Guns, Germs and Steel: A Historical Critique | BadEmpanada

A critique of chapter 3 of Jared Diamond's book. Alternate title: 'The battle that never happened'

Sources:
[1] Key Concepts in Political Geography, Carolyn Gallaher & others
[2] The Inca civil war and the establishment of Spanish power in Peru, John H. Rowe
[3] The Conquest of the Incas, John Hemming
[4] Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest, Matthew Restall
[5] Using Digital Tools to Construct a Spatial History of Conquest, Jeremy M. Mikecz
[6] A Peruvian Chief of State: Manco Inca (1515-1545), George Kubler
[7] The Last Days Of The Incas, Kim MacQuarrie

Some further critiques, I can't provide links to all of em' but they're easy to find on Google (not an exhaustive list):
Environmentalism and Eurocentrism, James M. Blaut
Questioning Collapse, Patricia A. McAnany
Reexamining the Lore of the “Archetypal Conquistador”: Hernán Cortés and the Spanish Conquest of the Aztec Empire, 1519-1521, Thomas Brinkerhoff
Reducing the Future to Climate: A Story of Climate Determinism and Reductionism, Mike Hulme
Marketing conquest and the vanishing Indian: An Indigenous response to Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, Michael Wilcox
A Human Geographer's Response to Guns, Germs, and Steel : The Case of Agrarian Development and Change in Madagascar, Lucy Jarosz

#History #Diamond #Jared

[Agos]

The 186 troops defeating 80, 000 incans without a single casualty was literally taught to me in grade school in the US. Thank you for educating me otherwise

[zacky]

Hey, no camera footage? That's not fair, how are we supposed to comment on the current length of your beard?

[sonwig]

It's always so annoying when people talk about the fall of the Aztecs as if their absolutely dominant super empire were completely defeated by 100 Spanish with super duper guns.

[juliemorrow]

This was the first "proper" academic book I read in full and did my first big history essay back in high school. Now I'm in doing history honours at uni and look forward to finishing this video and being able to look at it with the knowledge I've got now, once I finish these pesky assignments. I think I'll track down my old essay to laugh at my ignorance.

[luddlowvertakaclydecowley]

Great video! My only critique is the distinct lack of Maduro munching an empanada. I love that sound.

[lasschesteven]

As an ecologist with an interest in premodern history, so as someone with almost the exact same qualifications to talk on this subject as the ornitologist Diamond, my overall take is this:
There are many different factors that influence the history and development of entire societies, including the natural environment they inhabit. One might even be able to identify the general patterns that certain factors tend to lead to. But in the end, all of these factors and patterns interact in different complex and unpredictable ways, so the idea of completely explaining a society's history and development, let alone all of world history, is nothing but foolish hubris.
Now that I think about it, you'd need to replace about 10% of the words in that to get my take on ecosystems.

[normtrooper]

If I recall correctly, many of the conquistadors traded their steel armour for quilted armour because steel armour is not all that practical in the jungle/tropical terrain they were fighting in.

[madiganskipper]

Had to read this for AP World History and agh, thanks 4 debunking

[stopefinaround]

You've gone full Shaun in this video and I love it

[MrLorbu]

I studied history to a Master's level in the Goethe University in Frankfurt, Germany. First let me say, great video, thank you :)

Western history has a whole number of traps that bad historians love to fall into. They are usually based on two premises: first the idea of progress, that history and human development has a clear linear trajectory and that thus Europe and its descendants are the pinnacle of humanity and their societies are the best possible. This implies that history had to go this certain way, because since "we" are at the top it bascially had to be destiny or unavoidable due to arbitrary reasons. To justify that, narratives need to be created and reproduced. And so its not surprising that for those people the rise of European Hegemony after the MIddle Ages has to have cultural, geographical or at worst racist or at least amusing divine reasons.
Completely forgetting what happened to the two big empires of the middle ages which controlled most of the world trade when they suddenly and violently dissapeared and what effect this had.
(Sidenote: Also depicting the ancient Greek as strangely northern European in appearance^^ as well as completely ignoring that "European culture", if you really need to use such meaningless terminology, was not ancient Greece but the Celtic, Germanic and all other people who lived north and west of Greece and central Italy, which were highly influenced and in the tradition of Western Asia, Phoenicians and the various other Semite peoples that settled the mediterrenean - Lets also not forget how the very first example of racism in the modern sense we have in world history is from Sparta and wouldnt really reappear until the 16th century, almost two thousand years later...)
Secondly the ideology of Enlightenment and of the Protestant-Bourgouis class themselves. This would take quite a few paragraphs to explain and I will be happy to do so if anyone wants to read it, just tell me :)
But if you want to look for yourself you can start with the Dialectics if Enlightenment by Horkheimer & Adorno, which very well explains the flaw in western ideological tradition from a very safe position.
(Last Sidenote: We have to thank Karl Marx for the whole concept of taking a critical view of history and what that entails, sadly though Marx himself believed in the progress idea, which shows how we all are products of our times and societies, even people smarter than me^^)

[ANTSEMUT]

The Incan monarchy isn't as deified as Diamond is making it out to be, with the priestly nobility having far more authority than the emperor, as the priestly Nobility were the ones task with communicating the earthly wishes of ancestors including their taking care of earthly possessions when said ancestors were "alive".

Each emperor when they were alive had to prove their worth through effective administration and logistical management, along with appeasing said nobility. Conquest of surrounding areas was also how incan monarchs gain earthly status/power. They also would consolidate this by expanding public infrastructure in these new areas.

They also had an interesting "civil service" concept going on.

[antivaushistscheaktion]

all right, finally a new bad emo panda video.

[burnedbread]

Weird to think it's only been 2 years. This was your first video i found, and is something i occasionally suggest my friends to watch. Very informative, straight to the point, well sourced through ans through.

You are a great comrade, a person driven by truth and a sense of justice. Keep up the great work, i'm sure it's been a wild few years for you as well

[charlotteblossom]

Firet off, i loved this video. Excellent work. Second, I have a critique of Diamond's work of my own:

For someone doing research based on a military conflict, the man knows excruciatingly little about weapons, armor, and military tactics.

First off, I have a nitpick. Diamond claims that no infantry has ever been able to fight off cavalry in the open. I know little of Incan fighting tactics, but this is blatantly untrue. A unit of spearmen with long spears, if able to maintain formation, is absolutely able to hold its own against a cavalry charge. Cavalry are effective, absolutely, but there's a large number of polearms in history designed to counter them, and they worked.

Second, Diamond attributes an almost magical quality to steel. Steel armor is good, make no mistake, but Incans, as I understand, used a large number of stone and wooden clubs. There are accounts of knights in full plate being concussed by blunt impact, even from the humble quarterstaff. A solid stone club, swung with any amount of skill, which we must assume Incan fighters had, could be potentially devastating.

[hedgehog]

I think the problem with all deterministic theories like this is that they just end up being post hoc explanations, not proper explanatory theories. They look at the world in it's current state and then view history as the events leading to it's creation and treat the current state of the world as the final result. They seek to explain why the world is like what it is today but the fallacy in doing that is assuming that our current world is some sort of end state of history and not just one of many historical situations that have existed. That's why they start reaching back thousands or even millions of years to find an explanation because it is assumed that surely everything led to our world. The problem is of course that while our current world is one that is dominated by the west and has been so for a few centuries there is no reason why this can't change. And we can actually see this happening right now, we can see how new powers like China and India are starting to rise to dominance in our world while former colonial subjects like Brazil, Nigeria, South Africa etc. are starting to rise to become dominant regional powers. More now than ever it really does look like the west is starting to lose it's spot as sole ruler of the entire world as the traditional powers of France, Germany, Britain, Russia and Austria have lost their great power status and it clear that the reigning super power of the US is starting to be contested. Obviously the west is still engaged in plenty of imperialism and this is not to try to downplay that but rather to point out that the power of the west is fading compared to where it was just a century ago.

A lot of these deterministic theories clearly draw a lot of their philosophy from physics in assuming that you can explain an outcome through deterministic processes in the past but the problem is that they aren't actually doing the equivalent of proposing a physics theory but for history. In their mind history and in fact geology and paleontology can be viewed as one big experiment where the outcome is the present day. But if you did that in physics you'd be proposing a post hoc explanation, which is not acceptable as real science because in order to be science it needs to be able to make predictions. It's carrying out an experiment and then after the fact stating a hypothesis that explains why it happened, but of course in science the point is to carry out an experiment to see whether your hypothesis can predict the result. And that's where these theories obviously fall flat because while they can point to history and say "see the west ended up dominating" history is not an experiment that is over and as I pointed out it is becoming more and more obvious that the west is losing grip on world dominance. And none of these theories have or ever could predict that, none of them were ever made to actually learn about history function and therefor be able to predict the course of it, they were just intended to explain (but really justify) western dominance over the world.
And of course how could you ever begin to predict history, unlike the "harder" sciences you can't adjust for certain variables in history and you can't really carry out experiments and that's why historians have generally stayed away from trying to make theories about history. It's just so easy to fall into the trap of only explaining the current state of the world and not creating a proper theory. That doesn't mean that there aren't people who have tried and they have based their methodology on much more rigorous study than just random anecdotes about battles the Spanish didn't actually fight or a single ruler that died of a disease. Not to go full Marxist here but Marx does actually deserve attention for being one of the first to create a theory of history based on quantifiable data and there's a reason why theories like Long Cycle Theory which is based on the work of Marxists actually has some predictive capability (mainly predicting the decline of the US as a super power). Of course even then these theories are only able to make fairly vague predictions, Marx couldn't predict when Capitalism would collapse he just fairly effectively predicted how it would develop and long cycle theory also can't predict who will take the spot as the leading super power way from the US. But that's just the limits you have to accept if you want to try to actually be scientific about this. Science regardless of how good it is will never be an oracle that can perfectly predict everything and that's a limit that might be infuriating but one which we have to accept.

TL;DR: Deterministic theories of history all fail because they make the fallacious assumption that our current world is the end point of history and not just one point in a never ending history. Therefor they just "explain" why the west dominates but fail to understand that the west will not always be the hegemon of the world and that even now we can obviously see this changing.

[batskink]

This book was my bible for years, i finally re-read it recently and was surprised to say the least at what i had been spouting for years

[GiubileiFernando]

Finally you grabbed the shovel and made a new video.

[rainbowraver]

oh my god I had to watch the guns germs and steel films in school and im pretty sure its taught in most US public schools lmao

[ANTSEMUT]

Also Diamond is also under playing how competent General Quizu was, he managed to harry the Spaniard for a while. The charge of Lima wasn't Quizu idea and was forced to participate in it by his superiors, he wanted to continue harry the Spaniard with guerrilla tactics.

[percytheclown]

Great video not only for the specific critique it does of Diamond's book, but for generally showing why popular books about serious academic subjects aren't a replacement for rigorous academic research and study.