Welcome back to the series of lectures.
This is our last group of lectures.
We’re talking about European exploration.
So what I want to do here is talk about these
three authors and the arguments they made,
and some very widely-known books – among
historians, at least – and the second of
these books is very widely known for a popular
audience – Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs,
and Steel.
So let’s start with Alfred Crosby, Ecological
Imperialism.
Crosby makes the arguments that there are
little Europes scattered around the world
in temperate zones, and I want to go through
this argument a little bit to give you some,
a little more depth to this discussion.
Crosby says that Europeans live in large numbers
and in national units, from the Atlantic to
the Pacific, both north and south of the equator.
Crosby says that the Europeans establish these
neo, or new, Europes – lands that are thousands
of miles from Europe and thousands of miles
from each other.
He makes the argument that Australia’s population
is almost all European in origin.
So is New Zealand’s.
A huge percentage of the population of South
America is European in origin.
Argentina and Uruguay are almost – I think
more than ninety percent European in origin.
Over eighty percent of the population north
of Mexico is European, of European descent.
Crosby asks, he says, what do all these little
Europes have in common?
The answer – They export very large quantities
of food and have since their beginnings.
Where are these neo Europes?
They’re scattered geographically, but they’re
located in similar latitudes.
They’re located in the temperate zones,
north and south, which is to say they share
a very similar climate.
The regions that today export more foodstuffs
of European preference – that is grains
and meat, five-hundred years ago had no wheat;
no barley; no rye; no cattle; no pigs; no
sheep; no goats – whatsoever.
This is pretty astounding when you think about
it.
The Europeans have established little Europes
around the world that produce those things
that were indigenous to European culture.
These domesticated plants and animals, and
now they have recreated that in the Western
Hemisphere and in the Southern Hemisphere.
Crosby, his argument takes a turn here when
he tries to explain why the Western Hemisphere
and Australia and New Zealand, why they did
not have large mammals available for domestication.
He says that before the last Ice Age, the
Americas were as rich in large animals as
they Old World.
Australia and New Zealand also had large animals.
Crosby says, in general, the world lost more
kinds of large land animals in the millennia
around the end of the Pleistocene – this
is about thirteen-thousand years BCE; this
is the last Ice Age – we lost more large
mammals during this time period than at any
other time.
He said in no areas were the losses as great
as in the Americas and in Australia.
He goes on – He says, a few thousand years
later this wave of extinction reached the
last large islands to be inhabited by humans
– New Zealand and Madagascar, the large
island off the east coast of Africa.
You start to see a pattern here.
As humans arrive in the Americas, in Australia,
in New Zealand, in Madagascar – shortly
after humans arrive in these places, the large
land mammals disappear, and become extinct.
Why is this?
Crosby makes the argument that large animals
in the Americas and in Australia did not have
the benefit of hundreds of thousands of years
adjusting to the human presence; they had
not learned to be frightened of humans, how
to avoid human hunters.
The consequence, of course, is that human
hunters were able to slaughter these large
animals in such quantities as to eliminate
them entirely.
So while the forests and the plains of North
America once had horses, and just a variety
of large mammals, these were wiped out by
the humans who had migrated from Siberia across
the Bering land bridge into North America.
Crosby goes on – He says, the mastodon had
been wiped out five or six thousand years
ago in the same revolution that had killed
off the mammoth – again, human hunters destroying
these species.
The American mastodon vanished about thirteen-thousand
years BCE – that is, the Pleistocene extinctions.
Its demise, the mastodon’s demise, was part
of a wave of disappearances that have come
to be known as the Pleistocene megafauna extinction
– again, Pleistocene referring to the last
Ice Age; mega, large; fauna, animal; large
animal extinction.
Were the Australian extinction an isolated
event, maybe it’s just chance, maybe there
were other factors involved, but when you
bring all these different examples together
it begins to look as though Homo sapiens is
a sort of ecological serial killer.
As he inhabits new lands, he wipes out the
large animals that live there for their food;
their fat; the bones; the fur for clothing.
Crosby goes on – He says, within two thousand
years of the appearance of Homo sapiens, most
of these large unique species were gone.
According to current estimates, within that
short interval North America lost thirty four
out of its forty seven species of large mammals;
South America lost fifty out of sixty.
So when humanity shows up on the scene, it
can be a very dangerous thing indeed for other
creatures.
Now the second of the books that I want to
sort of briefly provide you with the arguments
that they make is Jared Diamond’s very popular
book – Guns, Germs, and Steel – The Fates
of Human Societies.
The argument here is essentially that Europeans
had distinct advantages in spreading their
little Europes around the world.
Diamond begins by saying the basic question
to be answered is – why did Europeans reach
and conquer the lands of the Native Americans
and not vice versa?
Our starting point will be the comparison
of Eurasian and native America societies as
of 1492.
Diamond goes on to say that the largest population
replacement of the last thirteen-thousand
years has been the one resulting from the
recent collision of the Old World with the
New World, as a result of Columbus.
He says, in Eurasia varieties of domesticated
animals had existed for millennia, providing
food; clothing; tools; labor energy, and of
course, in the Western Hemisphere, in the
New World all the large animals had been wiped
out.
Of course, in the Old World, animals, these
large animals had also been associated with
man long enough that they knew the danger
that accompanied man.
So this is an enormous set of differences
between the Old World and the New World.
The Old World will send its explorers, the
Europeans, out into the New World, and they
will have these advantages that they’ll
take with them.
Diamond repeats part of Crosby’s argument
here, talking about the Pleistocene extinction
events, and he makes the point that if it
had not been for these extinctions, that the
course of world history might have been dramatically
different, that the peoples of the New World
might have had much greater wealth and technology,
and might indeed have explored the Old World
instead of the way it actually turned out.
Diamond goes on to say that in the Americas
there were two empires – the Aztecs and
the Incas, which resembled their Eurasian
counterparts in size; population; diversity;
religions; and origins in the conquest of
smaller states.
He said that in the Americas these were the
only two political unities capable of mobilizing
the resources for public works or war on a
scale practiced in Europe.
Diamond says that there are seven European
states capable of this – Spain, Portugal,
England, France, Holland, Sweden, and Denmark
– that these all had the resources to acquire
American colonies between the time of Columbus
and 1666.
He said that in the Americas there are many
chieftains, but these tended to be much smaller
states.
He said the rest of the Americas were organized
only at the tribal, or at a much smaller level.
And Diamond goes on to say that another factor
in European success is literacy, the ability
to write.
He says that most Eurasian states had literate
bureaucracies, including the church, and in
some significant fraction of the population
of these European societies, were also literate.
He says that writing empowered European societies
by facilitating political administration,
economic exchanges.
Writing also motivated explorers and helped
guide exploration and conquest.
Diamond goes on to say that European societies
enjoyed big advantages over Native American
societies in food production; in deadly pathogens;
in technology, including weapons made of steel;
in political organization; and literacy.
And then finally, Diamond says that there’s
another factor here that may account for European
advantages.
He says that European, or that the Eurasian
continent is laid out east to west, unlike
the American continents which run generally
north to south.
He says this permitted diffusion without change
in latitude in associated environmental variables.
In other words, both plants and animals could
migrate east and west across this vast Eurasian
continent and remain in similar climate zones.
In the New World you move north to south,
and you move through dramatically different
climate zones which impede the migration of
both plants and animals.
So that’s Crosby’s and Diamond’s arguments.
I’ll come back in the last section and we’ll
talk about the argument made by Yuval Harari.
Thank you.
