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Message-ID: <3C1325D8.6FFE40A6@temple.edu>
Date: Sun, 09 Dec 2001 03:50:33 -0500
From: Dan Tompkins <pericles@temple.edu>
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To: classics@u.washington.edu
Subject: Re: "Providence," Rhode(s) Island, & Mexico
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There is an interesting review of recent studies of the Rise of the West
in American Historical Review by Gale Stokes of Rice U:

The Fates of Human Societies: A Review of Recent Macrohistories

AHR 106.2 (2001) 508-525

http://www.historycooperative.org/cgi-bin/justtop.cgi?act=justtop&url=http://www.historycoop.org/journals/ahr//106.2/ah000508.html

--an excerpt only, with instructions on how to get the full item; 

published in a different version in Lingua Franca Nov. 2001:

http://www.linguafranca.com/print/0111/cover.html
___

Stokes reviews recent work by Andre Gunder Frank, David Landes, Kenneth
Pomeranz and other world historians, a lot of them economic historians. 
China plays a major role in many of the studies. So does energy (coal)
and "geographic good luck" -- the proximity of goal and iron ore
deposits.  Colonial slavery (which helped the British to "escape an
approaching Malthusian trap" in which available land fails to support
population, trading land-based products [sugar, cotton] for manufactured
goods that required little land]) figures in Pomeranz' argument.  

The dating of the "takeoff" of Europe varies in these studies, some
placing it as late as the 1800s (coal), others earlier.  Stokes remarks
that many of these studies are characterized by their "overkill" of
opposing theories.  

Dan

"R. J. Rowland, Jr." wrote:
> 
> For an alternative (and for this writer more sensible) viewpoint, see Guns, Germs,
> and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies -- by Jared Diamond; Paperback Amazon's
> Price: $12.76  -- Or buy
>                                      used from $11.48.
> Bob Rowland
> 
> >A lively and critical discussion of the role of disease (smallpox, etc.)
> >in the European conquest of the New World is found in Victor Davis Hanson,
.