In this section the main topic has been:
how can some civilizations that seemed
poised for world domination
eventually decline and then miss the boat?
We focused on places like
Ottoman Turkey, Mughal India, Manchu China,
Tokugawa Japan, and throughout
there was a tug of war between
two different hypotheses: is it connected
to outside bullying (gunboat diplomacy) or
did these countries plateau and
eventually decline because their own
leaders were too timid? It's
difficult to know the answer because we
can't isolate one case or the other. If
you were a scientist and you were trying
to figure out the connection between one
causal factor and the consequence,
you would just have a whole
bunch of test tubes and then try the
different ingredients isolated, and then
have one test tube as a control.
In history we can't do it because it's a
messy field where everything is always
interconnected... unless you could find
some place that is so isolated from the
rest of the world that outside factors
are clearly not playing a role.
Well, that place exists: it is Easter Island,
a civilization that was once thriving
and then collapsed long before Europeans
even got to Easter Island.
So maybe we could study that island, and figure
out what can cause civilizations to collapse.
Stay tuned.
In a previous video (11.1) we went through the
history of Easter Island. Long story short:
this was an area that was settled
around the year 1200 by
Polynesian migrants.
They encountered an island that was
thriving with various kinds of birds,
rare species of trees, and the population
ballooned from a few thousand settlers
all the way to a peak of maybe 15,000 people.
In the process, they built
gigantic statues, the Moai that the
island is famous for. When we studied the
first European arrivals however,
Jacob Roggeveen in 1722 and later on in
the 18th c. various visits by explorers
like James Cook, we noticed that the
island was not doing that well by then.
The population had dropped to maybe 
3,000 people, so something
had gone wrong, and this was long before
the Europeans' arrival.
So what could that be? If you're interested
in that topic I would recommend reading
the book by Jared Diamond called
"Collapse," which is about... well, just what
the title indicates: why is it that some
civilizations collapse? Diamond,
whose background is in biology, tends
to interpret history through the prism of biology:
to him civilizations collapse when they mishandle
their environment, over-harvest their
resources, and then fall victim to
drought and so forth.
In that book he has different chapters
whether it's the Vikings around 1500
in Greenland or the Mayas
of Central America, but the first chapter,
a very interesting one that I used
when working on that lecture, is focusing
on Easter Island. His theory would go
kind of like that: when the population
of Easter Island grew, they had to cut down trees
to make more room for their
people, and also when building the statues.
They're made of stone
but you would need trees
to use as logs to carry the statues or to
make ropes with the bark.
So, what was once a Garden of Eden
covered with trees (according to the
archaeological record) became more and
more barren. It could be an issue if you're in
an island in the middle of the Pacific,
because you have a lot of wind erosion,
and that became a problem in the long
run: the soil became exhausted due
to too many people living on the land
and not enough trees to
retain soil together. Beyond that
Polynesians would have brought with them
species of rats from Polynesia that 
attacked the seeds and the birds and
their eggs and eventually completely
changed the environment.
So that's a good example of how
human beings have changed the
environment. And islands
tend to be  fragile because they
are so isolated: they often have a unique
ecosystem that developed in
isolation from the rest of the world, and
because the local species are never
really exposed to outside predators, they
can be weak. Whenever
there is settlement from the outside, all of a
sudden they can collapse. A good example
of that would be the dodo bird from Mauritius 
that was quickly
pushed into extinction. So there's some
evidence that after that initial boom,
the population hit a wall
of overpopulation and then malnutrition
or even starvation and then war and the
population started to go down
due to environmental stress. Also, if you have
no access to trees anymore, it becomes
more difficult to build ships. So
just going out to fish
becomes quite complicated. That's
supposed to have been reflected in the
political environment as well. An
island that used to be quite peaceful
with one overall king and then nine
clans dividing the island's resources peacefully...
this became far more
dramatic in terms of the politics as the
centuries went on, because you had
fewer resources and people started to
go to war with each other. The evidence
is still disputed, but there is
evidence of cannibalism as well. 
So that's the situation as of the 18th c.
when the Europeans came in.
So you could say that you can't blame
outside gunboat diplomacy at that time,
because it's all internal factors,
poor stewardship of the environment.
That collapse continued in the 18th and 19th c.
when you have occasional
visits by Europeans. Each of them
noticed that the population had gone down
even further and the wars were even
more terrible. It's during that period
that you had the appearance of the cult
of the Birdman, or to put it differently
the first egg hunts of Easter Island.
It's a story about Easter Island so I'd
better have some egg hunts in the mix, right?
Don't imagine, though, egg hunts, where you have
cute little girls in cute flower dresses
running around looking for
eggs and bunnies: that's not that kind of
egg hunt... something more muscular.
If you're interested in seeing that egg
hunt, I would recommend watching the
movie Rapa Nui, which is from the 1990s
and was produced by Kevin Costner. It's a
movie that is set on Easter Island, it was
actually shot on location, and that
retraced the moment where the
island is starting to hit a rough patch,
the last trees have been cut down and
the tension starts to rise. So, very interesting.
There's a scene in there
where they recreate the egg hunt of
Easter Island. So how did it work? Well
each of the clans would select a champion,
think of it as the Olympics
of Easter Island, and that young
athlete would be expected to go from the
SW tip of the island to two
nearby islets that are just half a mile
or one mile offshore. It would be
very dangerous race because you have to
run down the cliff, swim across raging waters,
trying not to think of sharks or
any kind of dangerous thing that you
might have there, and get to one of the
islets where you still have birds: this
area has not been infested by rats so
you still have a few birds and they
produce eggs and that's one of the last
sources of protein that you can have access to.
When you get there, quickly you
rummage through the island looking for a nest,
you fight mama bird, get the egg away from her,
while trying not to be pecked too much,
but if you make it back
to the main island first, back up the
cliff, back to your starting point, then
you are the birdman of the year. So
that practice is really symbolic of the
change in the culture of Easter Island
towards something that is more warlike, bellicose.
And also a change in the
religious worldview away from the
building of the statues to the birdman cult.
Because by that late stage the
statues are no longer built.
There are not enough resources to build
them anymore, people have lost faith
in the statues, those gods that were
supposed to protect the island failed,
the population has collapsed,
war has become the norm, and so there's an
anger against the statues.
There's evidence that the cult of the big statue
(the moai) ended all of a sudden.
A lot of them are still
unfinished in the quarry or
halfway down the slope on their way to
the coastline, as if people had
just dropped their tools and said: "that's
it, I'm not worshiping the statues anymore.
They have failed to protect me, instead
I switched to a different cult, that of
the birdman." So, so far you can't blame
outside influence to explain why
Easter Island collapsed. This was an area
that evolved in isolation:
complete isolation until 1722, and
with very occasional European
interference in the century that followed.
Things changed from the mid to
the late 19th c. however, when you
have a number of braids from Peru in
South America to Easter Island to capture
essentially slaves to harvest guano in
South America. What is guano?
Well that's bat dung, or bird poop.
You do have a number of islands
just off the coast of Peru that are
very rich in birds and the birds do what
they do, and so you have huge layers of
bird poop. What is the value in that?
In the 19th c. there is a lot of value.
It's a time when the population of the
world skyrocketed (we studied that in
the industrial revolution video when we
talked about the demographic transition)
and for a while there was a lot of fear
by people like Malthus that the
population would balloon so much that
the agriculture could not follow and
then you would have world famine.
One way to alleviate that would be to use
fertilizers. You don't have
synthetic fertilizers derived from oil
yet or nitrates, so the way to get
fertilizers back in the 19th c. is to
get natural fertilizers, and that's where
the birds come along. So getting guano
was a key resource in the 19th c.
In fact the US Congress even
passed something called the Guano Act
where the US Congress claimed every
inhabited island in the world where there
was some bird poop... and all the countries
said "no no! That's my bird poop not yours."
So anyways up the coast of Peru, there
were a lot of efforts to harvest the guano.
It's not a very glamorous or
interesting job, so that's why slaves
were employed, and that's why you had
slave raids to Easter Island to capture
about 1,500 slaves, so half the
population at Easter Island when that happened.
However there was an international outcry
because it's the mid to late 19th c.,
the population of the world has
turned away against slavery, and the
international community that used to
condone slavery back in the 18th c.
is now considering it to be
a crime against humanity.
Due to international pressure, Peru eventually
repatriated the survivors of that slave raid
back to Easter Island... except when
it did, the slaves brought with them
diseases that they had been exposed to,
like smallpox, like tuberculosis, and
that started a major epidemic in Easter
Island affecting the former slaves or
the people that had remained in the
island and then were reunited with their
loved ones. So the population that
used to be maybe 3,000 in the early 19th c.
dipped to a low of 111
in the late 19th c. And for that
purpose you could blame
outside influence, sort of a death knell
at the very end. So where is Easter Island
nowadays? Well it's now part of Chile, and
the population has recovered, either
people that are of Rapa Nui descent or
Hispanic settlers from Chile, or a lot of
tourism, that's the main industry in
Easter Islands nowadays. So things are
looking up in the more modern world.
What does that teach us about the big
story that we were interested in
for the whole section: why is it that
some civilizations that seemed poised for
success, how did they collapse? Well the
big answer could be the environment.
There is evidence for that in Easter Island.
Bad governance, poor management of
your resources, and there's definitely
evidence of that, as well all outside
influence by slave traders, by
colonizers, and there is some evidence of
that as well, though very late in the process.
So I'll let you ponder all these issues
and next time we'll shift sections
altogether and embark on a whole
different journey (on 19th c. imperialism).                      See you next time!
