If technological development is "heavily adapted to the context of its culture", and that context is mostly geography ("mountainous environments") then isn't Diamond right?
Seems like the alternative is, "That's just the way it turned out," which is not very satisfying.
And I'm pretty sure that's just the way it turned out.
They went at least as far as the Roman Empire and Africa.
https://www.encyclopedia.com/science/encyclopedias-almanacs-...
> The difference between the experiences of Europe and China were economic and cultural rather than technological. As the voyages of Cheng Ho demonstrate, the Chinese certainly possessed the maritime technology and expertise to undertake long voyages of discovery.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ming_treasure_voyages
> In 1435, when the Xuande Emperor died, the civil officials started to gain power as the new emperor, the Zhengtong Emperor, was only eight years old when he ascended the throne and could be influenced.[186] They seized this opportunity to permanently dismantle the voyages.
By his telling, Chinese bureaucrats buried the knowledge of large fleets because it was a more expensive way to project power than simply going over land.
To give up counterfactuals is to surrender causality and to truly make the past "one damn thing after another," i.e. chronicle rather than history. The historical profession as we know it is all about making arguments, not merely cataloging events, so it would cease to exist without counterfactuals.
This chapter is preceded, though, by 800 pages of detailed history. You have to earn your big conclusions. And the bigger your conclusion is (say, here is why/how Europe colonized the world) you'd better have a lot of evidence.
Sure, but I feel many academic historians have a bit of a double standard here. Did Foucault muster up mounds of evidence for his totalizing theories of power and social structure? Not really, he gestured at a few facts and then built an elaborate structure of theory on that very wobbly foundation. Yet he continues to be taken seriously in academia, whereas Diamond never has been.
I think that's partly because he was a "serious thinker" and Diamond is an "airport read," and also partly because theories like Focuault's are so flexible that it becomes a fun hammer you can apply to any nail ("social media is a panopticon!"), whereas Diamond's argument is specific to a particular historical arc, and partly because Foucault accords with the prejudices of the academy (there are hidden structures of power woven throughout society that oppress the weak) and Diamond doesn't (X determinism is bad, everything is "contingent.").
Plenty of academics hate Foucault. Ask an analytic philosopher what they think of him. And yet, those people still get to be part of the academy. Are some people shut out unfairly? Sure. Are many people shut out fairly because they aren't interested in rigor, they are only interested in exposure? Well, ok, academia has a lot of those. But at least it doesn't have Jared Diamond.