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Did geography give Eurasia an advantage? (T14)

topic background
Jared Diamond's 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel won a Pulitzer Prize for offering a lucid and plausible explanation of why civilizations in Eurasia advanced faster than those in other areas of the world resulting in the prominence of Eurasian cultures throughout history.

According to Diamond, Eurasia's advantages lay in prehistory when Eurasia was endowed by nature with a large suite of domesticable plants and animals and a long east-west orientation that facilitated the exchange of species, technologies and diseases.

In the Americas, by contrast, fewer domesticable species were available, while a narrow bottleneck of land at the Isthmus of Panama and a long north-south axis crossing many climate zones inhibited the spread of new ways. Thus, when Eurasian and American cultures met in 1492, nature and geography had predetermined that the former could dominate the latter.

2/3/03 J.R. McNeill reply
That's a good summary! (But) I think you're overly impressed by Diamond's argument about axes (my views are summarized in The History Teacher c. 2000 --I can find the cite if you want).

2/17/03 studentsfriend.com reply
This weekend I had an opportunity to study your article responding to the Diamond book (see description of the book above). As I understand your position, you are in agreement with his ideas about more domesticable plants and animals being available in Eurasia than, say, America. You are less convinced about his thesis that Eurasia's east-west orientation provided a relative advantage regarding the diffusion of technologies, etc. I believe you acknowledged that the axis theory does seem to apply in some instances; maize, for example.

Do you accept the notion that Eurasia's long band of moderate climate might explain Eurasia's bounty of plants and animals in the first place? This seems logical to me.

As you may recall, I am attempting to write a one-page summary of world history as the introduction to my concise online textbook alternative. In this summary I want to acknowledge geography's influence on the development of human societies, and I am trying to incorporate Diamond's ideas as an example of this influence.

2/19/03 J.R. McNeill reply
The key point in Diamond is that Eurasia had a larger suite of potentially domesticable animals; it did not have more plants and animals generally than the Americas (it probably had and has fewer plants, maybe fewer animals).

I do not think that Eurasia's East-West orientation meant its climate was similar even at identical latitudes. If it were so, then one would expect a narrower range of plants and animals within Eurasia than elsewhere.

Climate is more than temperature: there are extreme variations in precipitation patterns within Eurasia, at similar latitudes. JD's key insight is the inequality of the distribution of potentially domesticable species: this was chance, not climate. Or so it seems to me.

2/19/03 studentsfriend.com reply
So, let me see if I've got this right...you're saying that geography didn't have much to do with the fact that there were quite a few more domesticable plants and animals in Eurasia than in America. This was mere chance.

And geography didn't have much to do with the relative speed with which new crops, livestock, technologies and germs spread across Eurasia, compared to America. This despite the fact that Eurasia has far more land lying within temperate zones than America, and this land is contiguous. I can't help but think Eurasia's geographic situation somehow contributed to its rapid advances.

How about this? People like to live in temperate zones. This is where most of the world's population has always been concentrated, right? (After humans left Africa anyway) So, where population is most dense, exchange will likely be most rapid. In this way the large temperate zone of Eurasia contributed to its rapid advances. Does this make sense?

2/20/03 J.R. McNeill reply
The last proposition does indeed make sense. Population has concentrated in temperate zones, at least since early agricultural times and possibly before. And yes, more people means more interaction (other things being equal).

2/20/03 studentsfriend.com reply
All right! I have the geography connection I've been looking for...Thanks for thinking this through with me.