100, not a factor of 2 or 3. A factor of 2 is basically agreement, not disagreement, no?

Stay tuned! The numbers from the era I've talked about so far are indeed pretty close. It's in the next period that the high counts start to get really high and we end up talking orders of magnitude.

But that just means you shouldn't be trying to estimate death rates from pandemics by estimating the pre-contact population and comparing to post-contact population.

I certainly don't disagree, but this is exactly what certain people did in the high-count hegemony period and it started to go off the rails pretty quickly. Again, stay tuned.

(Blog linked here for convenience.)

206: wrong thread or no. That stinks. Sorry.

even at the start of the Civil War the guns used by the US Army were kind of shockingly terrible by modern standards. Firearms technology improved immensely over the course of the war, and like many other aspects of the war had important continuing effects on subsequent warfare around the world.

This is all true, but it suggests a link that I don't think was there. The Army had lots of smoothbore muskets at the start of the war, but the better technology already existed. Rifling, the Minie ball, and even repeating long guns all were around in 1861. The federal government just hadn't invested much money in buying those technologies, because they didn't need them for fighting Native people. That led to a lot of terrible tactics early in the war--generals fighting the previous conflict, as it were--as the newer technologies spread. Fighting on the defensive was a massive advantage for soldiers armed with rifles, and it took field commanders quite awhile to catch up with that, which meant that lots of people died for no reason. But that's war for you. It's hell.

even at the start of the Civil War the guns used by the US Army were kind of shockingly terrible by modern standards. Firearms technology improved immensely over the course of the war, and like many other aspects of the war had important continuing effects on subsequent warfare around the world.

This is all true, but it suggests a link that I don't think was there. The Army had lots of smoothbore muskets at the start of the war, but the better technology already existed. Rifling, the Minie ball, and even repeating long guns all were around in 1861. The federal government just hadn't invested much money in buying those technologies, because they didn't need them for fighting Native people. That led to a lot of terrible tactics early in the war--generals fighting the previous conflict, as it were--as the newer technologies spread. Fighting on the defensive was a massive advantage for soldiers armed with rifles, and it took field commanders quite awhile to catch up with that, which meant that lots of people died for no reason. But that's war for you. It's hell.

even at the start of the Civil War the guns used by the US Army were kind of shockingly terrible by modern standards. Firearms technology improved immensely over the course of the war, and like many other aspects of the war had important continuing effects on subsequent warfare around the world.

This is all true, but it suggests a link that I don't think was there. The Army had lots of smoothbore muskets at the start of the war, but the better technology already existed. Rifling, the Minie ball, and even repeating long guns all were around in 1861. The federal government just hadn't invested much money in buying those technologies, because they didn't need them for fighting Native people. That led to a lot of terrible tactics early in the war--generals fighting the previous conflict, as it were--as the newer technologies spread. Fighting on the defensive was a massive advantage for soldiers armed with rifles, and it took field commanders quite awhile to catch up with that, which meant that lots of people died for no reason. But that's war for you. It's hell.

Yeah, I didn't mean to imply that the invention of e.g. rifling was spurred directly by the war. But the large-scale spread of those new technologies was helped enormously by the massive purchasing power of the US Army once it realized it needed them.

Speaking of guns, I've started "Thundersticks" and so far it's very interesting.

So, thank you.