You need pack animals for civilisations. Transport is the backbone of industry and is required for the high degree of specialisation in trades that produces technological advancement.
You've drawn this argument from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel. There are a few problems with the theory:
1) Diamond's argument rests on the idea that world historical developments are effectively determined by geography (and implicitly, by factors which precede the existence of a civilization). While I can't make a strong argument against historical determinism, the conclusions Diamond draws are strange. The chief problem is that Diamond is trying to make the case that the exceptional prosperity of Northern Europe and all of its colonies was effectively a fluke of geography. The problem for Diamond is that this pattern repeats over the course of about four hundred years all over the world, not just in the places where Europeans had the advantage of small pox on their side.
2) Native Americans had access to pack animals by way of the llama.
3) The Aztecs lacked access to pack animals. They still had specialized tradesmen and constituted a civilization.
The germs argument is the only one of Diamond's that I think holds any water with regards to the European conquest of North America, and perhaps I was being too brash in my original assertion (these civilizations existed, but were decimated by small pox). The issue with this argument is that it doesn't address European colonialism in Asia (where the disease factor is absent) and Subsaharan Africa (where the disease factor actually worked against Europeans).
The fact of the matter is that Europeans (and specifically Northern Europeans) happened upon a method of conquest that worked. This could have been an accident of geography, biology, or ideology, but it's absurd to pretend that the model didn't exist when it was the basis of a successful campaign to conquer the world. It had nothing to do with having access to pack animals.
The Llama is not a very good pack animal, you would know this if you ever looked at one. Pack animals are not necessary for any specialisation, but the are for the degree that brings technological advancement. If you want advanced society, you need to move lumber from forests to cities and ore from mines to furnaces. It's difficult to do this by hand.
> it was the basis of a successful campaign to conquer the world
I am referring specifically to the conquest of America here. You can see that there were several advanced societies at the time (China, India, Europe, Middle East) and it is essentially luck which of them won out. There are also many places which could not have feasibly conquered the world, America was among them precisely due to the lack of pack animals barring further societal advancement. By the same token, aboriginal Australians and Polynesian islanders had little chance dominating the world.
>The Llama is not a very good pack animal, you would know this if you ever looked at one.
They are pack animals with carrying capacities comparable to donkeys and slightly less than horses.
>America was among them precisely due to the lack of pack animals barring further societal advancement.
You never addressed the issue of Tenochtitlan, which was constructed without the use of pack animals, so this isn't a compelling claim to begin with. Even so, North America had plenty of candidates for domestication that would have made serviceable pack animals (e.g. moose, caribou). Diamond makes some weak attempt to claim that the animals available were too temperamental to be domesticated, conveniently forgetting that the ancestor of man's flesh-eating best friend is the wolf.
> By the same token, aboriginal Australians and Polynesian islanders had little chance dominating the world.
You're making this argument because these places are islands. This was not a hindrance to the British. You'll then make the argument that you were really arguing that these places are isolated (which is maybe valid if we're talking about Polynesia, less so for Australia), to which I'd reply: "Isolated from what?" to which you'd reply: "The pack animals, the germs, and the steel," to which I'd inquire: "Why were these things found in Europe and not Australia?" and that is where we get to the root of the matter. Europe's conquests were not a matter of luck or an accident of geography. There was something in their method that simply worked better than the methods of those peoples that they conquered. I haven't reached a conclusion as to what it was in that approach that led Europe to becoming the dominant power of the last five hundred years, but there's no compelling case to be made that this method didn't exist.
>I haven't reached a conclusion as to what it was in that approach that led Europe to becoming the dominant power of the last five hundred years
500 years is a blink. Anatomically modern humans have existed for 150,000 years, yet civilizations as we understand them are at most 5000 years old. You are comparing two continents that have been isolated during that timespan, with different geography, diseases, and domesticable animals, and which developed a virtually independent separate history until the 1500s. How can you assert that all of this is irrelevant and that it was pure "Northern European superiority" or whatever that meant European colonialism was successful?
> How can you assert that all of this is irrelevant and that it was pure "Northern European superiority" or whatever that meant European colonialism was successful?
Because the alternative is doing what James_K is doing and claiming that these events were essentially chance developments; that is, that there was nothing endogenous to European civilization (or, perhaps, as you're inferring, European peoples themselves) that led to these world conquests, but that they were instead either just a series of coincidences or a product of the environment.
This discussion can get quite philosophical because like I said earlier in the thread, I can't refute historical determinism - I don't know if there is any way that we can really exit the chain of causality and determine events for ourselves, so in that sense, the underlying claim that it's all just the environment (or more accurately, antecedent causes) is correct, but this doesn't tell the whole story.
The fundamental question at hand here is if European civilization had anything within it that led to its rise to power. What you, James_K, and decolonialists everywhere are preoccupied with is the idea that if this is true, it must mean that this "thing" (which I will refer to as the European method) originated as a result of European intelligence, or more broadly from its biological characteristics. It is then inferred that this will necessarily lead to normative scientific racism and subsequently a world-homogenizing genocide.
There is reason to be weary of these things. They do not refute the notion that the Europeans possessed something endogenous which allowed them to conquer the world. Drawing the conclusion that Europeans did possess this endogenous thing would not validate any normative moral claim; we can only do that ourselves.
I don't know who that is and have never read any of his work.
> Tenochtitlan
> Even so, North America had plenty of candidates for domestication that would have made serviceable pack animals
Weirdly enough, Tenochtitlan is the rebuttal to this question. Why do you think they built a city on a lake? It's because they didn't have any pack animals so boats were the best way to move stuff around. This is a disadvantage that makes everything else much harder and therefore slows development.
> conveniently forgetting that the ancestor of man's flesh-eating best friend is the wolf
If literal millions of Native Americans could not domesticate the other animals, but they could domesticate dogs, I'm going to guess that the other animals are harder to domesticate than dogs. You might not feel that this is the case, but your feelings don't stack up to the practical results of a thousands-of-years-long experiment run on an entire continent where these animals could not be domesticated.
> Why were these things found in Europe and not Australia?
Because Europe has horses and Australia doesn't, and horses cannot swim therefore could not reach Australia. The moon also doesn't have horses for a similar reason. In fact, you'll find that horses only really inhabited areas reachable by horses, until someone put them on a boat and took them to other places (which didn't happen for Australia until quite late). You have this strange assumption that all areas are secretly equal in geography and must be equally hospitable to human flourishing, but this is not true. Europe is more hospitable than Australia, therefore humans flourished more in Europe than Australia. All you need do is assume differences in geography exist and you'll reach the conclusion that humans in more amenable areas are more likely to conquer those in less amenable areas.
> Europe's conquests were not a matter of luck or an accident of geography
You say this with precisely no proof. The closest you get is saying "other people didn't do it, and Europeans did so it couldn't have been luck". The idea that knowledge is what held other areas back, as opposed to luck or geography, is ridiculous and trivially disprovable. Knowledge exists in equal quantities for all people (unless you believe certain races are inferior to others). The difference between regions is geographical or in fortune, which could include the fortune of having a particularly skilled leader or successful sequence of conquests.
> Weirdly enough, Tenochtitlan is the rebuttal to this question. Why do you think they built a city on a lake? It's because they didn't have any pack animals so boats were the best way to move stuff around. This is a disadvantage that makes everything else much harder and therefore slows development.
They built their city on a marsh because an eagle landed on a cactus and they interpreted this as a sign from heaven. They subsequently conquered the city-states that already existed there. It had nothing to do with considerations surrounding the ease of transport as they were a nomadic people and were initially forced to settle in a marsh on the fringes of the lake.
Further, you are getting away from your original claim, which was: "Transport is the backbone of industry and is required for the high degree of specialisation in trades that produces technological advancement." This was not the case for the Aztecs. "Ah," you say, "but we can amend my claim to include analogs to pack animals which facilitate the movement of materials, such as Tenochtitlan's canal system," at which point I would draw your attention to the Cahokia, the Pueblos, the Mayans, and the Olmecs, none of which fit this pattern, all of which formed complex civilizations that soundly refute your claim.
> If literal millions of Native Americans could not domesticate the other animals, but they could domesticate dogs, I'm going to guess that the other animals are harder to domesticate than dogs. You might not feel that this is the case, but your feelings don't stack up to the practical results of a thousands-of-years-long experiment run on an entire continent where these animals could not be domesticated.
Dogs were domesticated thousands of years prior to the arrival of humans in North America.
> Knowledge exists in equal quantities for all people
There is no evidence of this whatsoever and plenty of evidence to disprove it.
Yes: You made the erroneous claim that Native Americans domesticated dogs. I corrected your error by pointing out that dogs were domesticated prior to the arrival of humans in the Americas. Thus, knowledge is not evenly distributed.
"I meant intelligence, not knowledge," you counter, to which I retort: The idea that intelligence is evenly distributed among populations has been soundly refuted. There are demonstrable differences in every metric of intelligence thus far devised both between and within populations. Incidentally, intelligence by itself is not sufficient for colonialism. The Han Chinese typically score higher on IQ tests than Europeans, and yet it was the latter that conquered the world, not the former. "You're proving my point!" you protest - I never made the claim that Europeans conquered the world due to their intelligence, I rejected the notion that this had anything to do with luck, because it kept occurring over the course of dozens of geographies and hundreds of years.
Let's suppose it was luck. Do you have this luck? Can I see it, have it defined? What would it mean for Europeans to have conquered the world by means of luck? Does it manifest out a magical aether like the pot of gold at the end of a rainbow?
