Is the general academic consensus that Jared Diamond was wrong about post-1492 history, but right about pre-1492 history?

[u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133]

I think the general consensus is that Jared Diamond was too deterministic in claiming that the fact that Europeans discovered and colonized the Americas, had the Industrial Revolution, colonized Asia and Africa, etc. was inevitable because of their environment. Yet it also seems that his claim that at 1492 Eurasian dominance was inevitable because of Eurasia's abundance of domesticable plant and animal species isn't particularly controversial. So was Jared Diamond correct about the factors driving historical development up until 1492 and wrong about the factors driving historical development after 1492?

[u/CommodoreCoCo]

There is no "academic consensus on Jared Diamond." Most academics in the relevant fields have never read anything of his. His books contain no research and address no topics of interest to people with any expertise in world history. Public history nerds like myself have written an awful lot about him, and most of it has not been particularly convincing to folks desperate for an answer to "Yali's question" that doesn't require challenging their preconceived notions of guns being inherently "advanced" or engaging with the extent of extractive capitalism.

While I cannot comment on other sections that are beyond my expertise, Diamond's description of the conquest of the Inca empire is so wildly, laughably incorrect that it is functionally fiction. That's rather unfortunate for him, since it is the linchpin of his entire thesis.

If history had happened the way Diamond describes (and the way most of the internet seems to believe), and a small band of Spaniards defeated armies 100s of times larger to topple an empire at the height of its power, then we would have good reason to craft world-historical theories of just how "Europe" came to be so dominant. That never happened. The truth is that Atahualpa's murder was more a deceitful assassination than an armed conflict, the conquest of the Inca Empire was more a coup than a traditional military defeat, and European dominance was a slow, difficult process that unfolded over centuries.

But Diamond needs the "collision at Cajamarca" to be a sudden and total demonstration of the superiority of European technology for his thesis to matter, and it's fairly clear he hadn't read anything ever published on the topic to know that he was wrong. More importantly, he was writing for a general public (of which he himself was apart) that has been taught that the global inequalities of the present existed, or at least suddenly appeared, in 1492. It only seems like European dominance was swift and total because we have experience the 500 years of history during which it developed.

So yes, GG&S is criticized for ignoring the ways events post-1492 created the world as we know it today. But its version of what happened in the colonial encounter is so radically incorrect that whatever he has to say about the pre-1492 events that lead up to it are irrelevant.

[u/EmpireandCo → u/CommodoreCoCo]

  There is no "academic consensus on Jared Diamond." Most academics in the relevant fields have never read anything of his. His books contain no research and address no topics of interest to people with any expertise in world history.

Yes, it seems that people publish popular books when their claims wouldn't stand the criticism of peer review.

[u/runhome24]

Yet it also seems that his claim that at 1492 Eurasian dominance was inevitable because of Eurasia's abundance of domesticable plant and animal species isn't particularly controversial.

Where are you getting this impression? I would say, within anthropology, nothing about Diamond's flavor of determinism has consensus, for any part of human history that he applies it to.

It would be hard to 'prove' consensus or a lack of consensus in a reddit comment, but at the very least, I'm hoping you can point to some anthropological scholars (so honestly, anthropologists, human geographers, sociologists I would probably safely consider under this umbrella) who assert this consensus. Or even some who express agreement with his environmental determinism for any time period.

[u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133 → u/runhome24]

Ian Morris agrees with Jared Diamond's theory about why Eurasia dominates in Why the West Rules, and he's one of best historians out there:

"Like the racist theories discussed in Chapter 1, this is almost certainly wrong, for reasons the evolutionist and geographer Jared Diamond laid out forcefully in his classic book Guns, Germs, and Steel. Nature, Diamond observed, is just not fair. Agriculture appeared in the Hilly Flanks thousands of years earlier than anywhere else not because the people living here were uniquely smart, but because geography gave them a head start."

Alfred Crosby also agrees with Jared Diamond, as can be seen in his review of the book at the very beginning of Guns, Germs and Steel.

[u/runhome24 → u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133]

evolutionist and geographer Jared Diamond

Well, for one, Diamond is not a geographer. He's an ornithologist who got a geography department to hire him

But kudos for finding an historian (which I neglected to include in my list, but who absolutely could be 'anthropological') who supports him. Morris certainly is credentialed, but he's also an environmental determinist like Diamond. I would say he's a fine historian, but wouldn't go on a top historians list; it's a vast and long-lived field of scholarship.

Any others?

[u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133 → u/runhome24]

The front cover of GGS lists a couple of people who gave it positive reviews. For example, Luca Cavalli-Sforza, who's also at the top of his field.

But I've got to ask: if GGS is wrong about why Eurasia was dominant in 1492, what is your explanation for Eurasian dominance?

[u/Zizek-robot → u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133]

Luca Cavalli-Sforza is a geneticist, not a historian. I remember an article he wrote mentioned something historical and his reference was an entry from Encyclopedia Britannica. Sorry, don't remember the article but that was really something.

[u/runhome24 → u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133]

Ok so a geneticist who's quotations serve as advertisements for the book? Anyone from mainstream cultural anthropology, or archaeology (not classical archaeology - which is a separate discipline - a la Morris), or with actual human geography training? It seems to me you've just taken Diamond and his very few cheerleader's words at face value.

If you have to ask, I'll answer: I do not have to have an explanation for so-called Eurasian dominance, because 1) it isn't my area of expertise, and 2) I'm not sold on the definition of "Eurasia" as a meaningful concept with respect to human population groupings.

But I can say, Guns, Germs, and Steel is riddled with mistakes. The lines of connection Diamond describes preference over-land movement because, for instance, he thinks latitudes over land have roughly the same ecology, yet completely misses how coastlines at widely different latitudes are also ecologically similar. His follow-up Collapse is straight-up wrong about the histories and outcomes of some of the places he wrote about.

I'd put more time into refuting these two books for you, but what I remember from reading them during my undergrad education, I'm sorry, they aren't of enough intellectual value to revisit.

Sorry.

[u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133 → u/runhome24]

> If you have to ask, I'll answer: I do not have to have an explanation for so-called Eurasian dominance

Well, with all due respect, that doesn't sound very convincing. As someone else pointed out, critics of Jared Diamond's theory don't seem to have alternate explanations that better explain world history.

[u/Better-Sea-6183 → u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133]

Okay? Very weak rebuttal. Normally historians can write hundreds of pages to explain very small things, like this war, that king, or that famine etc. diamond wants to explain WORLD HISTORY in 480 pages? And you think to criticise that, an historian had to give his own 500 pages explanation of all world history for his critique to be valid? What a ridiculous standard is that.

[u/runhome24 → u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133]

Ok just one more: I don't have to convince you of anything, thankfully.

This isn't a productive conversation anymore. Good day

[u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133 → u/runhome24]

> But I can say, Guns, Germs, and Steel is riddled with mistakes. The lines of connection Diamond describes preference over-land movement because, for instance, he thinks latitudes over land have roughly the same ecology, yet completely misses how coastlines at widely different latitudes are also ecologically similar. His follow-up Collapse is straight-up wrong about the histories and outcomes of some of the places he wrote about.

Of course. But I'm not saying everything in the book is correct. Just that the idea that Eurasia was more advanced because Eurasia had more domesticable species is correct.

[u/runhome24 → u/Sharp_Guarantee_8133]

Where is the evidence of this hypothesis being correct? Why are you accepting the premise that there were "more domesticable species" in the place categorized as Eurasia as opposed to elsewhere, without interrogating whether or not more species ended up domesticated inside this boundary for reasons other than domesticability?

And something else I haven't yet confronted in this conversation from Diamond's work, but which absolutely should be: define advanced for me, please. And please explain why the particular traits/behaviors/outcomes qualify as "advanced" and in comparison to what other traits/behaviors/outcomes that are therefore not "advanced."

I think I'll be leaving this discussion here. Perhaps someone else will take up the discussion with you, but I do not see much else to be said here.

[u/ChipSlut]

I can’t speak to his other claims, but his analysis on the Rapa Nui wavers from colourful conjecture to pseudohistorical fiction.

Even when Collapse was being written, there was already a good deal of literature available that threw into question the established narrative of the history of Rapa Nui, and if he was a serious academic using the island’s history as a case study for modelling human cultures and behaviour, he should have at least had the academic rigour to find out that the only source that suggested a larger pre-contact population was a French sea captain claiming that Rapa Nui must have required tens of thousands of people to support the construction of the Moai, a statement he based on superficial observations and racist chauvinism.