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Comment by borissk | Hacker News Reader

Even if the layout of the land didn't give an advantage to Eurasia + Mediterranean Africa, the sheer size did. It had a lot more arable land, more space for nomadic tribes (capable of fast travel and spread of culture and technology), more resources, more people. Brief study of geography and climate would make it obvious that areas like Mediterranean, Middle East, India and China will become centers of civilization. All these were connected by land and sea routes, that made it possible to exchange knowledge (and germs). Americas, Sub-Saharan Africa and Australia didn't stand a chance.

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The Americas and Australia lacked horses until their (re-)introduction by europeans, whie sub-saharan Africa resisted repeated attempts to introduce horses.

We can guess the effect that might have on exchanges by considering: unmounted but encumbered people travel at about 25km/day; spanish missions in California were about 50km apart; Pony Express riders with relay remounts could cover 120km/day.

You make it sound like sub-Saharan Africans were offered an unparalleled opportunity with horses and rejected them out of some sort of pique. A quick search indicates that endemic diseases in the region made the husbanding of horses completely impractical until they could be bred over centuries to be resistant to the diseases transmitted as easily as say... a bite from an insect.

The Pony Express lasted all of 18 months and was apparently financially unsustainable.

You make it sound like the Pony Express simply went bankrupt when the primary cause for its closure was the completion of the transcontinental telegraph.

In 1491 people in mountainous South America had domesticated alpacas and llamas, which are better suited than horses for steep, alpine slopes. The horse was quickly abandoned by Spaniards in such terrain.

Sure, but it's impossible to build a wealthy society using alpacas as pack animals over mountains. A horse or ox pulling a cart over relatively flat terrain is far more efficient.

The Incans were quite wealthy and advanced. As said by the official secretary of Pizarro [1]: “The city of Cuzco, being the primary place where the lords made their residence, is so great and so beautiful and with so many buildings that it would be worthy to be seen in Spain”.

On a fortress of the city: “Many Spaniards who have seen it, and who went to Lombardy and other foreign kingdoms,” he adds, “say they have not seen another building like this fortress nor a stronger castle.”

In any event, the advantages of stronger pack animals are only significant if you can create wheeled carts. The Incans, like most Mesoamerican civilizations, had limited access to metals and advanced metallurgy preventing them from widespread usage of wheels as a means of facilitating travel. Without wheels, the amount of distance most animals can go while carrying their supplies is fairly similar.

If I recall correctly, it is something on the order of 150 km, regardless of horse, ox, or even human. If you have to carry your food and water you can only go around 150 km with what you can carry. That means proportional consumption rate is highly similar, so two animals that can carry 100 kg is not materially different than one animal that can carry 200 kg. Under that model you would probably actually prefer smaller pack animals to reduce concentrated risk of animal loss and improve maneuverability.

You actually can do better since animals like horses can efficiently graze, but that heavily limits your transportation speed and weight maximums for commerce purposes and you still need to feed the humans.

Incidentally this is why rivers are so important in early civilization. Barges on rivers bypass the fundamental distance limit even without wind. Floaty boat and a stick to push off the banks/riverbed dominates almost everything else for commerce.

[1] https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/renaissance-quarterl...

The Incas had a handful of fancy residences for the ruling class. The society as a whole was very poor. Even if they had more metal available they lacked the economic surplus that would have been necessary to ever accomplish anything of significance.

> The Incas had a handful of fancy residences for the ruling class. The society as a whole was very poor

Meanwhile, in 15th century Europe…

You are going to need to support that blanket assertion with some references.

The capital city of the Incan empire, Cusco, is estimated to have had a population of ~40,000 [1] ruling over an estimated 10,000,000 people.

The capital city of Spain at the time, Toledo, had a population of a mere ~32,000 [2] at the time ruling a population of a mere 6.5 million at the time.

Contemporaneous accounts demonstrate the comparable grandeur of their seats of power and more objective determinations demonstrate the comparability of scale and scope. It is not just “a handful of fancy residences” unless you apply that moniker to Spain as well.

For that matter, Spain in the early 1500s is not exactly a wealthy country. Their wealth largely came from their American conquests which resulted in what is believed to be a ~300-600% increase in the amount of European-accessible gold and silver [4]. It is a little hard to determine how much came from plunder and how much from the mines and slavery, but the Incans were not poor in precious metals, the measure of wealth in the contemporaneous European societies.

[1] https://www.worldhistory.org/Cuzco/

[2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toledo,_Spain

[3] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Spain

[4] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_revolution

But that gets back to Diamond’s motivating fundamental question.

Why were the Spaniards colonizing the Americas rather than the Incas colonizing Spain?

No? This comment chain is not about that. The first comment argues "quantity of interconnected people". The second adds on by postulating horses/riding animals are key as they support interconnection/communication. The third says that the Mesoamerican societies had riding animals as well, so that is not a unique differentiator.

The person I am replying to then makes the implicit argument that obviously a poor society would be conquered and then makes the explicit argument that obviously the Incans were poor because alpacas do not count. This line of argumentation relies on the Incans being poor otherwise the implicit argument fails. The implicit argument is being made because otherwise there is no reason to bring up "it's impossible to build a wealthy society" since that would be irrelevant.

I point out how the Incans were not poor and thus their implicit argument fails. I quoted first-hand witnesses who support that the Incans appeared to be quite wealthy and thus the "wealthy conquers abject poor" theory does not adequately explain the Spanish conquest of the Incans.

You are free to make a different root argument, but it is not really the point here. But you do have to make a argument that is consistent with the fact that the Incans seemed pretty darn wealthy even though they were missing certain technologies that we would normally view as critical or indicative of "progress".

Think of "poor society" not in terms of quality of life of its residents, but in terms of how much economic surplus it has to spend on war-related things. If society A and society B have equal number of people living in poverty, but society B has much larger armies, it is richer (in purely economic terms) as a whole, and that's what matters here.

It goes beyond the sheer number of soldiers, too - if you have more economic surplus, you can spend it on e.g. things like mining to obtain better materials to make weapons from, on science to construct more advanced weapons etc.

What are you even responding to? The claim is A => B, A is true, therefore B. Much Poorer => Conquered. Incans were poor, therefore Incans conquered. I dispute A, Incans were poor. By almost any observable metric such as quality of life, size of empire, scale of construction, population and thus food production, intricacy of ornaments it is unclear that the Incans were much poorer than the Spanish. In fact, by many of those metrics the Incans were comparable or even wealthier than the Spanish.

If you do not think that the Incans were materially poorer than the Spanish, the we already agree. If you disagree and actually want to respond to the arguments presented, please present a argument supported by evidence that does not use circular reasoning to demonstrate that the Incans were much poorer than the Spanish.

As an example of circular reasoning: "The Spanish had more advanced weapons demonstrating they invested more economic surplus into weapon technology which proves they had more societal economic surplus." Not to say that superior weapon technology could not be a reason for the successful Spanish conquest, but it is not evidence of a significant "wealth gap" unless you subscribe to the ludicrous notion that all technology gaps are by definition wealth gaps. Even if we did assume that ridiculous notion is true, we have no way of comparing the tech trees of two civilizations to compare their "tech wealth" so it still just ends up being circular reasoning.

The obvious answer is the Spaniards had the means to get to the Americas.

A more subtle answer is the Spanish commanders had access to thousands of years of military history in the form of books.

Ironically, Spain did not become wealthy by looting gold and silver from the New World. What happened was - inflation!

The looting was doing the same thing that the US government does - injecting money into the economy, which always results in inflation.

The same thing happened with the two American gold rushes.

They did not become persistently wealthy, but they were able to buy a bunch of neat stuff like ships that they could not purchase previously before people caught on that there was more gold. Spain did become "wealthy", but that is because inflation is a wealth transfer from creditors to the immediate recipient of the newly created money that lasts until the creditors catch on. But, as you point out, it stops working when people realize they are getting fleeced. Spain learned that the hard way.

> injecting money into the economy, which always results in inflation

This can be disproven by simply plotting the quantity of money in circulation compared to the inflation rate.

For instance from 2005 to 2020 the US went from 6.5 to 15 trillion dollars in circulation yet inflation was around 2%.

Same story for the eurozone which went from 3 to 9 trillions euro in circulation, with similar inflation (despite the Quantitative Easing policy of injecting currency in financial markets).

The eurozone provides another clue in that its member states experience different inflation in spite of sharing a common currency.

The true effects of injecting money in the economy are more complex than a straightforward increase in inflation. Most notably, since economic projects must be financed before they can be undertaken, injecting money in the economy can result in the economy increasing in size if there is spare productive capacity and resources.

There are indeed cases like Venezuela where injecting money results in inflation because there is a supply crisis (more money attempts to buy the same quantity of goods) but it cannot be generalized to all economies.

Draft horses are going to be a lot better at hauling and plowing fields. The fact that they don't work well in mountainous South America goes to show how more difficult the geography there is. Which kind of Jared Diamond's point. The Incans were very well adapted to their environment, but their spawnpoint wasn't easy mode.

To my untrained eye, the eastern United States and Uruguay + surroundings also seem like great places for civilizations to thrive. But for some reason those areas did not seem to have particularly large civilizations before the colonization period. Does anyone know of a good reason why these areas were relatively unpopulated compared to the areas you mention but also compared to say Mexico?

Do yourself a favour and just read the book we're talking about. It explains exactly these questions, and many more, even if the current trend is to criticize those explanations because "there could be other factors as well" (which Diamond does acknowledge, but perhaps not enough for everyone).

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