Louis Proyect wrote: > In the latest NY Review of Books, there’s a lengthy and somewhat > critical review by Jared Diamond of Daron Acemoglu and James A. > Robinson’s “Why Nations Fail: the Origins of Power, Prosperity, and > Poverty.” Diamond is a natural choice for reviewer since his most famous > book “Guns, Germs and Steel” addresses the same question, albeit with > all the wrong answers. The authors of the reviewed book and Diamond do > have one thing very much in common; they all discount the role of > colonialism. For Acemoglu and Robinson, the main problem is the lack of > “good institutions”, while for Diamond environment is key.
FWIW, Diamond's big book is more an explanation of which side won in colonialism than it is a discounting of colonialism's impact. The basic theory is "environmental," as Louis says, but in a different way than usual (e.g., theories that temperate climate encourages civilization). Diamond's book sees a large number of ethnic groups as being in a somewhat Darwinian competition before the European Conquest. His book doesn't really deal with the post-Conquest world. In a very small nutshell: In large and united ecological zones, such as the northern part of the Eurasian land-mass (plus North Africa), there was a lot of competition among ethnic groups, so that the winners were peoples who had developed immunity to animal-borne diseases and better military technology and organization. In smaller ecological zones, such as the Inca highlands, the job of conquering was easier and the exposure to animal-borne diseases was more limited, so that the winners didn't have to develop better technology and military organization as much. Then, when the conquerors of the Northern Eurasian land-mass encountered those in the Inca highlands, the bias was for the former to conquer the latter. The Europeans (in this case the Spaniards) brought diseases to the Incas that were more deadly to the latter than the diseases that the Spaniards got from the Incas, while the Spaniards had guns, steel, and horses, along with a more coherent military organization. Once the Spaniards conquered the Incas, it was clearly bad for the latter, especially as they destroyed a lot of the Inca infrastructure and social institutions. To the extent that "development" occurred in Peru and its environs, it was of a Spanish-dominated sort (colonial capitalism, involving latifundia, etc.) and then, after political independence, dependent capitalism (distorted and incomplete capitalist growth). Diamond's theory is too abstract, especially as I've summarized it. For example, if I remember correctly, he doesn't have an explanation for why the Chinese didn't beat the Europeans. -- Jim Devine / "When truth is nothing but the truth, it's unnatural, it's an abstraction that resembles nothing in the real world. In nature there are always so many other irrelevant things mixed up with the essential truth." -- Aldous Huxley _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
