As recommended (yes you), I ordered this book, which arrived on Friday and I have now finished reading. It's all very interesting, or least useful background info, and for a modest £6 or something at Amazon the sort of book which everybody ought to have read.
It does make me wonder what possessed people from south east Asia (via New Guinea) to island hop all the way as far as Hawaii in little canoes, presumably by trial and error without even knowing whether there was a destination, let alone in which direction it might be. For every single person who made it to Hawaii, how many just ran out of food/water at some random place in the Pacific? A hundred? A thousand? Ten thousand? According to the book populating "virtually every habitable scrap of land in the Pacific" only took about two thousand years from start to finish
And in the epilogue, he says what I have always said: that history is a science like anything else, in that if you look at the grander sweep of things you can recognise definite patterns; and if you can recognise patterns you can predict future events. (Isn't that what economists do all the time? The problem being that economists are on the whole so stupid (or corrupt) that they can't recognise what's going right now, e.g. few of them called the land price or credit bubbles).
Isaac Asimov referred to this as 'psychohistory' in the Foundation Trilogy - ignore the later additions, they were crap. When I read the original trilogy, I assumed that The Foundation was an allegory for Japan (very developed scientifically, but on a distant planet with very few raw materials so that the tides of history would force them to become a successful and hence powerful trading planet), only it turned out that the books were written in the early 1950s, long before Gen Douglas MacArthur's Georgist reforms had turned Japan into the success it was for a few decades (until they turned their back on Georgism again, of course).
Sunday, 16 January 2011
Guns, Germs and Steel (2)
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
22 comments:
The prevailing winds and currents in the central Pacific run westwards, so Polynesian explorers could set out looking for land to the east and still run for home if they had found nothing once half their stores were exhausted. Not to say it was a very brave endeavour, but it wasn't a complete "death or glory" exercise.
C, according to Wiki the first settlers were from Tahiti, which is 2,724 miles away.
How far can you go in a day in one of those little canoes, purely on spec, how many days or weeks' of food (plus grain and livestock to kick start you on the new island) can you fit in a canoe? You could miss an island by ten or twenty miles and never know it was there, so how many outings from Tahiti would it take before there was a landing? And how did they get back to Tahiti to tell the others to follow them (you need men and women to get a new society going)?
It sounds very hit and miss to me.
I am very pleased that someone else likes Asimov. But 'the Foundation Trilogy' is not very 'Austrian'. (Hitchhikers Guide is better for that).
Nevertheless I highly recommend a pair of short stories of Asimov's, 'Marooned of Vesta (1939), and 'Anniversary (1959)'.
Why do I recommend these two? In 'Anniversary' he predicts the internet and Google (sort of).
Captain Bligh went 4,000 miles westwards to safety after being dropped off the Bounty in an open boat but he was supposed to have been the best navigator around at the time.The Kon Tiki expedition set sail westwards to prove the Pacific was colonised by people from S, America.They managed a shorter distance than Bligh but, shocking though this is to people of my generation, Thor Heyedahl's whole western-migration-into-the Pacific theory now appears to be cobblers.People got across the Atlantic by hopping, not from island to island, but from ice-floe to ice floe apparently .So anything's possible.You can fish as you go along ,of course.
L, I'll read them if I stumble across them.
DBC, I'd forgotten about Thor. But he had maps and stuff and knew where he was heading. I think you made up the ice floes, and anyway, we were talking about the Pacific not the Atlantic.
DBCR 'Hopping from ice floe to ice floe' Wot? That is a wonderfully comic mental image.
@Lola & MW
Hopping in the same sense as island hopping: they had boats .They were called the Solutrians and came from S.W France.So America was first colonised by early gite owners I expect.(Not sure I believe this theory myself but it goes to show you don't have to know where you're going when setting out.)
Columbus's exploration is a case in point ( I know its the Atlantic: please try and see the problem with a bit of breadth .) Do you think Columbus just set out westwards into a void? Or do you think he had heard sailors' tales of islands out in the Atlantic beyond the Canaries?Some people say he had a map of the Western Atlantic.Same with the Pacific exploration: vague tales of islands to the east;people set sail;somebody makes landfall and gets back.
( I think this discussion shows that history is not the predictive science that MW rather hopes. I speak as the holder of the St Albans Grammar School prize for History, I would have you know.)
Wot you need to read, young Mark, is Irwin's "The Prehistoric Exploration and Colonisation of the Pacific". A super read.
Nark afaik they didn't just head into the open sea and hope they happened upon an island. You can tell by things like the direction birds head in or cloud formations where the islands are.
GG&S is an excellent book as is Diamond's earlier work "The Third Chimpanzee".
DBC: "Do you think Columbus just set out westwards into a void?"
CC was much, much later, he knew perfectly well that the world was round and that if he sailed long enough, he'd get to India or somewhere, he had big boats with enough food and water to keep him for months and months. That's not quite the same as SE Asians jumping into little canoes with a hanky for a sail and hoping for the best.
D, thanks for tip. I'll have a look.
R, if this island hopping were so easy, how come the Hawaiins seem to have stopped doing it? According to that Wiki summary and the book I read, there was a lot of to-ing but very little fro-ing, and after 1200 AD the Hawaiins lost their navigational skills.
I didn't say it was easy. Maybe they stopped because an island group might be worth travelling far to colonise but not worth travelling the same distance for regular trade.
R, fair enough. I suppose to answer my own question, the people on Hawaii probably did start off by sending off a few boats every year (that having been tradition for the past thousand years or two), but after a few centuries in which none of them returned bearing joyous news of yet more islands further north or west, they packed it in and the island hopping skills withered away.
Hawaii is a large and fertile group of islands so the settlers never experienced the population pressures that had led people to leave other islands in search of new land.
It should also be pointed out that the Polynesians did not set out to sea in "little canoes with a hanky for a sail" - they used big canoes which could carry a supply of crops and livestock.
Voyages of settlement were often made to islands that had already been discovered by fishermen.
In 1993 there was a BBC series about Polynesia called "Nomads of the Wind", and I still have the accompanying book which explains a lot of this.
C: "Hawaii is a large and fertile group of islands so the settlers never experienced the population pressures..."
The book explains that Hawaii very much did; it developed the usual state/kleptocracy/land ownership/peasant-slave class pattern as anywhere else. I think the point is that H is the end of the line - starting from New Guinea, you can't get any further (unless you make twice the hop all the way to North America).
As to 'hankies for sails' OK, I was just saying that in contrast to Christopher Columbus et al.
The accounts above downplay the element of .The people may have travelled vast distances to get away from nogoodniks who may even have given chase .Andrea Bianco's world Map (published pre-Columbus) shows an island in the Atlantic called Antilia which was supposed to have been where refugees from religious persecution in Iberia fled.Some quite respectable commentators speculate that it may have been ,in fact, Cuba.
These geezers maybe were n't travelling out of idle curiosity.
DBC, you downplay "the element of." to such a degree that you don't even say what it is!
Coercion.What is going on?
This controversy has certainly settled the issue that intrigued me:did Columbus have a map?
He did n't need a secret one as I assumed ;he could have used the standard-ish 1489 Martellus map which clearly shows South America but attached to Asia in the East.This shows all the major rivers. So somebody had been to S. America and mapped it before Columbus.
Not much relevance to the Pacific exploration question,of course.But there you go.I'd say more interesting.
A few words of caution about Jared Diamond. I enjoyed the book enormously when I first read it but later on reflected that it was too elegant and simplistic. We have to beware of reductionism.
The follow on book was called "Collapse" and here Diamond's political ideas come into the open
Here's an essay where he writes about the society in Easter Island. Diamond would have us believe that the principle agent of collapse was the over exploitation of the environment. If true, this has an obvious message for modern society.
In fact, we know that the collapse of Polynesian culture in Easter Island was caused by disease, enslavement and colonisation, but the question arises as to why such an elitist (and frankly racist) view of Polynesian culture has become received wisdom. Do a Googe search for "Jared Diamond" "Easter Island" and see if you can find a critical article in the first few hundred entries.
TCK, of course it's a simplification. H cheerfully admits that on average each page covers the history of one continent for 150 years. The whole point of the book/TV programme is that history/colonialisation etc is largely driven by physical environment and not by racial differences. And he does constantly point out that the lack of 'large mammals' in the Americas may well be down to early humans eating them all.
Two factors which might have an impact upon development:
1. Environment
2. Culture (Race is distinct from culture)
Jared is explicit in rejecting 2 in favour of 1. In the modern world, the idea that Islam has declined (relatively) due to its culture is a thought crime; as is the idea that the Western enlightenment was a engine of progress. Jared's ideas chime well with today's intelligentsia. Humans are not agents of their own destiny, merely pawns of forces beyond their control.
On the question of simplification, did you read Benny Peiser's essay? The question of Diamond's wilful selectivity connot be in dispute and this is what I had in mind.
TDK, I read the book last weekend and although I agree he says that 1) Environment is the main factor, he also says that this definitely impacts on 2) (i.e. whether people become civilised farmers or primitive hunter-gatherers)
AND he also says quite clearly that e.g. China and Islamic countries fell behind (having been relatively advanced) because their 'culture' stifled innovation from about AD 1400 onwards (give or take a century). His book is neither racist nor unduly PC.
Yes of course Jared is selective, it's a 442 page book covering 13,000 years of history.
Don't misunderstand me. I enjoyed the book. I thought you would be interested in some different perspectives.
Post a Comment