Why Did the Europeans Win?

My last post, “Land Grants or Land Grabs,” revealed that most federal land that started land-grant universities had been taken from Indians. I  received some constructive pushback. (See the comments.) But that feedback reminded me of a question, Why did the Europeans invade the New World in the first place and conquer Native Americans, rather than Native Americans invading Europe and conquering Europeans?

The phrasing of this question will alert some readers to the subject of this post, the powerful 1997 book by Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel.[1]

Diamond’s book travels through time (back to the origins of humans) and space (all continents except Antarctica) to answer that question—to determine why some societies became so powerful, with such technology, that they could cross an ocean and conquer millions of people. The European/Native American conflict is the most obvious example, but history has many examples of more powerful groups overcoming less powerful groups.

One of Diamond’s goals is to get away from claims of European genetic superiority. Diamond himself summarizes his book this way: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among people’s environment, not because of biological differences among peoples themselves.” [2]

Those environmental differences go back thousands, even tens of thousands, of years. So here is a brief summary of some of the forces that Diamond says led to the make-up of the world today.

The Axis Problem

To begin, the east-west axis of Eurasia (which he considers as just one continent) spurred trade and movement. “Eurasia provides the world’s widest band of land at the same latitude,”  he explains.[3] The fact that a person (or group) could travel across the continent at the same latitude, and thus the same climate, meant that people could easily pick up new habits, new crops, new technology, and others’ culture.

Not so in the New World., which has a north-south axis. That is, the widest span east-west is 3,000 miles, but 9,000 miles north and south. To spread crops, clothing, and technology throughout the Americas, one must cross many latitudes. That means many different climates as one goes north or south.

Evidence of the problems of this spread is that in the New World certain wild crops were initially domesticated in several different places, at several different times. In contrast, in Eurasia once a wild plant was domesticated, the knowledge was easily picked up and tried by travelers across the Eurasian expanse. But in the New World such efficient transfer was limited. Domesticating the same plant de novo lengthened the process of moving toward agriculture.

The east-west axis also meant that inventions like writing in one part of Eurasia (such as Sumer) could be transferred and adapted in other parts of the continent. Diamond says that writing, a very difficult human challenge, was invented in only two places for sure, Sumer and southern Mexico, and two that are not as sure—China and Egypt. But the writing that was invented in Mexico did not spread throughout the continent, as writing did in Eurasia.

Another problem for the New World was that it had very few large animals that could be domesticated. In contrast to the sheep, cattle, pigs, oxen, and horses that were prevalent in Eurasia, the New World had only turkeys, guinea pigs, llamas, alpacas, and dogs. There simply wasn’t much to work with. (Once Native Americans obtained horses and guns, they became formidable adversaries.)

The Arrival of Farming

Agriculture—herding, at least, but especially crop cultivation—may have been the most important event in human history. It was also a long process—hunter-gatherers had to become farmers. (The biblical story of Cain and Abel figuratively illustrates the triumph of crop cultivation over herding.)

Farming developed piecemeal. For example, hunter-gathering families developed flint blades, baskets to carry grains, grain roasting, and storage pits—all for wild crops. These tools were “prerequisites to the planting of cereals as crops,” he says. [4]

Once food production occurred, life changed dramatically. Population rose, as the calories per cultivated acre were much greater than those that hunter-gatherers could obtain. Hunter-gatherers adopted agriculture or were wiped out by the more populous and stronger farming societies. The few places where hunter-gatherers still live in modern times are areas unsuited to agriculture.

Farming spawned specialization of labor, which vastly increased the society’s productivity. And the increase of population opened the door to larger, amalgamated societies. Diamond presents a procession of ways people lived,  starting with small bands, then tribes, then chiefdoms, and, finally, the state— ever larger groups.

But large groups (beyond the family or small band) led to conflict among members. At the smallest size, a band would have solidarity and only kill those outside the band, if they happened to challenge someone in the band. But with multiple families and multiple clans, that changed.

Bands, Tribes, Chiefdoms, and States

“With the rise of chiefdoms around 7,500 years ago, “ writes Diamond, “people had to learn, for the first time in history, how to encounter strangers regularly without attempting to kill them.” This led the chief to “exercise a monopoly on the right to use force.” [4]

After the chiefdom came the state, with its pharaoh, king, or emperor, and army, bureaucracy, and laws. This centralization enabled economic interaction, greater specialization, and more productivity, including more efficient warfare. Thus, guns and steel (for swords).

Now, I’ve shared the big themes, except for germs. As we know, the Old World, but not the new, had thousands of years of contact with domesticated animals—cattle, sheep, goats, etc. Europeans’ proximity to farm animals meant that they gradually became immune to devastating animal-based diseases, such as smallpox, measles, and others.

Without  intending to, Europeans brought their diseases to the New World. The impact was almost immediate. Millions of Indians were wiped out by the disease, many of them well before Jamestown or Plymouth was settled. Many more Native Americans were killed by disease than by armaments.

In sum, Jared Diamond gives reasons to understand why Europeans overcame Native Americans. That impact remains tragic, but we can begin to understand it.

The image above shows Francisco García de Holguín capturing  Cuauhtémoc, the last Aztec emperor  (1519-1521). This 18th-century painting on copper is in the public domain and available on Wikipedia.

Notes (Comments follow the notes)

[1] Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: W. W.  Norton & Co., 1997).

[2] Diamond, 25.

[3] Diamond, 187.

[34 Diamond, 111.

[5] Diamond, 273.