Rediff on the NeT: Why the West was won

Why the West was won

Why did Europeans conquer peoples of the third world and not the other way around?

Most modern history -- at least as taught by Europeans -- suggests that Europeans were inherently superior. This attitude was evident in the popularity in the West of the 1994 bestseller, The Bell Curve, which suggested African-American students did worse on intelligence tests because of inferior genes.

Dr Jared Diamond of the School of Medicine, University of California, disagrees. With experience in physiology, evolutionary biology and biogeography, contends that the answer to the question has nothing with human genes. The answer lies with the environment, especially biodiversity, he says.

In a new book, Guns, Germs, and Steel: the Fates of Human Societies, Diamond argues that continental differences between Eurasia on the one hand, and the Americas, Africa, and Australasia on the other, determined the course of history.

The immediate causes for Europe's subjugation of many third world societies was its advanced technology, especially in shipping and armaments. But it also exported germs that are estimated to have wiped out 95 per cent of the original inhabitants of the Americas within 100 years. European germs similarly decimated populations in the South Pacific and Southern Africa.

Diamond explains Europe’s ascendancy, going back 13,000 years to the end of the Stone Age, when all human societies were hunter-gatherers. It is from that moment that Eurasia began its long, slow climb to global conquest. Europe then had the most wild plant and animal species that could be domesticated. Thirty-nine species of large-seeded grass species, ancestors to today’s most common foodgrains, grew wild in Eurasia. That is more than seven times the number of similar species in the major climatic zones of the Americas, Australia and sub-Saharan Africa.

Higher food production led to more sophisticated political structures, standing armies, and technological development that freed inventors from the burdens of hunting and gathering. Also domesticable ancestors of sheep, pigs, dogs, cows and cattle roamed over Eurasia. South America had only llamas and alpacas, while Africa and Australia, had no large mammals capable of domestication 13,000 years ago. Camels and elephants were less quick and less manageable than horses.

Farmers and herders of Eurasia also had the advantage that climates were similar across the continent's primarily east-west geographical orientation. So technology apt in one area could quickly spread to another without much modification. That also applied to later technologies like writing, Agriculture and livestock too would find similar breeding grounds more easily, says Diamond.

With their predominantly north-south axes, the extreme climates and natural barriers of the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa slowed the spread of agriculture and technology. For instance, despite the short distance between the Andes and Mexico, the llamas, used as pack animals by the Incas, found the Central American lowlands too hot. Confronted by the Sahara desert and the tsetse fly, herders could not move horses and other livestock in north Africa southwards.

Not only did sheep, goats, and cows constitute a ready source of food, but draft animals like horses and oxen, yielded huge increases in crop production once tethered to plows. Consequently, populations became more sedentary and concentrated in villages, towns, and cities. Societies became more hierarchical, and occupations like blacksmithy and war-making became more specialised.

Domestication of big mammals, and the proximity in which people lived also helped increase infection. ''The major killers of humanity throughout our recent history -- smallpox, flu, tuberculosis, malaria, plague, measles, and cholera -- are infectious diseases that evolved from diseases of animals,'' notes Diamond. ''Because diseases have been the biggest killers of people, they have also been decisive shapers of history.''

The Eurasians slowly built immunity to these germs but the non-immune hunter-gatherers or farmers they met later died in droves.

"Any historian between 8500 BC and AD 1450, notes Diamond, ''would surely have labelled Europe's eventual dominance as the least likely outcome,'' given its technological backwardness compared to China's or the fertile crescent's during most of that period. But, according to Diamond, the fertile crescent lost out because of ''ecological suicide'' committed by its inhabitants over several millennia of deforestation, overgrazing, and irrigation agriculture that destroyed the soil's fertility.

China's ''geographic connectedness'', with its coastline smoother than Europe’s, proved a mixed blessing, he says. While political unity was achieved early and technology spread faster, legislation against any technology -- as China passed against mechanical devices and ocean-going navigation in the 1400s – would be enforced more easily. As a result, a Chinese Christopher Columbus had no recourse if he wanted to establish a sea-link between China and Europe.

By contrast, the actual Columbus had to travel all over a Europe fragmented by jagged coastlines and internal geographic barriers, before he persuaded Ferdinand and Isabella of Spain to finance the voyage that launched the European conquest.

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