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Comment by lettergram | Hacker News Reader

One thing that’s clear and matches what I have read —

(1) europe is surrounded by a large body of water (Mediterranean in south, Baltic & English Channel to north), enabling fast travel.

(2) Europe is extremely isolated geographically. Mountains, rivers & oceans isolated many cultural groups.

(3) the isolated nature of Europe, combined with access to mass transit (once sailing become prevalent) enabled technological expansion and competition.

(4) combined with massive competition from isolated cultures, once sailing was achieved, Africa and the Americas enabled massive raw resource inflows - creating growth and abundance

Eurasia in contrast consolidated around just a handful of cultures and often had an abundance of food and limited fast travel (via rivers & oceans) throughout history. This makes for less completion and although the stability enabled technological advancement and massive works. It also limited variation in ideas

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These are just-so-stories that don't really hold up when you look closely. Yes, Europe has the Mediterranean that is advantageous for travel. But other places also have bodies of water, usually more navigable than the channel and less pirate-infested than the Mediterranean. Important European trade routes didn't really rely on those large bodies of waters. Europe isn't isolated at all, except for maybe the Alps and only in the winter. Other continents also feature loads and loads of different cultures.

Really, what you say is an example for why thinking about human development in this way is flawed from the beginning. There are no single factors responsible for the course of history. Whenever you try to identify some, your view becomes so myopic that it ends in these arbitrary Diamond hypotheses that require endless explanations for all the obvious exceptions.

I reject this. There are macro affects that are identifiable. There may be micros and contrarian examples. But that doesn’t affect that macro elements influence in that circumstance.

But it’s not like the mountains, lack of fast travel etc haven’t defended while holding back Afghanistan for 3000 years. You can argue there are a million other issues there as well but that doesn’t contradict that macro point.

I think you are lost in an attempt to be contrarian where it isn’t really warranted.

But if you want to argue with me about that ask any soldier.

Trying to make a point about Afghanistan as an entity across 3000 years is exactly the kind of sillyness these analysis leads to.

Yes, there are macros, but the point is that there are hundreds of them, they are all interconnected. If you pick just one you either make wrong implications (like the silk road region Afghanistan being isolated or lacking fast travel) or extremely trivial (like mountains being advantageous tageous for defenders in war)

Point #2 is exactly the opposite of Diamond's hypothesis. The contention is that the broad east/west alignment of all the major population centers in Eurasia meant that trade of ideas and technologies was easier than the north/south travel required to reach other cultures.

The point here being that going across latitudes is harder because you're moving through many climates and water bodies with different equipment and technology requirements to pass through them. A single caravan might get to Persia using the same pack animals and equipment with which it left Tibet, but that's not possible if you're trying to get to Kenya or Australia.

It's been a long time since I read the book, but I do think he made the point that part of what gave Europe a military edge was the fact of lots of natural geographical borders like rivers and mountains, giving rise to lots of small kingdoms instead of one big one. So there were constant conflicts, driving innovation.

And the thing about latitudes I think applies more to mobility of things like crops than to human travel, since you need to cross climate zones.

I’m curious how that’s different from the Native Americans who, regardless of their Nobel savage portrayal in media, were constantly at war with each other yet failed to develop any weapons nearly powerful enough to repel the Europeans.

As I remember it, a major thesis of the book (which I recommend, it's a fun read!) is that Europeans had the benefit of several, mainly geographical factors. This was just one of them.

> trade of ideas and technologies was easier than the north/south travel required to reach other cultures

It was mostly about the exchange of domesticated animals and crop plants. You can start using crop plants you got from your neighbors, if the plants stay in the same climate zone, so east-west movement.

That was a stronger variant of the same hypothesis. And indeed it explains the nearly uniform agriculture/husbandry recipes in Eurasia. But it doesn't explain why at the dawn of the renaissance all these cultures were producing similar crucible steel (from India) or making gunpowder (China).

Obviously the book goes farther still, I wasn't trying to summarize the whole thing. The "germs" angle matters too, the pervasive Eurasian trade networks meant that acquired immunity could be traded like technology, leading to a Eurasian "fortress of disease" that prevented immigration but did nothing to deter colonialism.

I think it is more that for best growth you need to be accessible for trade over long distances, but not so accessible to armies that want to pillage all the lands. This was the problem China had, any time civilization gets going you have some damn warlord just running around wrecking it all. But even when they do consolidate power the empire is too big to centrally manage and has to be extremely oppressive to prevent the next warlord from repeating the same trick. This stifles the economy and retards the growth of technology.

> Europe is extremely isolated geographically.

Is it? The great plains from Germany to the Urals and the Pontic Steppe have both been crossed one way or the others by many population groups among the millenia.

On the other hand, the Alps were a great defensive barrier for Rome (until they weren't). My guess is that all the mountainous regions had a similar effect until sufficient industry was available to make them easily passable.

But every continents has mountains. Still, if you take France as an example of one of the most “protected” European countries (far in the West, surrounded by mountains and seas for most of its borders), you can still see so many migration waves:

  - first arrival of hominids evolving into Neandertal;
  - Cro-Magnon arriving from the Middle-East;
  - Bell-beaker culture, probably from the Pontic stepp;
  - Celts (maybe from the West, probably from the East);
  - Romans;
  - the crucible of Northern, Germanic and steppe populations (Franks, Saxons, Goths, Wisigoths, Alamans, ...) that were the Great Invasions;
  - Celts again in Brittany;
  - Northern-African incursions and the whole Mediterranean melting pot on the southern seashores;
  - All the 20th century immigration waves (Poles, White Russians, Italians, Spaniards, Algerians, Moroccans, ...);
  - and probably many others I forgot/don't know about.

And even in Antiquity/Middle-Age Italy, you have Gauls and Celts in the North (after all, Northern Italy was Cisalpine *Gaul*, not Northern Italia), many Italic populations (Sabines, Etruscans, Umbrian, ...), a lot of Greek people in the South, then the Romans; after them all the aforementioned Eastern populations, then the Vikings demesnes, then Germanic incursions and settlements, etc.

re 1) Europe is surrounded by a large body of water -> that is true for many continents. In fact being surrounded by water is what defines a continent. Arguably Europe less so since it and Asia are part of the same land mass. re 2) Is it? European rivers are relatively small, the alps not that high and yeah the atlantic is wide, but that's oceans for you

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