[HN Gopher] The Best Books on the Great Divergence
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The Best Books on the Great Divergence
Author : drdee
Score : 71 points
Date : 2022-08-26 14:04 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (fivebooks.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (fivebooks.com)
| newobj wrote:
| Recommend The Silk Roads by Peter Frankopan for a less western
| centric view of the east and west's intermingled histories
| tolciho wrote:
| And here I was expecting the divergence to be something about
| Gondwanaland.
| miki_tyler wrote:
| Tangentially related, but I find "Why Nations Fail: The Origins
| of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty" (Acemoglu & Robinson, 2012)
| takes a very interesting angle.
|
| According to the book, a decisive role for the development is
| played by political and economic institutions being "extractive"
| (slavery, serfdom, and encomienda systems) or "inclusive"
| (universal protection of property rights, not just for the
| elite).
| [deleted]
| paganel wrote:
| I heartily recommend Pomeranz's book, it steers clear of the
| quasi-triumphalist "the West was destined to win it" discourse,
| quite the contrary, and because of that it is all the better for
| it.
| deepdriver wrote:
| From the link, it sounds like recent study has pushed back on
| Pomeranz's thesis of "coal and colonies":
|
| >So is Pomeranz's book, his theory about the Great Divergence,
| now the received wisdom?
|
| >It's the received wisdom among some historians. However, I
| would say that the empirical evidence has moved against it in
| the last 20 years.
|
| >It turns out that in England silver wages were three times
| those in the Yangtze delta and five times those in India
| already by 1600. So the latest you can probably put the Great
| Divergence is 1700, which means that Pomeranz's story about it
| being all about colonial windfalls and British coal use is
| probably misguided.
|
| >One historian, Deirdre McCloskey, has pointed out that if coal
| was so important, Chinese industries could just have moved
| closer to coal because they have tons of it.
| paganel wrote:
| What I got out of Poneranz's book is that China started
| stagnating once it got out of wood to use, around the early
| 1700s if I remember rightly, I can't remember that much of a
| discussion about England and about its coal deposits, hence
| why I particularly liked it (there are countless other books
| written by Western writers about England and its industrial
| revolution).
| towaway15463 wrote:
| The question then should be why did they not switch to coal
| after wood became scarce. England was also rapidly running
| out of wood to use as fuel before they adopted coal as a
| source of heat.
| yorwba wrote:
| Coal deposits are mostly in sparsely-populated areas.
| https://www.researchgate.net/figure/The-geographic-
| distribut...
|
| People in the coal-rich, tree-poor northern steppe did
| mine coal, but getting it to densely-populated areas
| would've been expensive.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| Colonialism succeeded for several centuries largely because the
| invading powers had better weapons than the defending nations.
| The nations that most rapidly adopted the technologies of the
| colonial powers (ex: Japan) suffered the least from the
| deprivations of colonialism.
|
| As far as why technological development boomed in Europe, that's
| not really a story of political ideology, sociocultural norms, or
| anything like that. For example, the invention of the blast
| furnance by German ironworkers c. 1300, was probably a key event.
| Add in the importation of gunpowder from China, and you had the
| world's most powerful weapons, such as ship-borne cannons.
|
| A lot of history is just blind chance, as well. Manifest destiny
| claims about the inevitability of history and superior
| civilizational strategy aren't very interesting, other than as
| social propaganda aimed at justifying more expansionist warfare.
| rufus_foreman wrote:
| >> Add in the importation of gunpowder from China
|
| But why wasn't China able to take advantage of gunpowder? They
| invented it. They had the worlds most powerful navy at a point
| in time that they also had the advantage of gunpowder.
|
| But Europe ended up with all the power. How did that happen?
| UmbertoNoEco wrote:
| 'but the 'West' was moving ahead of the 'rest' at least by the
| beginning of the 18th century, and the gulf between them has
| continued to widen ever since.'
|
| this is not true
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| If the answer doesn't basically translate to "luck" then I'm very
| suspicious of it.
|
| Similar to evolutionary psychology, it's very easy to come up
| with just so stories to flatter your biases.
|
| Similarly, anything that suggests it's the "one neat trick" is
| dubious because we know things are so incredibly complex.
|
| It might be interesting to do the opposite and come up with
| plausible sounding alternate histories that exclude one
| particular factor as an exploration of how important different
| factors are. Arguing against the actual history is very hard
| though, people really heavily weight what actually happened even
| if it was pure chance and could have gone either way.
|
| Like modern Europe without the Protestant reformation.
|
| Or the British empire without a navy.
|
| Or industrial revolution without coal.
|
| Genghis Khan without horses.
| cs702 wrote:
| That's the main answer proposed by one of the five books on the
| list: "Guns, Germs, and Steel," by Jared Diamond. It's one of
| the best books I've ever read. It reaches its conclusions by
| considering verifiable facts and methodically reasoning about
| them. Highly recommended if you haven't read it.
| [deleted]
| UncleMeat wrote:
| If you want a macro history that is more widely respected by
| historians today, Braudel's "The Mediterranean" is far
| better.
| lukas099 wrote:
| Everything is luck when it comes down to it.
| iraqmtpizza wrote:
| sounds like a luck bias. it's easy to say ah, there are so many
| variables, and they're extremely difficult to isolate. must be
| luck. that way we don't have to do the gruelling historical
| analysis
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| No, you can do the analysis but if you end up with two
| competing theories like:
|
| * we accidentally started our civilization on top of oil
| which would come in handy 2000 years later
|
| Vs
|
| * My ancestors were super smart and did this one thing that I
| am really overinvested in today
|
| Then there's a kind of Occam's razor that leans towards the
| luck based explanation.
| keybored wrote:
| Not really. There can be still be causes of things which are
| known and analyzable... But "luck" says that agents didn't
| cause them (intentionally).
| cortesoft wrote:
| If you go back far enough, any explanation is going to come
| down to 'luck' in the form of chance circumstances. However,
| that doesn't mean we shouldn't still examine what form the
| 'luck' came in.
| chmod600 wrote:
| It seems like England at its colonial offshoots were particularly
| successful.
|
| Perhaps we can narrow the question to: what was going on with
| England socially and politically, and how were their colonial
| practices able to reproduce economic success in faraway places?
| cjf4 wrote:
| This was a good survey. The nature of historical books (and
| especially grand macro books such as these) tends to lead to an
| acceptance/rejection debate on a particular perspective, which
| can be tedious, but this did a good job of taking each
| perspective seriously yet critically.
| black_13 wrote:
| febeling wrote:
| In my view, the most important book is missing from that list:
|
| De Soto, Hernando. The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism
| Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else. Basic Books,
| 2000.
|
| It shows by experiment and historical analysis, that there's a
| clear pattern to explain the gap: the legal institution of
| property being accessible and affordable to everyone, not just
| the privileged or rich. And if that's introduced, things can
| change around quickly.
| [deleted]
| karpierz wrote:
| The only book I've read on this list, Guns, Germs, and Steel, is
| heavily discredited amongst historians because it bases its
| conclusions on cherrypicked, exaggerated, or outright wrong
| facts, and also relies on some specious reasoning throughout the
| book.
|
| Are the other books listed significantly better in terms of
| veracity?
| tombh wrote:
| I heard those same opinions and based on recommendations from
| r/AskHistorians they suggest Why The West Rules - For Now by
| Ian Morris as a replacement.
| andyjohnson0 wrote:
| There's a Long Now seminar by Ian Morris about his book at
| https://longnow.org/seminars/02011/apr/13/why-west-rules-
| now...
| WalterBright wrote:
| "The Triumph of the West" by Roberts has a different take,
| putting it down to differences in culture and attitudes. For
| example, the West had the idea that the universe could be
| modeled, and discoveries from testing the model could be
| applied to the universe in general. The West also had notions
| of rights and freedoms that were absent in other cultures.
|
| https://www.amazon.com/Triumph-West-Origin-Western-Civilizat...
| cs702 wrote:
| It appears many experts disagree with your assessment of this
| multiple-prize-winning book:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns%2C_Germs%2C_and_Steel
| funklute wrote:
| Like the parent, my impression from discussing this very book
| with many people who work in the academic social sciences, is
| that Guns, Germs and Steel is largely discredited today. This
| might actually be an example of a situation where the
| wikipedia article is simply out of date, incomplete, and/or
| biased.
|
| I would instead recommend reading the heavily moderated
| r/askhistorians sub-reddit for a description of that is more
| in line with mainstream academic thinking. For example https:
| //www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/6meq1k/a_det...
| allturtles wrote:
| GG&S rubs academics the wrong way for a couple of reasons:
|
| 1) It accepts as a fact that the Europeans had superior
| technology to the peoples they encountered elsewhere, which
| is now perceived by many academics to be a form of
| racism/eurocentrism. (see the discussion in the linked
| threads about how the Europeans weren't really that
| advanced)
|
| 2) Materialist explanations are out of favor. Everything is
| supposed to be about culture and ideology and social
| construction, and everything is supposed to be "contingent"
| (i.e. not pre-determined by material factors like geography
| or superior technology - see the discussion in the linked
| thread about "determinism," which is a bad word).
| funklute wrote:
| "supposed to be" is perhaps not quite the wording I would
| use.
|
| My understanding is that these kinds of materialist
| explanations are out of favour because they have some
| genuine shortcomings: 1) they are largely
| untestable/unfalsifiable, so they veer into pseudo-
| science, 2) they have a tendency to cherry pick data, and
| 3) related to the second point, they tend to ignore the
| importance of the precise historical context (e.g.
| whether a certain king is particularly ambitious or not,
| could in certain cases shape the history of a region for
| decades or centuries to come - this is difficult to
| accommodate in more systemic theories).
| allturtles wrote:
| (1) applies to pretty much any kind of historical
| argument, and historians who emphasize contingency are by
| no means immune to (2) (I'd say this is a weakness of
| humanity generally!). (3) is a reasonable argument, but
| the converse can also apply. I think we should be open to
| the idea that some historical developments hinge on
| individual human action, but others don't.
| cs702 wrote:
| I started reading the comment you link to in that
| subreddit, but I had to stop after it claimed that
|
| _> The European conquest [of the Americas] was hardly
| decisive. Furthermore, the difference between hemispheres
| wasn't all that great._
|
| I had to stop because that's the kind of statement on which
| lots of people -- many of them smarter and more
| knowledgeable than me -- strongly disagree, often with
| ideological or religious fervor. I have no interest in or
| patience for that kind of debate, so I will skip out from
| this thread.
|
| That said, if you and others think the Wikipedia page on
| this best-selling, award-winning book is out of date, you
| should try to update it.
| juve1996 wrote:
| It's hard to argue that something that took until the
| 1920s to complete is decisive. The American Indian wars
| didn't end until 1924. That's hardly decisive.
| meany wrote:
| I think you would need to start be defining "decisive"
| for this context. Not sure the debate makes sense
| otherwise. Why does it matter if it was decisive or not?
| juve1996 wrote:
| Because the post I was replying to disagreed with the
| decisive nature of the conflict.
|
| > Why does it matter if it was decisive or not?
|
| It goes against the entire theory of the book - if it's
| argument was true, why did it take centuries to
| ultimately conquer the americas?
| [deleted]
| cwalv wrote:
| Just because a conflict/war hasn't been officially
| resolved or declared over by both sides doesn't mean the
| final outcome isn't clear.
| funklute wrote:
| I'm struggling to decide whether to take this critique
| seriously or not.
|
| You yourself told the parent "many experts disagree with
| your assessment", when the parent clearly indicated that
| they simply were following what appears to be the
| academic consensus on this book, _today_.
|
| The link I provided has a clear link to further work you
| can go explore, and make up your own mind. But I sort of
| suspect that in the three cases of 1) the parent comment,
| 2) the wikipedia article, and 3) now this statement about
| the American conquest, you have already decided what you
| want to believe.
|
| I'm not personally an expert in this field. So I am not
| going to go and update the wikipedia article. What I am
| going to do, is to listen to the people who are experts
| in the field. I actually loved Diamond's book when it
| first came out, but over many years, I have not found a
| single academic historian who had good things to say
| about it. And it's not for lack of trying. As much as the
| book has received many awards, it is today simply a fact
| that it has a very fraught reputation in academic
| circles.
| meany wrote:
| I think one of the challenge with relying on academics of
| History or anthropology is that, unlike physics,
| consensus doesn't necessarily progress towards a more
| accurate interpretation. I think the post above is
| suggesting that the linked academic has a agenda that is
| guiding their analysis. For instance they write that more
| advanced technology really is just more European. That
| rather than being more technologically "advanced"
| Europeans developed technology for a different context.
| Perhaps it's inaccurate, but conclusions like these seem
| to some to be motivated by the need to retell events to
| achieve/support social justice movements today.
|
| I love reading history, but I am concerned that all
| historical narratives are illusions - stories we string
| together from a minuscule subset of the data we've
| captured in writing or other records. This is
| particularly problematic if people, including academics,
| see the outcome of their historical interpretations as
| influencing modern power struggles.
| funklute wrote:
| > I think one of the challenge with relying on academics
| of History or anthropology is that, unlike physics,
| consensus doesn't necessarily progress towards a more
| accurate interpretation.
|
| I think this statement needs some very strong evidence to
| be even considered in passing. This statement is
| essentially saying "the entire field is bad at their
| job".
|
| For individual academics and sources, yes, I agree that
| one should be vigilant. But the academic consensus is a
| different matter altogether, and the base assumption
| simply has to be that the field as a whole moves forward.
| Otherwise it becomes very difficult - maybe even
| impossible - to have any sort of evidence-based
| discussion.
| cwalv wrote:
| > the base assumption simply has to be that the field as
| a whole moves forward. Otherwise it becomes very
| difficult - maybe even impossible - to have any sort of
| evidence-based discussion.
|
| It seems like this "assumption" needs to be qualified
| with time scales for disambiguating trends from "facts"
| .. otherwise this is equivalent to saying that academic
| consensus can never be wrong
| funklute wrote:
| > otherwise this is equivalent to saying that academic
| consensus can never be wrong
|
| No it is not. I said that the assumption must be that the
| consensus becomes less wrong over time, not that it is
| never wrong. Those are two very different statements.
| cwalv wrote:
| Over _how much_ time? Does "consensus" never make a
| wrong turn?
| abecedarius wrote:
| > the base assumption simply has to be that the field as
| a whole moves forward.
|
| Nature doesn't care what anyone thinks our base
| assumptions have to be. Parapsychology had a decent run
| academically for a century, and still isn't quite dead.
| treis wrote:
| It seems like GG&S was the way people sounded "smart" for a
| while and now the way is to say "well actually....". Mostly
| it seems because people don't like the conclusions.
|
| Like the post as an example. It says the European conquest
| was "hardly decisive". Which is just so ridiculous that it
| should disqualify them as a source.
|
| But moving on they try to say that native alliances were
| the most potent weapon. Which is again just so ridiculous.
| Small pox wiped out double digit percentages of the
| indigenous population and devastated their society.
| [deleted]
| googlryas wrote:
| I think this is exactly it. When it first came out it was
| trendy to quote the book about why certain things were
| the way they were. Then, people got tired of it and now
| it's trendy to say "well actually...", To the point on
| the history subreddit, if you even mention the title, a
| moderator bot posts a form response saying "well
| actually..." Without even knowing the content of the
| post.
|
| I hope we can soon reach a stage where we can accept the
| book for its good parts, understand it's shortcomings,
| and have more realistic viewpoints of academic/mass-
| appeal works and rely less on trends to tell us how we
| should feel.
| karpierz wrote:
| > Small pox wiped out double digit percentages of the
| indigenous population and devastated their society.
|
| This is the kind of cherry picking I was talking about.
| It'd be like saying "disease killed a large portion of
| Jews during WWII". Technically, it's true. A lot of Jews
| died from disease (in concentration camps). But it avoids
| asking the question of "were there any aggravating
| factors (like sudden displacement from homes, famine,
| violence, etc.) that caused them to become more
| susceptible"?
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Like being a virgin population in which the new pathogens
| could spread like wildfire, being totally unknown to
| their immune systems?
|
| We have just seen the same with covid, where the entire
| humanity was a virgin population. And covid mortality was
| basically nothing compared to smallpox and a host of
| other Old World diseases.
|
| Notably, the only disease to spread the other way round,
| syphilis, was very severe too. It took several
| generations for syphilis to mutate to a more chronic
| form.
|
| And, notably, even though famine and violence weren't
| exactly rare during the later colonial conquest of
| Africa, it usually wasn't the natives who died of
| diseases, but the whites, who just couldn't tolerate
| local diseases such as malaria, to which the indigenous
| population was somewhat resistant.
|
| There is a reason why the only significant white
| population in Africa is located in territories with more
| European-like climate, where the disease situation wasn't
| as dire as, say, in Congo.
| nyolfen wrote:
| it is estimated that 90% of new world natives died of
| smallpox and viral herpes immediately following contact
| with europeans -- that is, after _initial_ contact with a
| small number of europeans on the western fringes, disease
| swept across the entire hemisphere and destroyed
| civilizations. it is literally the single most important
| factor in the history of western colonization. the
| europeans that colonized the americas arrived in a
| postapocalyptic wasteland.
| karpierz wrote:
| > it is estimated that 90% of new world natives died of
| smallpox and viral herpes immediately following contact
| with europeans
|
| Can you give an academic citation for this?
|
| I can't find anything that would support these numbers,
| they're high even for older work that's since been
| debunked (and especially not "immediately"). I suspect
| that there's a methodological error, but I can't say for
| certain until I actually see how you've come to these
| numbers.
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| It's not cherry picking. We have millenia's worth of
| evidence that people without immunity to Smallpox die at
| a very high rate if infected. The indigenous population
| of the Americas had no immunity when exposed to small
| pox. So they died at a very high rate.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Historians have no idea what the pre-Columbian population
| was, so estimates of death rates have huge error bars.
| treis wrote:
| We know the mortality and virulence of smallpox and the
| other diseases that the indigenous population had never
| seen. From that you can estimate a death rate and it's
| clear that the toll would have been devestating. How
| devestating might be subject of some debate but no doubt
| that it was very bad.
| WalterBright wrote:
| No, we don't, because we have no remotely accurate
| numbers on the pre-Columbian population.
|
| The reason we have reasonably accurate measures of the
| mortality of the Black Death in medieval Europe is some
| areas kept written records of who died and who didn't.
| Yet the mortality rate of that is _still_ in dispute.
| treis wrote:
| I'm not sure what part you're disagreeing with. Do you
| dispute that we know smallpox's mortality rate? Or that
| we have a reasonable idea of what it (and other diseases)
| would do to a population with no natural immunity?
| WalterBright wrote:
| I dispute that we have a reasonable idea of how many
| native americans it killed, because we have no idea how
| many pre-Columbians there were.
| treis wrote:
| AFAICT nobody is talking about "how many" except for you.
| My argument was percentage based and for that the total
| population is irrelevant.
| WalterBright wrote:
| How many matters very much, as that determines the
| percentage.
| ALittleLight wrote:
| I read Guns, Germs, and Steel a long time ago, but I'm
| pretty sure it focuses quite heavily on disease wiping
| 90+% of the native population and how decisive that was.
| I remember this because I was shocked when reading it
| that the percentage might be that high. One clue that the
| book is concerned with disease is the second word in the
| title.
| WalterBright wrote:
| It might not be that high. Estimates of pre-Columbian
| population vary by a factor of 10.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| One rather blatant error is the treatment of Easter Island -
| which the author portrays as a self-inflicted catastrophe. In
| reality, there are probably three general phases of Eastern
| Island inhabitation: (one) initial discovery and subsequent
| deforestation, (two) a long period of relatively stable
| population, (three) raids by European pirates who murdered or
| transported most of the population to work as slaves in
| Chilean guano mines. The third issue is entirely neglected in
| that book. Not a very good sign, really.
| allturtles wrote:
| That's a different Jared Diamond book, Collapse.
| chubot wrote:
| What's an example of these "wrong facts", and who is a
| historian that discredits it? Ironically, your comment is fact-
| free.
|
| It's a work of synthesis, so it has the problem where every
| specialist will find something to disagree with. Not to say
| that this shouldn't be taken into account.
|
| (I have read rebuttals/contradictions of Diamond's other work,
| e.g. on Easter Island)
|
| Also, why not read the other 4 books on the list, instead of
| focusing on the one you read and didn't like?
| searealist wrote:
| https://hbdchick.wordpress.com/2014/03/10/big-summary-post-o...
| throw0101a wrote:
| I would recommend:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_WEIRDest_People_in_the_Wor...
|
| As well as _Dominion_ by Tom Holland:
|
| * https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tom_Holland_(author)
|
| * https://historyforatheists.com/2020/01/tom-holland-dominion/
| nonrandomstring wrote:
| I would like to add anything by Alan Macfarlane, particularly his
| Huxley lecture, and the core books recommended in the Cambridge
| University course on Social and Cultural Anthropology. I'd then
| suggest taking the knife of a kind of post-modernist scepticism
| to all of that perhaps via a Native American or African eye such
| as Ekeocha's "Target Africa" and seeing what a (necessarily)
| parochial view it is, to get, as it were, a bigger picture of the
| big picture.
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