1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

[the last donut of the night]

So I'm reading this book, and I've been fascinated by what Mann says. New archaeological findings have completely destroyed the antiquated and racist picture of Indians as simple tree-huggers, living lightly off the land. This book is amazing, and I recommend it to any one. Discuss?

(I'm not sure if I should put this in the literature forum)

[Agnapostate]

They're not really new archaeological findings. This is simply a case of popular social science revealing to the lay public what the "experts" have known for decades, though there's still the fact that the vast majority of that lay public will still cling to their preconceived notions and never read the book. It's the same phenomenon as when Guns, Germs, and Steel was released; the general social scientific consensus was drawn upon to challenge rightist notions, and many people didn't like it.

[Blake's Baby]

Not read it, but there is a long strand of American academia (especially in Anthropolgy) that really believes that the Native Americans were incapable of social evolution. But both the 'nasty brutish and short' view, and the counter-tendency of 'noble savages', both patronise and belittle Native Americans.

There's no reason to see Native American cultures as having different dynamics to Old World cultures.

[Agnapostate]

Modern social science is increasingly left-oriented (even economics, which is stereotyped as the opposite), and I honestly believe that there are few anthropologists that believe that today. But the lay public has either the "noble savage" or "brutal savage" view, with the mindset being that Indians were "conquered by superior technology," even though that's demonstrably false.

[A.R.Amistad]

They're not really new archaeological findings. This is simply a case of popular social science revealing to the lay public what the "experts" have known for decades, though there's still the fact that the vast majority of that lay public will still cling to their preconceived notions and never read the book. It's the same phenomenon as when Guns, Germs, and Steel was released; the general social scientific consensus was drawn upon to challenge rightist notions, and many people didn't like it.
Hey i rather liked Guns, Germs and Steel

[HEAD ICE]

I haven't read Guns, Germs and Steel,but I do know that James Blaut criticized it for being Eurocentric. That alone won't make me not read it, just curious as to what you think of the charge (and what that charge is).

[A.R.Amistad]

I haven't read Guns, Germs and Steel,but I do know that James Blaut criticized it for being Eurocentric. That alone won't make me not read it, just curious as to what you think of the charge (and what that charge is).

Hm, I certainly wouldn't call it that, since the point was to counter Eurocentric ideas of "civilization." Basically he said one of the greatest contributing factors to the uneven development of certain cultures to others was rooted in the limitations of the geography of a certain area. For example, the people of Papua New Guinea could never achieve what China or Europe did on their own not because of some inherent racial reasons, but becuse the geography of the area was too limiting to allow for that sort of production without outside help from other regions. I think its an interesting contribution, and compliments historical materialism.

[Agnapostate]

Hey i rather liked Guns, Germs and Steel

I said that the rightists didn't like it; the moderate rightists disliked it because they believed that European cultural supremacy was responsible for the triumph of Western European imperialism and the extreme rightists disliked it because they believed that European racial supremacy was responsible (though that explanation doesn't indicate why Eastern Europeans didn't expand as successfully). J. Phillipe Rushton offered a critical review, for example, and in line with that, the general consensus on Stormfront is against the book and its Jewish author. I haven't actually read GGaS myself; I own it, but I've lent it to someone because I don't have much time to read things.

[Forward Union]

the mindset being that Indians were "conquered by superior technology," even though that's demonstrably false.

Apologies for perhaps making a somewhat blind statement here, as I haven't read the book, but unless you are suggesting the Native Americans had Firearms, Cavalry, Cannons, Boats and Armour, then I think superior technology was certainly a factor.

If it's demonstrably false that they had inferior technology, then I want to see it falsified.

[Agnapostate]

Apologies for perhaps making a somewhat blind statement here, as I haven't read the book, but unless you are suggesting the Native Americans had Firearms, Cavalry, Cannons, Boats and Armour, then I think superior technology was certainly a factor.

If it's demonstrably false that they had inferior technology, then I want to see it falsified.


No, aside from boats...did you mean ships? Those items were simply in generally short supply (and of poor quality, when it came to the arquebus, for example) when the most significant conquests were undertaken. Those were conducted by Spaniards against the urban Indians of Mesoamerica and the Andes, which had sustained the highest population densities, and the most significant factor was infectious disease, as it generally was everywhere. As time went by, that "superior technology" advanced and became more abundant in the Americas, but it became diffused to Indians also.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f1/Apache_chieff_Geronimo_%28right%29_and_his_warrior s_in_1886.jpg

[Forward Union]

No, aside from boats...did you mean ships? Those items were simply in generally short supply (and of poor quality, when it came to the arquebus, for example) when the most significant conquests were undertaken. Those were conducted by Spaniards against the urban Indians of Mesoamerica and the Andes, which had sustained the highest population densities, and the most significant factor was infectious disease, as it generally was everywhere. As time went by, that "superior technology" advanced and became more abundant in the Americas, but it became diffused to Indians also.

Yes after decades of conquest the West sold arms selctively as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The point being that they still had vastly superior technology to the Natives, despite the fact that they did manage to get their hands on some of it at some point. They cerainly never had any production capacity.

In other words they were never technologically "equal" with the Europeans, thus the Europeans had 'superior technological power'

[Dimentio]

Yes after decades of conquest the West sold arms selctively as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The point being that they still had vastly superior technology to the Natives, despite the fact that they did manage to get their hands on some of it at some point. They cerainly never had any production capacity.

In other words they were never technologically "equal" with the Europeans, thus the Europeans had 'superior technological power'

In some areas they were technologically superior. The Incan Empire for example alone had cultivated all the dozens of types of potatoes which were existent in the world at that time. Their terrace agriculture was also superior to everything in the world maybe except the Chinese paddy field system.

[Blake's Baby]

Sdaly perhaps for the Incas, you can't easily 'weaponise' the potato. I think military technology is what's being hinted at here.

[Pavlov's House Party]

Sdaly perhaps for the Incas, you can't easily 'weaponise' the potato. I think military technology is what's being hinted at here.

The Spanish under Cortes had less than 600 men, 20 horses and less than 10 small cannons. The firearms they used were primitive and frequent to malfunction and they had only a few of these. Aztec weapons featured obsidian and flint pieces that were sharper than steel, and it was recorded by a Spanish soldier to have been able to decapitate a horse in two blows.

It is theorized that the reason the Spanish managed to defeat much larger Aztec armies with such a small force is the difference in European and Mesoamerican military goals: the goal of Aztec armies in their Flower Wars was to take prisoners to be used as slaves, while the goal of European armies was to annihilate the enemy. They were also successful at using politics, playing subjegated tribes and cities against their Aztec oppressors and gained thousands of Indian troops in the process.

You can see that Spanish military sucesses against the Aztecs were mostly won on open terrain where European style tactics and strategy could be used to destroy the enemy, such as the battle of Otumba Valley, compared to the disaster of La Noche Triste, where the Spanish forces were massacred in an urban environment.

[MilkmanofHumanKindness]

Wait, you mean that American Indians were actually people and not just noble or brutal savages? That in some areas they were more technologically advanced, and in some areas they were not?

This is a mindblowing revelation! :rolleyes:

[Dimentio]

The Spanish under Cortes had less than 600 men, 20 horses and less than 10 small cannons. The firearms they used were primitive and frequent to malfunction and they had only a few of these. Aztec weapons featured obsidian and flint pieces that were sharper than steel, and it was recorded by a Spanish soldier to have been able to decapitate a horse in two blows.

It is theorized that the reason the Spanish managed to defeat much larger Aztec armies with such a small force is the difference in European and Mesoamerican military goals: the goal of Aztec armies in their Flower Wars was to take prisoners to be used as slaves, while the goal of European armies was to annihilate the enemy. They were also successful at using politics, playing subjegated tribes and cities against their Aztec oppressors and gained thousands of Indian troops in the process.

You can see that Spanish military sucesses against the Aztecs were mostly won on open terrain where European style tactics and strategy could be used to destroy the enemy, such as the battle of Otumba Valley, compared to the disaster of La Noche Triste, where the Spanish forces were massacred in an urban environment.

The Aztec flower wars were not actual wars, but rather religious rituals and regular sports events, like the World Cup but with human deaths (similar to the Roman gladiatorial games). They were a contributing factor to the Aztecs losing though, as Cortéz would never have been able to conquer the Aztec Empire had it not been for allying with Tlaxcala and other city-states who opposed the Aztecs because of Aztec cruelty.

And no one could deny that the Aztec Empire was built on exceptional cruelty. They sacrificed about 20 000 people each year. I am not saying this to indicate that they were savages, but rather that their class system built on a theocratic warrior aristocracy produced bizarre results. Obviously, in other aspects they were highly civilised and sophisticated. But so was the German nation, and it produced the Third Reich.

The fall of the Incan Empire was less believable though, and was really a very quick shot which became an amazing success. The Inca was the undisputed ruler of all aspects of the social order, including the military, economic life, social life, the centre of life for the Incan people. When Pizarro kidnapped him, he had literally dealt a stroke to the Incan nervous system.

The Disney film "The Emperor's new groove" with that reprehensible Kuzco character actually had a pretty fair depiction exactly of how adored the sovereign was in the context of the Incan system.

The Incans could be pretty sadistic, but their Empire was not built on continuous humiliation like the Aztec Empire. They could deal out genocide upon rebelling tribes, but often preferred to just use the threat of violence to keep suppressed nations in line, and the Empire was probably quite a peaceful place to live in.

For those who are interested to know, the Incans had a completely centralised planned economy where all people received free food, clothes, housing and so on.

[Agnapostate]

Yes after decades of conquest the West sold arms selctively as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The point being that they still had vastly superior technology to the Natives, despite the fact that they did manage to get their hands on some of it at some point. They cerainly never had any production capacity.

In other words they were never technologically "equal" with the Europeans, thus the Europeans had 'superior technological power'

Yes, and this is a focus on an exception to a rule. The most significant conquests of Indian nations occurred within a few years of each other, and were the assaults on the urban civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andes, which had sustained the highest population densities. And those weren't characterized by victory due to dramatic disparities in military technology, except when Pizarro's expedition was able to capture the Inca and take him as hostage with a cavalry charge and repeated weapons volleys. But in that case, they were facing unarmed opponents, and it wasn't a battle so much as a massacre, since there was not a single Spanish death and an injury only to Pizarro himself. But for the most part, horses and firearms were in short supply during those conquests and did not play a significant factor, certainly not comparable to infectious disease. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the arquebus and the early musket were extremely
primitive and defective firearms that were often grossly inaccurate.


It is theorized that the reason the Spanish managed to defeat much larger Aztec armies with such a small force is the difference in European and Mesoamerican military goals: the goal of Aztec armies in their Flower Wars was to take prisoners to be used as slaves, while the goal of European armies was to annihilate the enemy. They were also successful at using politics, playing subjegated tribes and cities against their Aztec oppressors and gained thousands of Indian troops in the process.

You can see that Spanish military sucesses against the Aztecs were mostly won on open terrain where European style tactics and strategy could be used to destroy the enemy, such as the battle of Otumba Valley, compared to the disaster of La Noche Triste, where the Spanish forces were massacred in an urban environment.

There's a far simpler explanation: they were aided by thousands upon thousands of indigenous allies, most notably the Tlaxcalteca. While Cortes and his command staff possessed administrative control, the actual battle victories were thanks to the Tlaxcalans being effective foot soldiers.

[#FF0000]

Yes after decades of conquest the West sold arms selctively as part of a divide and conquer strategy. The point being that they still had vastly superior technology to the Natives, despite the fact that they did manage to get their hands on some of it at some point. They cerainly never had any production capacity.

In other words they were never technologically "equal" with the Europeans, thus the Europeans had 'superior technological power'

If 'Superior technology" means "guns" then yeah.

[Agnapostate]

If 'Superior technology" means "guns" then yeah.

And it's all a matter of diffusion. Gunpowder was diffused to Europe from China, and then from Europe to America.

[Forward Union]

If 'Superior technology" means "guns" then yeah.

What about, roads, gas lanterns, stone structures, (assuming we're talking about the 15-1600s) mass farming techniques whatever. I think it's fairly obvious that the Europeans were technologically superior to the Native Americans at the time. Including the Aztecs, Incas Mayans etc.

Im not saying the Europeans were better, or that this justifies what happened. But saying it was a technological level playing field is rediculous. That would suggest that the Native Americans were as likely to colonise Europe as the vice verca. Which, when stated in this way, is obviously rediculous.


And it's all a matter of diffusion. Gunpowder was diffused to Europe from China, and then from Europe to America. Oh wow that has so much to do with who was technologically superior during the colonisation.

[Forward Union]

Yes, and this is a focus on an exception to a rule. The most significant conquests of Indian nations occurred within a few years of each other, and were the assaults on the urban civilizations of Mesoamerica and the Andes, which had sustained the highest population densities. And those weren't characterized by victory due to dramatic disparities in military technology, except when Pizarro's expedition was able to capture the Inca and take him as hostage with a cavalry charge and repeated weapons volleys. But in that case, they were facing unarmed opponents, and it wasn't a battle so much as a massacre, since there was not a single Spanish death and an injury only to Pizarro himself. But for the most part, horses and firearms were in short supply during those conquests and did not play a significant factor, certainly not comparable to infectious disease. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the arquebus and the early musket were extremely
primitive and defective firearms that were often grossly inaccurate.


But far better still than Crossbows or even Longbows due to their range and increased overall accuracy. By that I mean, a skilled bowman can hit a target as well as a skilled riflemen of the time, but it was easier to train people to use muskets adequetly while they were also they were much longer rance and did much more damage than bows.

[Agnapostate]

But far better still than Crossbows or even Longbows due to their range and increased overall accuracy. By that I mean, a skilled bowman can hit a target as well as a skilled riflemen of the time, but it was easier to train people to use muskets adequetly while they were also they were much longer rance and did much more damage than bows.

I referred to the arquebus and early musket, and should have referred to the arquebus exclusively in the cases of Spanish "battles" with the Native Americans of Mesoamerica and the Andes. But the author of 1491 himself casts aspersions on the value of some European firearms:


Contemporary research suggests that indigenous peoples in New England were not technologically inferior to the British - or rather, that terms like "superior" and "inferior" do not readily apply to the relationship between Indian and European technology.

Guns are an example. As Chaplin, the Harvard historian, has argued, New England Indians were indeed disconcerted by their first experiences with European guns: the explosion and smoke, the lack of a visible projectile. But the natives soon learned that most of the British were terrible shots, from lack of practice - their guns were little more than noisemakers. Even for a crack shot, a seventeenth century gun had fewer advantages over a longbow than may be supposed. Colonists in Jamestown taunted the Powhatan in 1607 with a target they believed impervious to an arrow shot. To the colonists' dismay, an Indian sank an arrow into it a foot deep, "which was strange, being that a Pistoll could not pierce it." To regain the upper hand, the English set up a target made of steel. This time the archer "burst his arrow all to pieces." The Indian was "in a great rage"; he realized, one assumes, that the foreigners had cheated. When the Powhatan later captured John Smith, Chaplin notes, Smith broke his pistol rather than reveal to his captors "the awful truth that it could not shoot as far as an arrow could fly."

However, I never stated that Europeans didn't possess superior military technology, though I would state that the urban civilizations of America in particular probably surpassed various European civilizations in general technology; the back cover of 1491 itself states that, "The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city."

I stated that this superior military technology was not a significant factor in their conquest, which was correct, since the most significant factor was the spread of infectious disease, followed by the efforts of other Indian enemies, not Europeans. The exception might be the steel sword, but other forms of "superior technology" were in short supply.

[Wolf Larson]

So I'm reading this book, and I've been fascinated by what Mann says. New archaeological findings have completely destroyed the antiquated and racist picture of Indians as simple tree-huggers, living lightly off the land. This book is amazing, and I recommend it to any one. Discuss?

(I'm not sure if I should put this in the literature forum)

They were communists. They were obviously smarter than the western world. more humane as well.

[Wolf Larson]

What about, roads, gas lanterns, stone structures, (assuming we're talking about the 15-1600s) mass farming techniques whatever. I think it's fairly obvious that the Europeans were technologically superior to the Native Americans at the time. Including the Aztecs, Incas Mayans etc.




. .
>
"
Aztecs stone buildings? Check. Mass Farming? Check. Roads? Check. As far back as Caral we saw these things in South America. The only reason the Spanish defeated the was because of disease. Further north in the Americas the same coupled with the fact the native Americans had no centralized state.

[#FF0000]

What about, roads, gas lanterns, stone structures, (assuming we're talking about the 15-1600s) mass farming techniques whatever. I think it's fairly obvious that the Europeans were technologically superior to the Native Americans at the time. Including the Aztecs, Incas Mayans etc.

They had all that plus Mayan (or Incan, was it?) cities were far bigger and more densely populated than European ones, and cleaner thanks to a sewer system.

Not to mention Native Americans literally invented corn.

[Pavlov's House Party]

. .
>
"
Aztecs stone buildings? Check. Mass Farming? Check. Roads? Check. As far back as Caral we saw these things in South America. The only reason the Spanish defeated the was because of disease. Further north in the Americas the same coupled with the fact the native Americans had no centralized state.

The Spanish had the benefit of inheriting more than 2000 years of military, technological and political knowledge from their geographical situation in the Eurasian continent, and their posession of a written alphabet. It would not be suprising to learn that Cortes' manipulation of the various tribes was inspired by something like Caesar's conquest of Gaul. Of course the diseases played a major role in their conquest of the Americas, but not as much so as the British or French faced when they found North American wilderness almost deserted of human life, when in fact the diseases had wiped a substantial portion of the North American Indians out. In contrast, the Spaniards had the unique experience to find heavily populated city-states in the south. It should also be noted that the role of horses and gunpowder weapons is widely exaggerated, seeing how few of these they possessed, and how the gunpowder weapons were so primitive and prone to failure.

Just because the Aztecs had stone structures, mass agriculture and roads does not mean they could have withstood a Spanish invasion, remember that Cortes' force was only an expeditionary force. The Gauls too had complicated architecture, organized farming and a road system, but they were ultimately beaten by the Roman armies.

It can be argued that the theocratic class structure of the Aztecs may have been their downfall; creating enemies of their subjegated city states, and if not for the Spanish invasion their tributary states and rivals could have revolted against them.

[Agnapostate]

Sorry; I missed this post.


What about, roads,

Most urban civilizations have roads. The Inca empire contained a particularly extensive road system.


gas lanterns,

A proper gas lantern contains an enclosed flame (which means a torch does not suffice), so I don't know the answer; I'm not an anthropologist. As with firearms, European gas lanterns were probably diffused to Indians, however, which would have evened the technological disparities that existed.


stone structures, (assuming we're talking about the 15-1600s)

You've never seen Teotihuacan?

http://www.destination360.com/north-america/mexico/images/s/mexico-teotihuacan-s.jpg

http://www.destination360.com/north-america/mexico/images/s/mexico-teotihuacan-2-s.jpg

This was about a millennium before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.


mass farming techniques whatever.

Large-scale agriculture is generally the foundation for mass urban development in human social organization. The existence of maize in Mesoamerica (and to a lesser extent, corn, squash, and beans), and potatoes in the Andes were the mechanisms that engineered their city-building cultures; the existence of crops eliminated the need to primarily focus on hunting and gathering.


I think it's fairly obvious that the Europeans were technologically superior to the Native Americans at the time. Including the Aztecs, Incas Mayans etc.

If you don't know about any of those things, why are you making such broad assertions? It seems to me like you believe the Eurocentric myth of Amerindian nomadism, when the majority of the indigenous population was urban.


Im not saying the Europeans were better, or that this justifies what happened. But saying it was a technological level playing field is rediculous.

Europe is situated on the Eurasian continent, which contains over a third of the earth's land mass and massive amounts of arable land and domesticable crops and livestock. The continent is uniquely situated for particularly effective diffusion of inventions and capital goods amenable to their production, so I would think it unusual if Europe didn't contain more advanced technology than the Americas on many fronts. However, there were also areas in which America rivaled or surpassed Europe, since their distance from Eurasia was a hindrance, but not a complete barrier to ingenuity and development.


That would suggest that the Native Americans were as likely to colonise Europe as the vice verca. Which, when stated in this way, is obviously rediculous.

Actually, the ability to successfully colonize distant continents would only imply shipbuilding capacities and superior military technology, not a general technological superiority. But that's when ignoring the issues of plague and Indian heterogeneity, as you have.

Native Americans could not have successfully colonized Europe at the time that Europeans colonized America, but once again, technological inferiority was not the primary issue. Regardless of location, they would have been susceptible to European infectious disease because of their lack of previous exposure and immunization. And the sustained contacts between Eurasians and the more abundant number of livestock on the Eurasian continent facilitated disease flow (but gradual resistance to disease along with it), in a way that could never occur in America.


Oh wow that has so much to do with who was technologically superior during the colonisation.

Um, yes, it...does. It's related to possession of weapons, after all, not that weapon advancement is the sole measure of technological advancement. And since diffusion was the foundation for the importation of gunpowder into Europe from Asia, it's a bit odd that you don't see it as a relevant factor in equalizing skirmishes between colonists and indigenous peoples when the abudance of firearms in America increased.

[ComradeOm]

The Spanish under Cortes had less than 600 men, 20 horses and less than 10 small cannons. The firearms they used were primitive and frequent to malfunction and they had only a few of these. Aztec weapons featured obsidian and flint pieces that were sharper than steel, and it was recorded by a Spanish soldier to have been able to decapitate a horse in two blowsYet the most significant military advance in Central America prior to the arrival of the Spanish was the bow and arrow. They had no iron (a staple of European weaponry since Celtic times) and bronze working had only been introduced two-three centuries before the Spanish arrival. Hence the use of sharpened stones. Arguing that the Aztecs, or other pre-Columbian civilisations, were on par, in terms of military technology, with the European invaders is absurd


Europe is situated on the Eurasian continent, which contains over a third of the earth's land mass and massive amounts of arable land and domesticable crops and livestock. The continent is uniquely situated for particularly effective diffusion of inventions and capital goods amenable to their production, so I would think it unusual if Europe didn't contain more advanced technology than the Americas on many frontsWhich is an admission disguised as an excuse

No one here is regurgitating that Eurocentric myth that Europeans possessed a uniquely innovative or ambitious spirit that drove them to global dominance. There were good material reasons for the European technological advantage over the Amerindians but that is not the same as denying that the difference did not exist. Europe was simply more technologically advanced than the Americas... as were the Islamic, Indian, and Chinese societies at the same time


Actually, the ability to successfully colonize distant continents would only imply shipbuilding capacities and superior military technology, not a general technological superiorityOnly if you consider woodworking and metallurgy to be uniquely military or maritime technologies with no economic applications. Both contemporary Islamic and Asian societies possessed strong naval traditions but did not employ them in a colonising role. No pre-Columbus civilisation had anything approaching this

[Forward Union]

I referred to the arquebus and early musket, and should have referred to the arquebus exclusively in the cases of Spanish "battles" with the Native Americans of Mesoamerica and the Andes. But the author of 1491 himself casts aspersions on the value of some European firearms:

If I remember correctly, when reading a book about the Conquistadors, many of their battles didn't come down to military strength in the initial invasions. The Spanish took a large part of Peru with one cannon and 40 soldiers because the Natives thought they were angry Gods from the sea. And it happened to coincide with a solar eclipse and the structural collapse of their main temple.


However, I never stated that Europeans didn't possess superior military technology, though I would state that the urban civilizations of America in particular probably surpassed various European civilizations in general technology; the back cover of 1491 itself states that, "The astonishing Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan had running water and immaculately clean streets, and was larger than any contemporary European city."

Running water existed in Europe since the Carthaginians. By the year 1500 Europeans had invented mechanical devices, like the Printing press, had ships that could sail around the world, international highways etc. Don't misunderstand me though, I am very aware of the advanced nature of the Southern Native American civilisations, having crude forms of brain surgery, good mathematics and fairly advanced federal political systems. They were not exceptionally inferior, and most of the Europeans technological superiority had come from trade with the east. I also am aware that most people don't realise all this. Though, my initial comments were directed at the Northern Natives, the Seoux, Cherokee etc, who certainly did not have large cities or running water.

However, the fact is, even factoring in the powerful empires, they were all still technologically inferior, as well as incredibly superstitious.


I stated that this superior military technology was not a significant factor in their conquest, which was correct, since the most significant factor was the spread of infectious disease, followed by the efforts of other Indian enemies, not Europeans. The exception might be the steel sword, but other forms of "superior technology" were in short supply.

Ok, I agree with this but it depends on the era as well. The later conquests and wars into the 16/1700s were certainly down to superior firepower (and militray experience)

[Forward Union]

You've never seen Teotihuacan? This was about a millennium before the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. [quote]

I've seen it in person actually, and it still doesnt outdate Rome, which was equally impressive and built much earlier. But this isn't a dick size competition, what are the implications of all this? You seem to me to be attacking a strawman in some way, I am very aware of how advanced the Aztecs, Mayans etc were. But they were not equally matched on a number of important cases with the Europeans. As pointed out, they still used stone tools and had no forms of mechanisation, efficient lighting etc. I am not about to list all the techonological superiorities that the Europeans, Asians, and North Africans had in comparison at the time.

[QUOTE]If you don't know about any of those things, why are you making such broad assertions? It seems to me like you believe the Eurocentric myth of Amerindian nomadism, when the majority of the indigenous population was urban. Yes, the fact that you have this impression of my argument is very obvious in your retorts.


Native Americans could not have successfully colonized Europe at the time that Europeans colonized America, but once again, technological inferiority was not the primary issue. Right, but I was mainly taking issue with the statement that the Natives of the Americas were NOT technologically inferior.

[Queercommie Girl]

I said that the rightists didn't like it; the moderate rightists disliked it because they believed that European cultural supremacy was responsible for the triumph of Western European imperialism and the extreme rightists disliked it because they believed that European racial supremacy was responsible (though that explanation doesn't indicate why Eastern Europeans didn't expand as successfully). J. Phillipe Rushton offered a critical review, for example, and in line with that, the general consensus on Stormfront is against the book and its Jewish author. I haven't actually read GGaS myself; I own it, but I've lent it to someone because I don't have much time to read things.

Fuck the rightists with their fucking stupid ideologies.

However, I'm not naive to think that right-wing ideas are not prevalent within the self-proclaimed leftist camp as well, even though often it is implicit. Racism also exists among the left and the working class.

But technological differences between cultures did exist. Otherwise the European conquest of the Americas could not be explained except by idealistic "mystical" and "moral" factors. (E.g. Europeans are inherently bad or some shit like that)

[Franz Fanonipants]

GG&S' problem is, when read without nuance, basically makes the conquest of the Americas "inevitable." I of course don't think that was Diamond's point, as inevitability is not something he addresses, but rather looks at unequal or even separate development. I do fear his North - South, East - West axis of development theory is a little too reductionist, but overall its a decent book, despite Eurocentrism.

1491 is sort of, to me, a counterpoint. 1491, instead of detailing obsessively the whys of how Europeans conquered rather focuses on Indian societies and their own unique patterns of development.

[Pavlov's House Party]

GG&S' problem is, when read without nuance, basically makes the conquest of the Americas "inevitable." I of course don't think that was Diamond's point, as inevitability is not something he addresses, but rather looks at unequal or even separate development. I do fear his North - South, East - West axis of development theory is a little too reductionist, but overall its a decent book, despite Eurocentrism.

From a Marxist analysis, the conquest was inevitable in the sense that the fledgling European capitalism required expansion on a world scale to establish itself.

From the Communist Manifesto:

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

The development of capitalism was only possible through its creation of a world market and the eventual colonization of the Americas.

[Franz Fanonipants]

The development of capitalism was only possible through its creation of a world market and the eventual colonization of the Americas.

This is correct.

But the development of capitalism was not inevitable.

[Queercommie Girl]

This is correct.

But the development of capitalism was not inevitable.

In the larger context the development of capitalism generally is inevitable.

In East Asia, capitalism began to develop independently from European capitalism at around the same time, during late Ming dynasty China (16th century CE) there were relatively large craftsmen workshops that employed hundreds of people. As well as the traditional peasant rebellions, late Ming dynasty also for the first time witnessed large-scale miner strikes. But due to the persistence of the bureaucracy stalled.

The independent development of capitalist relations in more than one part of the world demonstrates that capitalism is not unique to Europe to European culture, further suggesting that the rise of the West is based on technology and economics, not culture or race.

If you say capitalism is not inevitable but it did develop in Europe there must be some unique factors in Europe spurring on its development, like cultural factors, which is precisely falling into the cultural essentialist right-wing fallacy.

[Franz Fanonipants]

If you say capitalism is not inevitable but it did develop in Europe there must be some unique factors in Europe spurring on its development, like cultural factors, which is precisely falling into the cultural essentialist right-wing fallacy.

Capitalism developed in more than one place I don't disagree with that, however, the TRIUMPH of Western Capitalism was not inevitable.

That's my point.

[Dimentio]

What about, roads, gas lanterns, stone structures, (assuming we're talking about the 15-1600s) mass farming techniques whatever. I think it's fairly obvious that the Europeans were technologically superior to the Native Americans at the time. Including the Aztecs, Incas Mayans etc.

When it came to stone structures and mass farming techniques, the Incans were probably superior to any other civilisation in the world except East Asia. You should read up on the technologies and social structure of the Incan Empire.

While the Romans did have impressive baths and buildings and sewage systems, most European cities in the 16th century did not have sewage or even clean wells, disposing their waste in mid-street and so on. Gaslights appeared in European cities firstly in the 18th century I think.

I concede though that the Europeans did have superior metallurgy and ship-building techniques, as well as superior weaponry.

[Franz Fanonipants]

When it came to stone structures and mass farming techniques, the Incans were probably superior to any other civilisation in the world except East Asia. You should read up on the technologies and social structure of the Incan Empire.

And go to Cusco.

[Raúl Duke]

I once read one analysis that horse cavalry gave the spaniards a particular advantage.

[Franz Fanonipants]

I once read one analysis that horse cavalry gave the spaniards a particular advantage.

So did the cloth armor that they picked up...from the Triple Alliance/Tlaxcalans.

e: apparently, though, and this is from Bernal Diaz del Castillo, a maquahuitl could cut off the head of a unarmored horse with a swing. it would ruin the blade, but it could be done.

[Forward Union]

While the Romans did have impressive baths and buildings and sewage systems, most European cities in the 16th century did not have sewage or even clean wells, disposing their waste in mid-street and so on. Gaslights appeared in European cities firstly in the 18th century I think.


And while the Mayans had much less impressive layouts, architecture and technology (including no sewage systems, or efficient construction, mechanisation whatsoever) even centuaries after the Romans, most Natives didn't even endulge in the mediocre fruits of Mayan society.


I concede though that the Europeans did have superior metallurgy and ship-building techniques, as well as superior weaponry.

Only adds to the point.

[Dimentio]

And while the Mayans had much less impressive layouts, architecture and technology (including no sewage systems, or efficient construction, mechanisation whatsoever) even centuaries after the Romans, most Natives didn't even endulge in the mediocre fruits of Mayan society.


I wasn't talking about the Mayans, but the Incans, who evidently did not only have complex sewage systems, but a civilisation dependent on a highly complex irrigation system.

[Franz Fanonipants]

And while the Mayans had much less impressive layouts, architecture and technology (including no sewage systems, or efficient construction, mechanisation whatsoever) even centuaries after the Romans, most Natives didn't even endulge in the mediocre fruits of Mayan society.

Imperialism rears its ugly head. Again.

E. Not to mention that the Maya basically lived in a tropical area with no potable water other than that found in cenotes, but somehow against all odds managed to have drinking water. With all of your dismissive views on the capacity of Indians, do you have an explanation on how the Mayans built the infrastructure to collect water?

Cus you seem to have an expansive knowledge of Precolumbian societies and I'd really dig learning from you.

[Agnapostate]

Yet the most significant military advance in Central America prior to the arrival of the Spanish was the bow and arrow.

You mean Mesoamerica? The Aztecs' capital and central administration in central Mexico places them outside of Central America.


They had no iron (a staple of European weaponry since Celtic times) and bronze working had only been introduced two-three centuries before the Spanish arrival. Hence the use of sharpened stones.

Mesoamericans lacked iron, but I'm not sure of the point in stating that "bronze working had only been introduced two-three centuries before the Spanish arrival." Primitive muskets were used in the United States only two to three centuries ago, and what would their role be in modern warfare? Now, while obsidian and flint were used in the maquahuitl, was this a significant defect in their function in certain forms of melee combat? It was a Spanish observation that these Aztec swords could decapitate horses, not a Mexica claim.


Arguing that the Aztecs, or other pre-Columbian civilisations, were on par, in terms of military technology, with the European invaders is absurd

Since no one in this thread has made such a claim, this seems to be a response to a strawman. My own claim was that European "technological superiority" was not a primary cause of "conquest" (more of a scavenge than a conquest), because the archaeological and anthropological consensus is that the most significant cause was plague. It's not inaccurate, however, to note that the defective nature of European firearms in the arquebus and early pistol (to say nothing of their scarcity), may have placed them at a disadvantage in comparison to native arrows. I did state that the technological superiority of the steel sword was more significant than firearms, however.


Which is an admission disguised as an excuse

How would an "excuse" exist without a reason for an excuse? If there is an excuse advanced, it seems that there would need to be some sort of deficiency admitted.


No one here is regurgitating that Eurocentric myth that Europeans possessed a uniquely innovative or ambitious spirit that drove them to global dominance.

Some people do seem to be regurgitating that Eurocentric myth that Europeans dominated America because they were technologically superior. Regardless of whether such technological superiority existed or not, this was simply not the central reason; the inadvertent spread of viral disease was the central reason.


There were good material reasons for the European technological advantage over the Amerindians but that is not the same as denying that the difference did not exist. Europe was simply more technologically advanced than the Americas... as were the Islamic, Indian, and Chinese societies at the same time

Actually, while I might have been inclined to agree with the comments about military technological superiority, this probably goes too far. Europe and America were not sufficiently homogenous to make generic declarations of overall technological superiority...and even if Europe was ultimate more technologically advanced, there was nothing "simple" about it.


Only if you consider woodworking and metallurgy to be uniquely military or maritime technologies with no economic applications.

That's an interesting point, but it's still the case that armed forces with superior military technology could still defeat their enemies even if they represented a society that was technologically inferior in many other ways.


Both contemporary Islamic and Asian societies possessed strong naval traditions but did not employ them in a colonising role.

Then what exactly occurred in Iberia?


No pre-Columbus civilisation had anything approaching this

Approaching what, a naval tradition? America was probably originally settled via coastal migration, as indicated in Mitochondrial Population Genomics Supports a Single Pre-Clovis Origin with a Coastal Route for the Peopling of the Americas (http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297%2808%2900139-0).


If I remember correctly, when reading a book about the Conquistadors, many of their battles didn't come down to military strength in the initial invasions. The Spanish took a large part of Peru with one cannon and 40 soldiers because the Natives thought they were angry Gods from the sea. And it happened to coincide with a solar eclipse and the structural collapse of their main temple.

The battles came down to the role of infectious disease in eliminating the majority of the native population, as well as the thousands of indigenous allies that assisted Spanish conquistadores. While they retained administrative control of these operations, the vast majority of the footsoldiers (i.e. the actual combatants), were Indians.

"The books are filled with names of kings.
Was it kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?...
Young Alexander conquered India.
He alone?"

The exception would be the "battle" that "conquered" the Inca empire, which was Pizarro's cavalry massacring unarmed opponents and kidnapping the emperor to force surrender, executing him even after he payed their demanded ransom, incidentally.


Though, my initial comments were directed at the Northern Natives, the Seoux, Cherokee etc, who certainly did not have large cities or running water.

What is the basis for division between the "Northern" and "Southern" Natives? It can't be the continents, since Mesoamerica is in North America. Moreover, what do you make of the fact that the Mississippian Mound Builder society (architects of Cahokia) existed north of Cherokee territory? And why would you compare tribes to states instead of states to states anyway? The Indian urban civilizations contained the highest population densities.


However, the fact is, even factoring in the powerful empires, they were all still technologically inferior, as well as incredibly superstitious.

And those urban civilizations possessed higher population densities in their largest cities, more significant administrative control over greater territory than any European power (the Inca empire), the Aztecs possessed a more comprehensive medical system than the Spanish, and in terms of incredible superstition, the Spanish practiced a religion that involved attaching heretics to a stake and setting them on fire.


Ok, I agree with this but it depends on the era as well. The later conquests and wars into the 16/1700s were certainly down to superior firepower (and militray experience)

By the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, infectious disease had taken its toll and eliminated the majority of the indigenous population, so no, plague still played the most significant part. And as I've mentioned repeatedly, after decades and even centuries of contact with Europeans, Indians acquired firearms.


I've seen it in person actually,

Then...why did you ask about stone structures? You must have been aware of the existence of pre-Columbian stone structures if you've visited some of these ruins.


and it still doesnt outdate Rome, which was equally impressive and built much earlier.

And Teotihuacan pre-dates Venice and there were architectural constructions in Tikal that pre-date the largest in Rome. What's the point intended to be, exactly?


But this isn't a dick size competition, what are the implications of all this?

You tell me.


You seem to me to be attacking a strawman in some way, I am very aware of how advanced the Aztecs, Mayans etc were. But they were not equally matched on a number of important cases with the Europeans.

And the "Europeans," if such a broad group can be said to exist (I'm sure you wouldn't welcome me comparing Germanic and Celtic tribes with Mayan urban civilization, for example), were surpassed by Indian civilizations on a number of important cases also, as with their most advanced cities exceeding the size and population of contemporaneous European cities.


As pointed out, they still used stone tools

That's not true. Who told you that? Here are some images of bronze axes used by the Maya that I posted the last time a person on this forum said that they only used stone tools.

http://www.precolumbianweapons.com/images/axe.ht30.jpg

http://www.precolumbianweapons.com/images/axe.ht28.jpg


and had no forms of mechanisation,

Which fifteenth and early sixteenth forms of mechanization did you have in mind?


efficient lighting etc.

I'd speculate that no one had very "efficient lighting" at the time.


I am not about to list all the techonological superiorities that the Europeans, Asians, and North Africans had in comparison at the time.

You didn't mention Asians or North Africans; you mentioned the technological superiority of Europeans. While Europeans might often acquire technological innovations from those regions (paper, gunpowder, etc.), there was not always perfect diffusion, and if Europe and America were both isolated, America would probably come out ahead because of the greater land mass and higher population. Regardless, I never even stated that Europeans were not technologically superior (though I still think that an inappropriately broad generalization); I stated that technological superiority was not a central cause of native downfall.


Yes, the fact that you have this impression of my argument is very obvious in your retorts.

You say that "my initial comments were directed at the Northern Natives, the Seoux, Cherokee," so what am I to make of your posts?


Right, but I was mainly taking issue with the statement that the Natives of the Americas were NOT technologically inferior.

You responded to my comment that "technological inferiority" was not the primary cause or characteristic of the European conquest of America.

[Agnapostate]

And while the Mayans had much less impressive layouts, architecture and technology (including no sewage systems, or efficient construction, mechanisation whatsoever) even centuaries after the Romans, most Natives didn't even endulge in the mediocre fruits of Mayan society.

Um, we had a thread about this: http://www.revleft.com/vb/mayans-had-plumbingi-t134681/index.html

[Wolf Larson]

Caral (2600 BC - South America) was perhaps the most advanced civilization (socially) of all time. They lived for 1000 years without war....and what sort of economic system do you think they had? They had a network of cities stretching from Peru down into Bolivia and up into Columbia. All linked by roads and trade routes. The fishermen fished and gave fish to the farmers for vegetables etc and so on. There was no private property. They were socially advanced. Not necessarily technologically but I'd say their humanity was firmly in tact.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S3objRWDOE4&feature=related

More than I can say for capitalists who have supposedly given us all of this wonderful technology.


(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_qG5kfootUM&feature=related)

[ComradeOm]

Mesoamericans lacked iron, but I'm not sure of the point in stating that "bronze working had only been introduced two-three centuries before the Spanish arrival." Primitive muskets were used in the United States only two to three centuries ago, and what would their role be in modern warfare?It should be obvious - bronze working arrived in Mesoamerica circa 1200AD but had been known to Europeans since around 3000BC. This is one of the most glaring examples of the technological gap between Europe and the Americas


Now, while obsidian and flint were used in the maquahuitl, was this a significant defect in their function in certain forms of melee combat?Of course it was. It significantly restricts the user to "certain forms of melee combat". Without iron working you could never develop effective armour, muskets, machinery, ships, etc, etc

I have no doubt that various stone implements used by Paleolithic Europeans could also be exceptionally sharp but that did not prevent them being abandoned once superior materials were developed


How would an "excuse" exist without a reason for an excuse? If there is an excuse advanced, it seems that there would need to be some sort of deficiency admittedSee your attempts, above and below, to portray the Amerindians as not being technologically backwards relative to the European conquerors. If this is not the case - and you accept that the Aztecs, for example, were significantly behind Europe in key technological areas - then all you have to do is say so. Disease does not factor into this


Actually, while I might have been inclined to agree with the comments about military technological superiority, this probably goes too far. Europe and America were not sufficiently homogenous to make generic declarations of overall technological superiority...Because...? There were of course huge discrepancies in the technological spread in Europe alone (particularly rural areas) but even the most backwards areas possessed technologies that we would consider exceptionally basic (such as the wheel or metallurgy) that were lacking in the Americas. Furthermore, even if the knowledge was not evenly applied across the continent, it was preserved and known about in many centres of learning or commerce. Which is not even noting the general technological superiority of the Islamic and Chinese civilisation to Europe at the time


That's an interesting point, but it's still the case that armed forces with superior military technology could still defeat their enemies even if they represented a society that was technologically inferior in many other ways. Can you think of an example, other than the current topic, in which this occurred? Military technologically does not advance in isolation. As I've already noted, the Spanish invasion would have been impossible without a wide variety of 'civilian technologies'. These include metalworking, shipbuilding, and navigation, to name but three relevant ones


Then what exactly occurred in Iberia? I suppose you want to point out when the Caliphate equipped a vast fleet of ocean-going ships and sent them across the Mediterranean to invade Iberia? You might find that the North African army was ferried across at Gibraltar by a small fleet of trading vessels :glare:


Approaching what, a naval tradition? America was probably originally settled via coastal migration, as indicated in Mitochondrial Population Genomics Supports a Single Pre-Clovis Origin with a Coastal Route for the Peopling of the Americas (http://www.cell.com/AJHG/abstract/S0002-9297%2808%2900139-0)So was India (probably), and Australia. The ability to construct crude boats for migratory purposes does not maritime or commercial tradition make. Certainly not when compared to the contemporary Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, English, French, Arabic, Chinese, etc, etc trade fleets

[Franz Fanonipants]

bros, you guys are racists i really hate to tell you but you are.

your doctrinal belief in european superiority is kinda nauseating. and ahistorical.

not that indians were superior, but that there was WAY more of a technological/cultural parity than you're willing to admit here, and it pretty much shows off how reactionary and racist certain elements of the left are that you all are continuing this.

[Queercommie Girl]

bros, you guys are racists i really hate to tell you but you are.

your doctrinal belief in european superiority is kinda nauseating. and ahistorical.

not that indians were superior, but that there was WAY more of a technological/cultural parity than you're willing to admit here, and it pretty much shows off how reactionary and racist certain elements of the left are that you all are continuing this.

Europeans and Asians were technologically superior to Native Americans and Africans in those days. Between Europeans and Asians there never were significant gaps. Even during the Sino-British Opium War, Chinese technology was not significantly behind that of the British, China only lost due to severe feudal corruption. It was a problem of the political system, not technological inferiority. And today many parts of East Asia such as Japan are economically and technology on par with Europe and America.

Europeans and Asians had more elaborate writing systems, advanced iron and steel metallurgy, sophisticated military tactics, advanced ship-building and map-making techniques, and gunpowder. Of course, I said Europeans and Asians, not just Europeans, since the Chinese invented gunpower, and the Chinese admiral Zheng He had huge ocean-going ships a century before the Spanish did.

To admit an objective fact is not racist, Europe and Asia had superior productivity. And with the European capitalist revolution, Europe also had a superior productive relation compared with Asia. Ultimately Europe defeated Asia (but never on the same scale as the European conquests of America and Africa) not primarily due to advanced technology, but a more advanced productive relation - capitalism vs. feudalism.

On the other hand, not admitting this could actually be racist. How could the Europeans defeat the Native Americans if it weren't for technological and political superiority? Was it cultural, racial or spiritual superiority I wonder? Or was it because Europeans are intrinsically more evil and are natural-born conquerors?

[Franz Fanonipants]

it isn't an objective fact. European colonies were undersupplied, isolated, and broadly were not up to the standard of continental European "technological superiority."

it wasn't cultural or other superiority that allowed the Europeans to conquer the Americas, but rather, in many cases, luck. Cortes was an adept political thinker, but without the fortune of having his Malinalli or other translators, all the political talent in the world would have not saved him.

In fact, I have to cast a dubious eye on your continuing insistence that conquest stems from any kind of superiority, comrade.

[Hiratsuka]

I haven't read Guns, Germs and Steel,but I do know that James Blaut criticized it for being Eurocentric. That alone won't make me not read it, just curious as to what you think of the charge (and what that charge is).

Heh, well the book advertises itself to be purportedly focused on Euroasian affairs.

[Hiratsuka]

. .
>
"
Aztecs stone buildings? Check. Mass Farming? Check. Roads? Check. As far back as Caral we saw these things in South America. The only reason the Spanish defeated the was because of disease. Further north in the Americas the same coupled with the fact the native Americans had no centralized state.

Disease and either corrupt or fragmenting political lifestyles.* Having no sense of tribal unity while simultaneously oppressing peoples undid the Aztecs more than any disease. To be perfectly honest, I think if Cortes had not arrived, the Aztecs would have encountered a similiar fate just by continuing its practices as a domineering empire - just not as easily. Cortes was a brilliant tactician who, aided by religious superstitions and an angry audience of nations, lit the fire cracker first.

[Queercommie Girl]

it isn't an objective fact. European colonies were undersupplied, isolated, and broadly were not up to the standard of continental European "technological superiority."

it wasn't cultural or other superiority that allowed the Europeans to conquer the Americas, but rather, in many cases, luck. Cortes was an adept political thinker, but without the fortune of having his Malinalli or other translators, all the political talent in the world would have not saved him.

In fact, I have to cast a dubious eye on your continuing insistence that conquest stems from any kind of superiority, comrade.

To say that conquest results from the superiority of productive force and productive relation is not in any way saying that conquest is justifiable. We simply need to make sense of world history in an objective and scientific manner. And to say that superiority of force results from technology and political system is clearly not racist, it's not the same as saying that superiority results from genetics or culture.

I would grant you that in the case of the conquest of the Americas "luck" was involved, since the natives were hit hard by European diseases. This was a far more significant factor than your idea about the so-called "political adept-ness" of a single individual - as socialists we should focus less on individuals and more on groups. However, in the case of the European colonisation of Africa and Asia, "luck" was simply not a factor.

Please tell me, why did the British defeat the Chinese during the Opium War? Was it "luck" also? Can every single instance of European victory in the last 500 years be explained by "luck"? Does this mean that God is on the side of the Europeans? In the case of the Opium War even the technological gap was relatively small. China also had warships with cannons and firearms, even if they can't shoot as far or as fast.

[Queercommie Girl]

Marx always spoke on behalf of oppressed peoples and against colonialism. However he did this in a dialectical sense, he also recognised the more "positive" side of colonialism, a manifestation of superior productivity. In the Communist Manifesto he said:

The discovery of America, the rounding of the Cape, opened up fresh ground for the rising bourgeoisie. The East-Indian and Chinese markets, the colonisation of America, trade with the colonies, the increase in the means of exchange and in commodities generally, gave to commerce, to navigation, to industry, an impulse never before known, and thereby, to the revolutionary element in the tottering feudal society, a rapid development.

... ...

The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

[Franz Fanonipants]

That quote from Marx is pretty deeply neutral. It doesn't convince me that old Carlitos was somehow saying, "Guys this was the only way it could go down!"

Anyways, conquest does not manifest itself from set superiority in any form. Instead, the superiority of a conqueror is deeply situational. Cortes' political adeptness (and translators) allows him to understand what in theory should be an entirely alien political situation, the Triple Alliance has become a major imperial power and as a result made a lot of enemies. He doesn't need superior technology or production to recruit an army a few ten thousand strong of people from subject states in the Valley of Mexico/surrounding areas, he simply capitalizes on the internal disarray within the Triple Alliance. Conditionally, maybe his understanding of the state of Empire was superior, but his limited ability to resupply musket powder, horses, or steel armor is pretty much canceled out by Triple Alliance strength in Tenochtitlán and the Valley of Mexico.

As for the Chinese, I'm not an expert in anglo-sino history so I can't cite like I can with the conquest of Mexico, but I'd argue that there were probably a set of circumstances (internal division, military inefficiency, etc) that, influenced of course by material conditions, resulted in a British victory. Of course, there's a world of difference between the conquest of Mexico and the Opium wars.

The thing is that of course material superiority in terms of production helps in military campaigns, but other material conditions affect conquest just as deeply. Political and social conditions that stem from material issues aid or draw on conquests and military campaigns just as much as matériel.

It is reductionist and racist to posit that the conquest of the Americas occurred solely as a result of an assumed European technological advantage. It denies Indian societies their agency and misrepresents their levels of development (which did not follow the Asian-European path, but were most likely just as developed in the period), both things that white supremacists have done historically.

E. And don't go starting with that "Does GOD love Europeans more?!" bullshit, no one is suggesting that.

Though, I did say a prayer to Santiago Matamoros/indios before I started in on you in this thread, so maybe...God is on MY side. Makes u think.

[Queercommie Girl]

That quote from Marx is pretty deeply neutral. It doesn't convince me that old Carlitos was somehow saying, "Guys this was the only way it could go down!"


No it doesn't say history is completely deterministic, but it does suggest that there is a "positive" side to colonialism and admitting that isn't necessarily racist.



Anyways, conquest does not manifest itself from set superiority in any form. Instead, the superiority of a conqueror is deeply situational. Cortes' political adeptness (and translators) allows him to understand what in theory should be an entirely alien political situation, the Triple Alliance has become a major imperial power and as a result made a lot of enemies. He doesn't need superior technology or production to recruit an army a few ten thousand strong of people from subject states in the Valley of Mexico/surrounding areas, he simply capitalizes on the internal disarray within the Triple Alliance. Conditionally, maybe his understanding of the state of Empire was superior, but his limited ability to resupply musket powder, horses, or steel armor is pretty much canceled out by Triple Alliance strength in Tenochtitlán and the Valley of Mexico.
But obviously technological superiority and the effects of European diseases are far more important factors than just a single individual. Do you ever see Marx and Engel analyse world history from such an individualistic perspective? That's a bourgeois way of looking at history, that human history is largely created by a small number of great "heroes" and "villains", rather than by the majority of the people at large.

Even the so-called political and tactical "adeptness" of Cortes can still be explained by more fundamental factors such as the more developed status of European military and political science. The sheer dis-unity among the native American groups is also a manifestation of their political backwardness, they were not able to form large, stable and loyal empires in the European and Asian mode. The consciousness of nation-hood is itself a relatively late development.



As for the Chinese, I'm not an expert in anglo-sino history so I can't cite like I can with the conquest of Mexico, but I'd argue that there were probably a set of circumstances (internal division, military inefficiency, etc) that, influenced of course by material conditions, resulted in a British victory. Of course, there's a world of difference between the conquest of Mexico and the Opium wars.
The point is simply that you cannot attribute everything to "luck" or just short-term factors. What is the underlying fundamental reason for the repeated victory of Europeans over non-Europeans in the last 500 years? In the case of the Africans and Native Americans, it is due to both superior productivity and productive relation. (Iron Age/Gunpowder over Bronze Age/Stone Age and Capitalism over Tribalism/Slavery) In the case of the Asians, it is primarily due to superior productive relation. (Capitalism over Feudalism)



The thing is that of course material superiority in terms of production helps in military campaigns, but other material conditions affect conquest just as deeply. Political and social conditions that stem from material issues aid or draw on conquests and military campaigns just as much as matériel.
Which is why I didn't say it was just due to better technology and productivity. It was also due to better productive relations.



It is reductionist and racist to posit that the conquest of the Americas occurred solely as a result of an assumed European technological advantage. It denies Indian societies their agency and misrepresents their levels of development (which did not follow the Asian-European path, but were most likely just as developed in the period), both things that white supremacists have done historically.
But how is saying one group of people is technologically more advanced than another group racist? Technology is not based on race. Anyone can learn the technology and other peoples can overtake the Europeans.



E. And don't go starting with that "Does GOD love Europeans more?!" bullshit, no one is suggesting that.

Though, I did say a prayer to Santiago Matamoros/indios before I started in on you in this thread, so maybe...God is on MY side. Makes u think.Obviously, I don't literally mean this kind of thing. But there is a risk that if we all go down your road of analysis and explain everything by "luck", the crazy religious right-wing like the KKK would start to explain world history with divine justification.

[Franz Fanonipants]

The sheer dis-unity among the native American groups is also a manifestation of their political backwardness, they were not able to form large, stable and loyal empires in the European and Asian mode.

(Iron Age/Gunpowder over Bronze Age/Stone Age and Capitalism over Tribalism/Slavery)

I'll respond to you more fully later, but dude honestly those two quotes above are funny as hell.

[Agnapostate]

Firstly, I'll be at work during the entire week and won't be back until late Friday night and probably won't be posting until Saturday or Sunday, so kindly don't think that I've scampered and abandoned the topic when I'm not back until the weekend.


It should be obvious - bronze working arrived in Mesoamerica circa 1200AD but had been known to Europeans since around 3000BC.

That is untrue. Bronze working existed in western Mesoamerica (specifically western Mexico), prior to that, as indicated in Recent insights into the metallurgical technologies of ancient Mesoamerica (http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa5348/is_199905/ai_n21438921/?tag=content;col1). On that note, you may find it interesting that "Metalworking was initially introduced to West Mexico through maritime trade with South America," which indicates that beliefs in an absence of maritime commercial trade are false.

Once again, I'm still unsure of the purpose of your statements that certain forms of technology existed in Europe before they existed in America if they both existed at the point of contact, especially since this dialogue is an outgrowth of my contention that superior European technology was not the cause of the conquest of America by European powers. While the point that technology is interrelated and advancements in some areas are likely to exist alongside advancements in others because of the more advanced nature of core materials or comprehension of underlying principles is well made and well taken, the various "civilian" applications of iron do not have the same significance in the limited dimensions of violent conflict that military applications do. If a numerically superior force is given automatic weapons without having synthesized advanced metallurgy prior to that, they will still defeat their similarly armed foes. The Plains Indians' acquisition and breeding of horses (particularly the southern Plains Indians), placed them at an advantage over less-equipped European colonists in the region, even if horses had been imported to America from Europe.


This is one of the most glaring examples of the technological gap between Europe and the Americas

And the deficiencies in comprehensive medicine during the European Dark Ages prior to the importation of surgical methods and instruments devised by the Arab physician al-Zahrawi compared to the nature of comprehensive medicine in Mesoamerica and the Andes would have also been "one of the most glaring examples of the technological gap between Europe and the Americas." Did Europeans possess quinine?

The Mayan use of the superior Mesoamerican Long Count Calendar had provided them with knowledge of the "scale of eternity," as Wright puts it, and they were told by arriving Spaniards that, "God Our Lord, One and Eternal, created Heaven and Earth and a man and a woman from whom you and I and all the people of the world are descended...because of the great multitude begotten from these over the past five thousand and some years since the world was made..." You certainly know that the Mayan use of zero in positional notation predated any European use, though that's veering off from technology proper and even science proper into applied mathematical knowledge.


Of course it was. It significantly restricts the user to "certain forms of melee combat".

Which was the focus of my post. In the context of melee combat, there was no significant limitation posed by the usage of flint and obsidian, since it was recorded that these weapons were powerful enough to decapitate horses, and had bludgeoning rather than thrusting power. In this specific example, inference through extrapolation of the usage of volcanic stone in these weapons to make broader judgments about Aztec technology would fail, since you've conceded that Aztec metallurgy existed. You wouldn't be aware of that if you used this specific weapon to form those broader conclusions.


Without iron working you could never develop effective armour,

Before I go into the specific details of your comments about iron and "effective" military technology, the Bronze Age produced the increase of slings, bows, and javelins in addition to previously existing knives, swords, axes, and spears, along with the Mesopotamian and Egyptian chariots, looking to a book I own called Battles of the Ancient World:


n 1450 BC armies from a rival [to Minoa] Aegean kingom, Mycanae, may have had such an easy time defeating and nearly destroying the Minoan civilization. Mycenae, unlike the Minoans completely defined by war, became dominant in the region. The Mycenaeans had intricately organized armies, but they were not innovative ones. Even into the Iron Age, Mycenaean warriors preferred using bronze weapons, although they did use light chariots but solely as means of transportation to take elite warriors to the battlefield where they dismounted and engaged in single combat with their enemy counterparts.

It also has nothing to do with suggesting that iron does not generally represent an innovation over bronze, but instead suggesting that there's not so significant a disparity between iron and bronze melee and ranged non-gunpowder weapons that extenuating factors such as overwhelming numerical superiority and the spread of infectious plague can be dismissed.

Going back to armor, Mann states of the Inca that, "Soldiers wore armor made from sculpted, quilted cloth that was almost as effective at shielding the body as European armor and much lighter. After trying it, the conquistadores ditched their steel breasplates and helmets wholesale and dressed like Inka infantry when they fought."


muskets,

The arquebus was the firearm of the sixteenth century conquests of the most densely populated native regions. Muskets were not abundant among European armed forces until the seventeenth century, and after decades or even centuries of European presence in America at that time, along with alliances formed between Indian and European powers against other Indian and European powers, Indians had acquired firearms. Now, it's been said that they did not have firearm production capacities, which was true in light of the fact that the surviving Indians were numerically decimated and members of less urban civilizations than those of Mesoamerica and the Andes, as well as subject to theft of their territory and productive resources. Neither did most encroaching colonists have firearm production capacities, which were mainly in the hands of organized governments. And even aside from that, the Spaniards that were involved in the conquests of the most densely populated regions had limited access to firearms, which were in scarce supply.


machinery,

Which "machinery" did you have in mind? The Industrial Revolution did not begin until the mid-to-late nineteenth century.


ships,

You made a broad comment about naval traditions as a whole, so if you wanted an example of an Indian naval fleet used for commercial purposes, I'd refer to the Inca balsa rafts. Mann states that "Europeans first encountered Tawantinsuyu in the form of an Inka ship sailing near the equator, three hundred miles from its home port, under a load of fine cotton sails." Based on a Spanish account, historian Ronald Wright states that these had the carrying capacity of the caravel. In his Stolen Continents: 500 Years of Conquest and Resistance in the Americas, he writes this:


Several early expeditions down the South American coast were failures, but in 1526 one of Pizarro's ships intercepted a strange vessel near the equator. It was a great balsa raft of the kind the Incas used for trading with Central America and exploring the Pacific, one of a fleet heading north. Its size and sophistication immediately impressed the Europeans: "It carried masts and yards of very fine wood, and cotton sails in the same shape and manner as on our own ships." The craft had a twenty-man crew and thirty tons of freight - close to what a caravel could hold.

This should actually be rendered 36 gross tons, only slightly under the carrying capacity of a caravel, in line with the summary of the Spanish observer that he was quoting:


This vessel which I say he captured appeared to have a capacity of up to thirty 'toneles' [36 gross tons]. The flat underbody and keel were constructed of logs as thick as posts, lashed together with ropes of what they call 'hennequen', which is a kind of hemp. The upper part was of more slender canes, tied together with the same lashings, and there the crew and cargo went dry while the bottom was awash. It carried masts and yards of very fine wood, and cotton sails in the same shape and manner as on our own ships. It had very good rigging of the said 'hennequen' . . . and some mooring stones for anchors formed like grindstones.

The Norwegian anthropologist Thor Heyerdahl stated that, "for coastal traffic and as landing bargers bringing crew and cargo ashore on the shallow Peruvian beaches, the flat-bottomed, unsinkable balsa rafts proved so superior to the European vessels with keel and open hull that some large balsas survived until modern ports with wharves were built in all coastal towns."

In the early sixteenth century, some Europeans certainly possessed more advanced watercraft. This was not so broad as to flatly declare Europe superior in every regard. Would you suggest that landlocked European societies had more advanced maritime technology than coastal American societies? More speculatively, there is also evidence of Native American maritime technology used for exploratory purposes in addition to the knowledge we have of the commercial naval trade, though it's more speculative. To quote from William Marder's Indians in the Americas: The Untold Story:


Thor Heyerdahl, through the voyages of the Kon-Tiki and the RA expeditions, discovered that it is possible to cross the Pacific Ocean following the existing natural currents. Heyerdahl discovered that boats he had constructed from balsa, reed, or papyrus, using a design similar to that used by boat builders in 2000 B.C., were watertight and could be used for long ocean voyages. Heyerdahl used a balsa raft, built to ancient Inca specifications, and the accurate description given by Juan de Saamanos, to build the first Kon-Tiki and found that it was possible for ancient travelers to voyage from South American to Polynesia and Australia...Evidence also points ti ancient voyages around 5000 B.C. or earlier from Southeast Asia to Indonesia and eventually to the east and west, where the explorers would have found themselves in the Pacific Islands. There also is a 1988 genetic study that points to pre-Columbian migrations from America to the South Pacific Islands. Genetics tests of blood samples have shown that, in most instances, Indians from America and not from Asia settled these South Pacific Islands. Several of the same species of plants exist in both South America and the Pacific, from Polynesia to New Zealand. They are all usefl plants that explorers might take on a long voyage to a new land. The plant list includes the yam (Ipomoca batatas), the bottle gourd (Lagenaria), coco palm (Cocos nucifera), cotton (Gossypium), and the totora reed (Scirpus riparius), which was used to construct the reed ship. This reed grows extensively on the shores of Lake Titicaca near Tiahuanacao and in the Crater Lakes of Easter Island. Other useful plants found in both regions include the tomato, sweet potato, tobacco, papaya, and the wild pineapple. Those discovered in America have been found to pre-date those grown in Polynesia, suggesting a western migration from South America. The seeds could not have survived the long ocean drift nor being carried by birds on a migratory flight, so there is strong evidence that humans transported them. The great number of American crop plants that pre-date European exploration in Polynesia are positive evidence of overseas voyages from and to South America and to the South Pacific or beyond. Oral legends of both the Incas and Eastern Island link a connection between the two.

That's in addition to the original settlement of America through Pacific coastal migration, which if it did not approximate a voyage of the great fleets that would be constructed many thousands of years later, was still a successful naval journey to another hemisphere.


etc, etc

And Europeans did not possess the aforementioned quinine, rubber, etc., etc. It's not even accurate to say that pre-Columbian America was entirely destitute of iron. Iron was not smelted from ores, but nickel-iron alloys were cold-hammered from meteoric deposits, with one ethnic group to do this being the Inuit of Greenland.


I have no doubt that various stone implements used by Paleolithic Europeans could also be exceptionally sharp but that did not prevent them being abandoned once superior materials were developed

Universally? You ought to consider that ostensibly superior materials do not always facilitate the creation of higher-quality implements. Jack Weatherford wrote in Indian Givers: How Indians of the Americas Transformed the World (published in 1988), that, "Aztecs paralleled in many regards the European organization of medicine at that time, and in some ways they surpassed it. Even today no steel scalpel has ever been made that cuts sharper than the obsidian implements of the Aztec surgeons. Only the laser beam can cut a finer incision with less bleeding and less scarification than the Aztec surgeons. The fine Aztec scalpels allowed the doctors to cut with minimum blood loss, and the wound healed with fewer scars."

And really, going back to the larger point, independent development in Europe? Or development stacked atop diffusion from Asia? If the benefits of Asian diffusion are repeatedly used as examples of technological superiority, can the benefits of European importation of horses to America be used to argue for Plains Indian superiority, as I did?


See your attempts, above and below, to portray the Amerindians as not being technologically backwards relative to the European conquerors. If this is not the case - and you accept that the Aztecs, for example, were significantly behind Europe in key technological areas - then all you have to do is say so. Disease does not factor into this

The central premise did not concern whether the Amerindians were not "technologically backwards relative to the European conquerors," but whether any kind of technological superiority played a significant role in European conquest, as was the subject of the dialogue between me and Forward Union. It did not, inasmuch as the most significant factor was the spread of disease, and the most common combatants were Indians of opposing factions, as opposed to Indians uniformly fighting Europeans. The "Spanish" conquest of the Aztec Triple Alliance might better be called the Tlaxcalan (and viral) conquest of the Aztec Triple Alliance, for example, since it was only the command staff of a small Spanish expeditionary unit that exercised administrative control over the conquest.


Because...? There were of course huge discrepancies in the technological spread in Europe alone (particularly rural areas) but even the most backwards areas possessed technologies that we would consider exceptionally basic (such as the wheel or metallurgy) that were lacking in the Americas.

The wheel and metallurgy were not lacking in the Americas. The wheel was used in small Mesoamerican effigies.

http://www.precolumbianwheels.com/images/main_05.jpg

http://www.precolumbianwheels.com/images/index.20.gif

http://www.precolumbianwheels.com/images/index.5.jpg

It did not find wider application because of the absence of draft animals along the lines of horses and oxen in pre-Columbian Mesoamerica (as well as the Andes, since llamas and alpacas are pack animals, small compared to horses and oxen, and needed to surmount steep mountain roads), but unless you consider animals present in a certain region without intentional design by its human inhabitants to be an example of "technology" (and if you did, you'd concede my point about the Plains Indians), that doesn't amount to much. The point is that the principle of rotary motion was understood, and sufficiently understood to create implements that could be used for transportation if they had the draft animals that were themselves not "technology" per se.

You also know that the comment about metallurgy is false. Metals available to American Indians included copper, gold, silver, platinum, bronze (after copper was refined with tin alloys), and to a limited extent, iron. The expense and consequent scarcity of iron and horses in Europe was the very reason for the consignment of so many to feudalist serfdom, so again, there's no reason for uniform declaration of superiority.


Furthermore, even if the knowledge was not evenly applied across the continent, it was preserved and known about in many centres of learning or commerce.

Then there's not even a cause for speaking of "Europe," but of the specific regions and localities where this higher technology and knowledge was actually present. Where is the line of division drawn, since you think it's worth speaking of Europe as a whole? Why don't we speak of "Eurasia," the Northern Hemisphere, or "Earth"?


Can you think of an example, other than the current topic, in which this occurred? Military technologically does not advance in isolation.

I suppose it would depend on your estimates of the Vandals, Visigoths or the Germanic tribes that invaded Britain. And it would depend on your idea of the respective merits of Carthage, Persia, and Greece.


As I've already noted, the Spanish invasion would have been impossible without a wide variety of 'civilian technologies'. These include metalworking, shipbuilding, and navigation, to name but three relevant ones

As I've myself noted, the focus of my commentary was on the military adaptations of that technology, since my only contention was that technological superiority was not the cause of European conquest of America.


I suppose you want to point out when the Caliphate equipped a vast fleet of ocean-going ships and sent them across the Mediterranean to invade Iberia? You might find that the North African army was ferried across at Gibraltar by a small fleet of trading vessels :glare:

This is a response to a strawman, since I never claimed that "the Caliphate equipped a vast fleet of ocean-going ships and sent them across the Mediterranean to invade Iberia." The issue that I was looking to was transport facilitated by any kind of watercraft.


So was India (probably), and Australia. The ability to construct crude boats for migratory purposes does not maritime or commercial tradition make. Certainly not when compared to the contemporary Dutch, Italian, Portuguese, English, French, Arabic, Chinese, etc, etc trade fleets

"Contemporary? Which contemporary European fleets existed somewhere from twenty to forty thousand years ago, at the time of settlement through Pacific coastal migration? Now, the point that Indian watercraft were not proper ships, though they did facilitate fairly abundant trade, means that they did not master the high seas in the same way that the naval powers of Europe did, but once again, the disparities aren't as significant as you imply, and the coastal Indian powers obviously had superior naval technology in comparison to landlocked European nations and ethnic groups. Heyerdahl did prove that navigation across the Tropic of Capricorn to Easter Island was possible, and these probable oceanic voyages to south Pacific islands seem more significant than mere traversal of the Mediterranean Sea, which marked European naval traditions long before trans-Atlantic expeditions were undertaken.

More than that, what's the purpose of technology if it does not have any role in bettering the lives of the general population, which necessitates requisite social conditions? Was Western Europe united in a gargantuan social organization, as the Inca Empire was? Wright notes this:


At a higher level of organization were small city-states and nations, deriving from tribal groups who had become sedentary. Beyond these, dominating large slabs of territory, were two great empires, those of Ming China and the Incas. (The Mogul Empire had yet to be founded; the Ottoman Empire was still in its infancy; and the Holy Roman Empire was, as Napoleon later pointed out, neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.

Mann concurs:


In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West African tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude - as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast, and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. "If imperial potential is judged in terms of environmental adaptability," wrote the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, "the Inka were the most impressive empire builders of their day."

It's an issue beyond mere scale, but also of social systems devised in large urban civilizations that still had the consequence of providing sustenance for those under its influence. Mann believes that Inca centralized economic planning accomplished that purpose:


Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it functioned without money. True, the lack of currency did not surprise the Spanish invaders - much of Europe did without money until the eighteenth century. But the Inka did not even have [I]markets. Economists would predict that this nonmarket economy - vertical socialism, it has been called - should produce gross inefficiencies. These surely occurred, but the errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu "managed to eradicate hunger," the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted. Though no fan of the Inka, he conceded that "only a very small number of empires throughout the whole world have succeeded in achieving this feat."

This relative abundance generated by the command economy of the Andes reflects a superior form of social organization to the others than in existence, and can be contrasted with the poverty generated by the feudalism of Europe, as well as the Aztec feudalism of northern Mesoamerica. While he may not be the most neutral observer, Cortes described its deficiencies in one of his letters to Emperor Charles V.


There are many chiefs, all of whom reside in this city, and the country towns contain peasants who are vassals of these lords and each of them whom holds his land independently; some have more than others...in many places they suffer hardships for lack of bread. And there are many poor people who beg from the rich in the streets as the poor do in Spain and in other civilized places.

It's a matter of heterogeneity.


On the other hand, not admitting this could actually be racist. How could the Europeans defeat the Native Americans if it weren't for technological and political superiority? Was it cultural, racial or spiritual superiority I wonder? Or was it because Europeans are intrinsically more evil and are natural-born conquerors?

It's been repeatedly stated over and over again: The vast majority of Amerindian casualties and the subsequent instability in their social organization that weakened them was directly caused by the importation of European infectious disease that they had no previous exposure to, and thus no immunity to. The only archaeological-anthropological dispute among Indian scholars these days is the scope of such plague. Many people here simply don't realize the Eurocentric implications in their Avatar-style depiction of the "conquest." While the conquerors are depicted as cruel and vicious, they're also depicted as capable of forcibly overcoming a numerically superior opposition because of their almost inconceivably superior technology, as though they're humans toying with ants with a magnifying glass.

For example, in the pseudo-historical white supremacist text March of the Titans: A History of the White Race (http://www.white-history.com/), a racist and historically and anthropologically inaccurate account is offered in Chapter 48 : Conquistadors -Whites in South and Central America (http://www.white-history.com/hwr48.htm):


The White conquest of South and Central America is a tale of extreme high drama, with a very few White adventurers completely overwhelming millions of Amerinds through a combination of crushing technological superiority and brute force...It was at this first battle that Cortes realized the technological advantage the Whites possessed: steel armor, guns, cannons and even horses were completely unknown to the Amerinds of Central America, and many tribesmen fled at the very sight of a powerful charge horse. These advantages were pressed home remorselessly, and all the Amerind tribes up and down Central and South America were to pay dearly for being technologically so far behind the Whites...Advancing quickly, Pizarro reached the Inca heartland: despite the tiny White force being numerically dwarfed by the warlike Incas, the latter, like the Aztecs, had no answer against the overwhelming White technological superiority.

Now, I've not claimed that the majority of indigenous people were annihilated by plague simply to contradict this account; I've reiterated that over and over because that's what actually happened. In this thread, interestingly, my statements that Indian societies were felled because of the spread of infectious disease decimating the majority of their population and not simply because European armies were able to overpower them thanks to their superior technology, were evidently interpreted as statements that I challenged the idea that anyone anywhere was technologically superior to anyone else in any way. :bored:


Disease and either corrupt or fragmenting political lifestyles.* Having no sense of tribal unity while simultaneously oppressing peoples undid the Aztecs more than any disease. To be perfectly honest, I think if Cortes had not arrived, the Aztecs would have encountered a similiar fate just by continuing its practices as a domineering empire - just not as easily. Cortes was a brilliant tactician who, aided by religious superstitions and an angry audience of nations, lit the fire cracker first.

No, disease. The leaders of the Aztec Triple Alliance would have ultimately endured the fate of all imperialists, but it's quite another thing to suggest that the majority of their population would have been decimated in the absence of infectious plague. Cortes did not seem to be particularly aided by religious superstitions, either; that's a Spanish legend inaccurately reflected in modern history books, as far as I can determine. I would also expect that the Aztecs would have "no sense of tribal unity," considering that the Aztec empire was not a "tribe." It's a lasting feature of Eurocentric language that Indian nations and ethnic groups are always "tribes" even if they exceed the size and social structure of European states.


No it doesn't say history is completely deterministic, but it does suggest that there is a "positive" side to colonialism and admitting that isn't necessarily racist.

There is not a positive side to colonialism. The "positive side" usually consists of the diffusion of foreign technologies and products that would have peaceably occurred through voluntary association. So it's actually a matter of ignoring opportunity costs, i.e. what could have been in the absence of colonialism and imperialism.


But obviously technological superiority and the effects of European diseases are far more important factors than just a single individual.

It is the latter and not the former that was significant, as well as Europeans' alliance with thousands of indigenous peoples.


Even the so-called political and tactical "adeptness" of Cortes can still be explained by more fundamental factors such as the more developed status of European military and political science. The sheer dis-unity among the native American groups is also a manifestation of their political backwardness, they were not able to form large, stable and loyal empires in the European and Asian mode. The consciousness of nation-hood is itself a relatively late development.

That statement is ridiculous, considering the scale and nature of the Aztec Triple Alliance, the Iroquois Six Nations, and most significantly, the Inca Empire, the last of which dwarfed every European state in existence.


The point is simply that you cannot attribute everything to "luck" or just short-term factors. What is the underlying fundamental reason for the repeated victory of Europeans over non-Europeans in the last 500 years? In the case of the Africans and Native Americans, it is due to both superior productivity and productive relation. (Iron Age/Gunpowder over Bronze Age/Stone Age and Capitalism over Tribalism/Slavery)

It's a matter of infectious disease in the case of small Spanish expeditionary forces gaining influence over large empires. The Inca empire, far larger and more populous than Spain, was not a manifestation of "tribalism," nor of feudalist slavery, but of high-level central planning.


Which is why I didn't say it was just due to better technology and productivity. It was also due to better productive relations.

How did European and Asian feudalism represent a form of productive relations more developed than Inca central planning?


But how is saying one group of people is technologically more advanced han another group racist?

The problem here is repetition of Eurocentric dogma regardless of its falsity. Apart from needing to know that nomadic primitivism is largely mythical, people ought to know that the fairy tale of Europeans simply overwhelming large numbers of Indians because of their superior technology is largely mythical.

[Queercommie Girl]

Now, I've not claimed that the majority of indigenous people were annihilated by plague simply to contradict this account; I've reiterated that over and over because that's what actually happened. In this thread, interestingly, my statements that Indian societies were felled because of the spread of infectious disease decimating the majority of their population and not simply because European armies were able to overpower them thanks to their superior technology, were evidently interpreted as statements that I challenged the idea that anyone anywhere was technologically superior to anyone else in any way. :bored:

No, disease. The leaders of the Aztec Triple Alliance would have ultimately endured the fate of all imperialists, but it's quite another thing to suggest that the majority of their population would have been decimated in the absence of infectious plague. Cortes did not seem to be particularly aided by religious superstitions, either; that's a Spanish legend inaccurately reflected in modern history books, as far as I can determine. I would also expect that the Aztecs would have "no sense of tribal unity," considering that the Aztec empire was not a "tribe." It's a lasting feature of Eurocentric language that Indian nations and ethnic groups are always "tribes" even if they exceed the size and social structure of European states.


In the case of the Native Americans disease was indeed the primary factor, but it cannot explain at all the success of European colonialism in Africa and Asia.

And from an anthropological perspective, the fact that Europeans and Asians are more resistant to diseases shows that the native Americans were more isolated than the peoples of the Old World. Even the "disease factor" wasn't just a factor of "luck".



There is not a positive side to colonialism. The "positive side" usually consists of the diffusion of foreign technologies and products that would have peaceably occurred through voluntary association. So it's actually a matter of ignoring opportunity costs, i.e. what could have been in the absence of colonialism and imperialism.


But that is not what Marx said. Since you are an anarchist and not a Marxist I don't think we have a common ground of discussion here.

Despite being obviously anti-capitalist, Marx always recognised the "positive" side of capitalism in the historical sense (not in the ideal sense as you seem to be suggesting) as better being able to develop the productive forces compared with feudalism. Marx describes Western capitalism as "civilisation" and non-Western non-capitalist systems such as the feudal systems in Russia and China and the tribal systems in Africa as "barbarism" or "semi-barbarism".

Was Marx a racist therefore?

I'm not being Eurocentric here since I would use exactly the same kind of dialectical method to analyse ancient Chinese history. The feudal Chinese empires, for all their political reaction, did play "positive" roles in unifying a large number of people and advancing science and technology. Feudal China invented gunpowder, printing, paper and the compass, the key technologies which Marx explicitly identified as being the technological basis of the new capitalist age.



That statement is ridiculous, considering the scale and nature of the Aztec Triple Alliance, the Iroquois Six Nations, and most significantly, the Inca Empire, the last of which dwarfed every European state in existence.


It's not just the superficial "scale", it's also the population size, population density, the productivity of the land, and how effectively can the central government really hold onto the various regions.

The Aztecs and Incas in this sense were dwarfed by the great empires of Asia and Europe. The Native American states were still ruled by theocratic priests and aristocrats when the Chinese already had a system of bureaucratic civil servants which are recruited through a fair examination system for more than 1000 years. In feudal China even the peasants were often literate and "could recite the poems of the ancients" while in the slavery Inca and Aztec empires the benefit of civilisation only affected the top layer of people in society, and actually Inca and Aztec literature did not even develop to the level of being able to write poetry. In Asia and Europe, the Chinese, Greeks and Indians developed poetry as early as just after 1000 BCE.

In Cortes' day, it is true that on the surface the kingdoms of Europe seemed to be more fragmented than the Incas and Aztecs were. But in reality there were more connections between the various European peoples, and wars were usually limited rather than total war. At least Europeans did not capture other Europeans and use them as human sacrifice.

As for the Iroquois, it was just a loose association of tribes. It was not even a state.



It's a matter of infectious disease in the case of small Spanish expeditionary forces gaining influence over large empires. The Inca empire, far larger and more populous than Spain, was not a manifestation of "tribalism," nor of feudalist slavery, but of high-level central planning.


And your explanation for European colonialism in Africa and Asia is?



How did European and Asian feudalism represent a form of productive relations more developed than Inca central planning?


Because according to Marxist political economy, generally speaking feudalism is superior to slavery, capitalism is superior to feudalism, and socialism is superior to capitalism. This is true both in terms of productivity and productive relation.

Europe became capitalist after the English and French capitalist revolutions, while Asia stayed feudal. At the time of the European conquest, the Native Americans were either tribal societies or slavery societies, and most of Africa was tribal.

Spain was still largely a feudal state at the time of the American conquest. It was a case, one could say, not of Europeans conquering non-Europeans or whites conquering coloured peoples, but of feudalism conquering slavery.

Slavery was a more backward system compared with feudalism. Political and economic power in slavery society was held in the hands of aristocratic priest-lords. Agricultural productivity was therefore lower, general literacy level was more primitive, and the political system less structured. Ideologically the prevalence of theocracy also means that the development of science and technology is severely affected in the negative sense. In China, feudalism replaced slavery completely by the 3rd century BCE, and indeed, ancient Chinese slavery of the Shang dynasty was in many ways similar to the slavery system of the native Americans, a brutal political system based on human sacrifice. But human sacrifice was abolished in the Chinese states 2500 years ago, as society advanced from slavery to feudalism, while in the Americas, theocratic slavery still held sway in the 1400s.

Surely you can't suggest that human sacrifice, the most extreme manifestation of the contradiction between productive force and productive relation, is somehow a sign of native American advancement?



The problem here is repetition of Eurocentric dogma regardless of its falsity. Apart from needing to know that nomadic primitivism is largely mythical, people ought to know that the fairy tale of Europeans simply overwhelming large numbers of Indians because of their superior technology is largely mythical.


But I'm not being Eurocentric at all. I've repeatedly stressed the role Asia played. It was the Chinese that invented gunpowder, and Chinese ships sailed the oceans a century before the Spanish did.

[Agnapostate]

In the case of the Native Americans disease was indeed the primary factor, but it cannot explain at all the success of European colonialism in Africa and Asia.

Actually, it can, since Africa also had fewer domesticated animals than Eurasia and therefore fewer opportunities for earlier pathogen transmission and the acquired immunity associated with it. But that is not the topic of this thread anyway, and the point that infectious disease and not "superior technology" was the driving point of the success of European colonialism in America stands.


And from an anthropological perspective, the fact that Europeans and Asians are more resistant to diseases shows that the native Americans were more isolated than the peoples of the Old World. Even the "disease factor" wasn't just a factor of "luck".

Europeans and Asians were not "more resistant to diseases"; they were more resistant to diseases of Eurasian origin, since they had greater previous exposure. If syphilis is of American origin, as has been speculated, there's clear evidence of Indians being "more resistant to diseases" in that case. The reason that there were many more Eurasian diseases than American is because of the greater abundance of domesticated animals in Eurasia and the closer contacts with those animals that facilitated disease transmission. The reason why importation of European diseases resulted in such high casualty rates (exceeding the Black Death pandemic of Europe), was because there were numerous diseases (influenza, measles, typhus, etc., although smallpox was the undisputed king), and because American Indians are probably the most genetically homogenous population to spread out over such a vast land area, being descended from a common ancestral population. Just as they were uniformly susceptible to some infectious diseases, they would be uniformly resistant to others.


But that is not what Marx said. Since you are an anarchist and not a Marxist I don't think we have a common ground of discussion here.

I never claimed that Marx said that.


Despite being obviously anti-capitalist, Marx always recognised the "positive" side of capitalism in the historical sense (not in the ideal sense as you seem to be suggesting) as better being able to develop the productive forces compared with feudalism.

That has nothing to do with colonialism specifically, but the system of productive relations imported by colonists. And even the spread of material and social innovations still has little to do with violently enforced colonialism; it's a consequence of contact, and would be better spread by peaceable and voluntary association. I understand what the point is intended to mean, but it ignores the concept of opportunity costs.


Marx describes Western capitalism as "civilisation" and non-Western non-capitalist systems such as the feudal systems in Russia and China and the tribal systems in Africa as "barbarism" or "semi-barbarism".

Was Marx a racist therefore?

Probably, in line with historical context and the common ethnic discrimination of the time. For example, wasn't he somewhat disdainful of Slavs? But I'm not even sure he intended to make denigrating statements; even if he'd written those terms in English, they still had less offensive meanings than they're regarded as having today.


I'm not being Eurocentric here since I would use exactly the same kind of dialectical method to analyse ancient Chinese history.

Eurocentrism involves cultural bias in favor of Europe in place of balanced cultural analysis. Many of the posts in this thread have been characterized by that theme.


The feudal Chinese empires, for all their political reaction, did play "positive" roles in unifying a large number of people and advancing science and technology.

Those are only positive effects in the narrowest frame of analysis; when opportunity costs are considered, the political reaction of feudalism inhibited the development of science and technology in contrast to what direct democracy or even liberal republican capitalism could have produced.


It's not just the superficial "scale", it's also the population size, population density, the productivity of the land, and how effectively can the central government really hold onto the various regions.

The Aztecs and Incas in this sense were dwarfed by the great empires of Asia and Europe.

The Aztec Triple Alliance, as a tributary hegemonic empire, might have been in the last category; the Inca Empire, as a territorial empire that compelled assimilation, almost certainly was not. It's generally accepted as having been the largest empire in the world at its height. I'm not aware of any contemporaneous European political entities that had greater population sizes and densities, unless you count the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, as mentioned.


The Native American states were still ruled by theocratic priests and aristocrats when the Chinese already had a system of bureaucratic civil servants which are recruited through a fair examination system for more than 1000 years.

I'm not aware of a single European state that was not "ruled by theocratic priests and aristocrats" to some degree or another, even if their influence was not always so overt as the Pope establishing the line of imperialist demarcation between Spain (Castile, more accurately), and Portugal.


In feudal China even the peasants were often literate and "could recite the poems of the ancients" while in the slavery Inca and Aztec empires the benefit of civilisation only affected the top layer of people in society,

Along with Europe, so that's a poor example. You do realize that Francisco Pizarro was illiterate, for instance?


and actually Inca and Aztec literature did not even develop to the level of being able to write poetry.

That is plainly and demonstrably false. There is literally an abundance of literature that you could consult on this, so I'll just provide a couple of links to get you started:

http://www.carnaval.com/dead/aztec_poetry.htm

http://www.mexica.net/nahuatl/literatu.html


In Cortes' day, it is true that on the surface the kingdoms of Europe seemed to be more fragmented than the Incas and Aztecs were. But in reality there were more connections between the various European peoples, and wars were usually limited rather than total war. At least Europeans did not capture other Europeans and use them as human sacrifice.

They captured other Europeans and set them on fire for deviating from their religious customs. And they rained destruction upon the Middle East and North Africa. It astounds me that I'd have to quote this statement here, but in the words of Lazaro Gutierrez de Lara in his book The Mexican People:


Much has been written, particularly by Spanish historians, of the barbarous religious practices of these native races. It is true that the degraded native priesthood, who founded their wisdom-religion in Mexico more than three thousands years ago, practiced human sacrifice as did the British druids. Even so, this deliberate blood sacrifice of the Aztecs was intrinsically no more inhumane than the martyr holocausts of Smithfield, the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or the complicated cruelties of the Spanish Inquisition...Compared with the Conquistadores they were enlightened, peaceable, and humane, and if the practices of their priesthood (a small and degenerate section of the master class) bring a shudder to the modern mind, it must be remembered that the barbarity they betray is not an Aztec peculiarity, but the common barbarity of priestcraft in all ages and climes: it is an essential component of class rule wherever it be found, and as such, it is a class characteristic - not a race characteristic.

True dat. :thumbup1:


As for the Iroquois, it was just a loose association of tribes. It was not even a state.

Yes, I know. The Iroquois Confederacy was a more refined system of democratic social organization than contemporaneous statism.


And your explanation for European colonialism in Africa and Asia is?

Irrelevant to the thread, but since you keep mentioning it, it's related more to lasting environmental settings than racial or cultural facets, though. The factor of infectious disease was not completely absent in Africa, and there's far more parity between Europe and Asia than you imply.


Because according to Marxist political economy, generally speaking feudalism is superior to slavery, capitalism is superior to feudalism, and socialism is superior to capitalism. This is true both in terms of productivity and productive relation.

I have to assume that you did not read my responses to ComradeOm, since there's already a clear refutation of the statements you're making contained in my writing. Specifically: It's an issue beyond mere scale, but also of social systems devised in large urban civilizations that still had the consequence of providing sustenance for those under its influence. Mann believes that Inca centralized economic planning accomplished that purpose:


Not the least surprising feature of this economic system was that it functioned without money. True, the lack of currency did not surprise the Spanish invaders - much of Europe did without money until the eighteenth century. But the Inka did not even have markets. Economists would predict that this nonmarket economy - vertical socialism, it has been called - should produce gross inefficiencies. These surely occurred, but the errors were of surplus, not want. The Spanish invaders were stunned to find warehouses overflowing with untouched cloth and supplies. But to the Inka the brimming coffers signified prestige and plenty; it was all part of the plan. Most important, Tawantinsuyu "managed to eradicate hunger," the Peruvian novelist Mario Vargas Llosa noted. Though no fan of the Inka, he conceded that "only a very small number of empires throughout the whole world have succeeded in achieving this feat."

Now, I certainly wouldn't claim that the Inca Empire was socialist, because its political centralization and imperialist and dictatorial nature were authoritarian and therefore antithetical to the participatory nature of the public ownership and management of the means of production. On the contrary, it was not far different from the Soviet command economy. characterized by central planning that was able to produce more efficient outcomes than feudalism and some forms of capitalism, but still inferior to socialism.


Europe became capitalist after the English and French capitalist revolutions, while Asia stayed feudal.

And French colonists, along with Portuguese colonists, were primarily interested in establishment of trade routes rather than permanent settlements. While the English were interested in permanent settlements, colonial New England functioned with an agrarian non-capitalist market economy.


At the time of the European conquest, the Native Americans were either tribal societies or slavery societies,

Aztec Mesoamerica was feudalist, and the territory of the Inca empire in Western South America was, if we adhere to Leninist doctrines, arguably characterized by vertical socialism, as stated by Mann.


and most of Africa was tribal.

The Mali and Songhai Empires were "tribal"? You don't say? Or did "most of Africa" mean the land mass and not the population, along with sub-Saharan Africa specifically?


Spain was still largely a feudal state at the time of the American conquest. It was a case, one could say, not of Europeans conquering non-Europeans or whites conquering coloured peoples, but of feudalism conquering slavery.

Or actually, of disease and natives conquering natives, in line with historian William Prescott's prescient observation that, "The Indian empire was in a manner conquered by Indians." That comment, incidentally, was written in 1843. Why are people regurgitating historical myths 167 years later? There's also the fact that people spread over two continents in vastly heterogenous political configurations cannot be accurately characterized with uniform descriptions such as "slavery," particularly when groups such as the Iroquois were characterized by a level of internal freedom alien to contemporaneous European societies.


Slavery was a more backward system compared with feudalism. Political and economic power in slavery society was held in the hands of aristocratic priest-lords.

Political and economic power was held by effective aristocratic priest-lords in contemporaneous European societies and continues to be in religious fundamentalist regions. Can you identify some unique deficiency?


Agricultural productivity was therefore lower,

If agricultural productivity was lower, it was caused by the sparsity of the same number of domesticated crops and arable land, not some intangible cultural issue.


general literacy level was more primitive,

I wouldn't think there was a huge disparity prior to the invention of the movable-type printing press and Age of Enlightenment, or much basis for comparison after the decimation of the majority of the Indian population in the sixteenth century.


and the political system less structured.

Well, to repetitively reiterate, was Western Europe united in a gargantuan social organization, as the Inca Empire was? Wright notes this:


At a higher level of organization were small city-states and nations, deriving from tribal groups who had become sedentary. Beyond these, dominating large slabs of territory, were two great empires, those of Ming China and the Incas. (The Mogul Empire had yet to be founded; the Ottoman Empire was still in its infancy; and the Holy Roman Empire was, as Napoleon later pointed out, neither holy nor Roman nor an empire.

Mann concurs:


In 1491 the Inka ruled the greatest empire on earth. Bigger than Ming Dynasty China, bigger than Ivan the Great's expanding Russia, bigger than Songhay in the Sahel or powerful Great Zimbabwe in the West African tablelands, bigger than the cresting Ottoman Empire, bigger than the Triple Alliance (as the Aztec empire is more precisely known), bigger by far than any European state the Inka dominion extended over a staggering thirty-two degrees of latitude - as if a single power held sway from St. Petersburg to Cairo. The empire encompassed every imaginable type of terrain, from the rainforest of upper Amazonia to the deserts of the Peruvian coast, and the twenty-thousand-foot peaks of the Andes between. "If imperial potential is judged in terms of environmental adaptability," wrote the Oxford historian Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, "the Inka were the most impressive empire builders of their day."

And as I said, the relative abundance generated by the command economy of the Andes reflects a superior form of social organization to the others than in existence, and can be contrasted with the poverty generated by the feudalism of Europe, as well as the Aztec feudalism of northern Mesoamerica.


Ideologically the prevalence of theocracy also means that the development of science and technology is severely affected in the negative sense.

Mayan astronomer-priests generated scientific readings of indisputable accuracy; Roman Catholic officials, by contrast, burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and placed Galileo under house arrest for contradicting their doctrines about the nature of the solar system and universe. Which form of theocracy would you describe as more counterproductive?


In China, feudalism replaced slavery completely by the 3rd century BCE, and indeed, ancient Chinese slavery of the Shang dynasty was in many ways similar to the slavery system of the native Americans, a brutal political system based on human sacrifice. But human sacrifice was abolished in the Chinese states 2500 years ago, as society advanced from slavery to feudalism, while in the Americas, theocratic slavery still held sway in the 1400s.

This board's Maoists might have a thing or two to say about your apparent veneration of Chinese feudalism and insinuation that it was not characterized by deeply reactionary social practices such as foot binding.


Surely you can't suggest that human sacrifice, the most extreme manifestation of the contradiction between productive force and productive relation, is somehow a sign of native American advancement?

Perhaps, in the relative sense, considering the higher rate of executions in Europe. Quoting from 1491 again, which every single person here who insists on conveyance of their Eurocentrism (and all modern Europeans, I've noticed), the author writes this:


Between 1530 and 1630, according to Cambridge historian V.A.C. Gatrell, England executed seventy-five thousand people. At the time, its population was about three million, perhaps a tenth that of the Mexica empire. Arithmetic suggests that if England had been the size of the Triple Alliance, it would have executed, on average, about 7,500 people per year, roughly twice the number Cortes estimated for the empire. France and Spain were still more bloodthirsty than England, according to [Ferdinand] Braudel.

Oh, well...


But I'm not being Eurocentric at all. I've repeatedly stressed the role Asia played. It was the Chinese that invented gunpowder, and Chinese ships sailed the oceans a century before the Spanish did.

Eurocentrism doesn't preclude acknowledgment of the accomplishments of other cultures except in its most extreme form, which involves tales of ancient Europeans giving those cultures technology and/or advanced social structures and then disappearing. The more radical Eurocentrists dismiss the undeniable advancements of the Maya, for example, by insisting that they were gifted by European patrons. More moderate Eurocentrism is exposed through cultural bias, such as the double standard of insisting that Mesoamerican human sacrifice represents social backwardness without mention of the barbarity of European religious tradition. I've literally copied and pasted some of the same text that I've used in arguments against white supremacists here in this thread.

[Queercommie Girl]

Actually, it can, since Africa also had fewer domesticated animals than Eurasia and therefore fewer opportunities for earlier pathogen transmission and the acquired immunity associated with it. But that is not the topic of this thread anyway, and the point that infectious disease and not "superior technology" was the driving point of the success of European colonialism in America stands.


Did you know the reason for the Dutch colonists to be halted in South Africa? Disease. Actually generally speaking Asians and Africans are more resistant to diseases naturally than Europeans, not less. The so-called "black death" actually spread into Europe from Central Asia.



Europeans and Asians were not "more resistant to diseases"; they were more resistant to diseases of Eurasian origin, since they had greater previous exposure. If syphilis is of American origin, as has been speculated, there's clear evidence of Indians being "more resistant to diseases" in that case. The reason that there were many more Eurasian diseases than American is because of the greater abundance of domesticated animals in Eurasia and the closer contacts with those animals that facilitated disease transmission. The reason why importation of European diseases resulted in such high casualty rates (exceeding the Black Death pandemic of Europe), was because there were numerous diseases (influenza, measles, typhus, etc., although smallpox was the undisputed king), and because American Indians are probably the most genetically homogenous population to spread out over such a vast land area, being descended from a common ancestral population. Just as they were uniformly susceptible to some infectious diseases, they would be uniformly resistant to others.
Numerically Eurasia was the home of a larger number of diseases, just like it was home to a larger number of cultures and animals.



That has nothing to do with colonialism specifically, but the system of productive relations imported by colonists. And even the spread of material and social innovations still has little to do with violently enforced colonialism; it's a consequence of contact, and would be better spread by peaceable and voluntary association. I understand what the point is intended to mean, but it ignores the concept of opportunity costs.
But you are just making an idealised abstract point. I was saying that historically (history is far from perfect in any sense) capitalism and colonialism did play a "positive" role to some extent.



Probably, in line with historical context and the common ethnic discrimination of the time. For example, wasn't he somewhat disdainful of Slavs? But I'm not even sure he intended to make denigrating statements; even if he'd written those terms in English, they still had less offensive meanings than they're regarded as having today.
Actually my view is that Marx was not racist because frankly the Russians and the Chinese were relatively backward compared with the West Europeans at the time (not so much difference between Russia and China), that's what "semi-barbarian" meant, it was not a racist remark, but a fact. Because Marx also highly praised the peasant rebels of the Taiping Tianguo movement in China.



Eurocentrism involves cultural bias in favor of Europe in place of balanced cultural analysis. Many of the posts in this thread have been characterized by that theme.
There is a difference between Eurocentrism and acknowledging objective facts. My point is that refuting your ideas about the alleged "superiority" of Inca civilisation is not at all Eurocentrism.



Those are only positive effects in the narrowest frame of analysis; when opportunity costs are considered, the political reaction of feudalism inhibited the development of science and technology in contrast to what direct democracy or even liberal republican capitalism could have produced.
History can only be analysed relative to its own time period, not compared with what came centuries later. Before the emergence of modern capitalism, feudal China led the world in many aspects for many centuries, in both productivity and productive relation. China was the only feudal nation in the ancient world with a detailed historical record of peasant rebellions, where the biographies of two lowly peasants could be formally recorded into the official imperial histories, where a large number of emperors were actually of peasant origin. It was unheard of in Africa, Europe or the Native Americas. The empires of India and the Middle East were comparable, but China was certainly more powerful politically. How can you gloat about the "greatness" of the Inca slave-lords so freely while saying the positive effects of the Chinese are only present in the "narrowest frame of analysis"?



The Aztec Triple Alliance, as a tributary hegemonic empire, might have been in the last category; the Inca Empire, as a territorial empire that compelled assimilation, almost certainly was not. It's generally accepted as having been the largest empire in the world at its height. I'm not aware of any contemporaneous European political entities that had greater population sizes and densities, unless you count the Holy Roman Empire, which was neither holy nor Roman nor an empire, as mentioned.
In terms of population density and size they still can't compare with Asia of the same period. Not to mention that agricultural productivity was significantly lower.



I'm not aware of a single European state that was not "ruled by theocratic priests and aristocrats" to some degree or another, even if their influence was not always so overt as the Pope establishing the line of imperialist demarcation between Spain (Castile, more accurately), and Portugal.
Although European feudalism lagged behind Chinese feudalism in many aspects, it was not as dominated by the theocrats as people imagine. Political power as itself did play a very significant role too.



Along with Europe, so that's a poor example. You do realize that Francisco Pizarro was illiterate, for instance?
But many European colonists were not. One reason why the Incas were dealt with effectively by the Spanish was because they read the record of the previous encounters with the Aztecs, which helped them tactically.



They captured other Europeans and set them on fire for deviating from their religious customs. And they rained destruction upon the Middle East and North Africa. It astounds me that I'd have to quote this statement here, but in the words of Lazaro Gutierrez de Lara in his book The Mexican People:

True dat. :thumbup1:
It has to be said that witch-burning for all its reactionary elements, is still better than human sacrifice. Witch-burning was primarily wrong due to ignorance, if it were true that demonic forces were really involved, witch-burning would actually be the correct thing to do. Whereas one cannot even imagine a scenario where human sacrifice would be justifiable. Deaths due to religious wars at least weed out mainly the weak (sorry if this sounds somewhat social darwinist), whereas human sacrifices kill the strong off too, which is a bigger assault on productive force.



Irrelevant to the thread, but since you keep mentioning it, it's related more to lasting environmental settings than racial or cultural facets, though. The factor of infectious disease was not completely absent in Africa, and there's far more parity between Europe and Asia than you imply.
But interestingly in Africa it is the other way around, the Africans were more resistant to diseases than the Europeans, which is why the Dutch expansion was halted in South Africa. I suppose if one argues that diseases were the only factors, one would expect Asians and Africans to colonise Europe.



I have to assume that you did not read my responses to ComradeOm, since there's already a clear refutation of the statements you're making contained in my writing. Specifically: It's an issue beyond mere scale, but also of social systems devised in large urban civilizations that still had the consequence of providing sustenance for those under its influence. Mann believes that Inca centralized economic planning accomplished that purpose:
I don't think Mann's theory is in any way mainstream. I think he is in the same category as the guy who claimed the Chinese admiral Zheng He discovered the world and some fringe historian in China who claims that the Shang dynasty Chinese went across the pacific to found the Native American civilisations. (There are actually some circumstantial evidence in the latter case since in many ways the Incas and the Aztecs were very similar to the Shang civilisation of Chinese antiquity, though the Shang pre-dated the Incas and Aztecs by 2000 years and more) I don't think there is more justification to say that the Incas were in any way close to socialism than to say that the Han dynasty in China was a semi-socialist system, as some mainland Chinese Marxists actually believe - after all, the Han dynasty, which ruled a larger territory than Rome at around the same time, had an economy that was largely state-owned, large-scale craftsmenship employing hundreds at a time, progressive taxes and a comprehensive welfare system. It also almost did not have any slaves, unlike Rome of the same period. During the Western Han period most peasants in China were free small-scale farmers, not serfs, though serfdom began to emerge due to land centralisation by the Eastern Han (akin to the evolution from free-competition small capitalists to financial capitalism in the modern West), and the founder of the Han dynasty was himself originally a peasant. In short, everything Mann says the Incas had, the Han dynasty Chinese had more, and 1500 years earlier. But I still wouldn't jump the wagon and call the Chinese Han dynasty a "semi-socialist" society.



Now, I certainly wouldn't claim that the Inca Empire was socialist, because its political centralization and imperialist and dictatorial nature were authoritarian and therefore antithetical to the participatory nature of the public ownership and management of the means of production. On the contrary, it was not far different from the Soviet command economy. characterized by central planning that was able to produce more efficient outcomes than feudalism and some forms of capitalism, but still inferior to socialism.
For one thing I am glad that you are not calling the Incas socialist, otherwise despite my aversion to ad hominem I would have called you literally "delusional".

It's not even primarily due to the political super-structure, which is all you seem to focus on. Stalinist USSR was fundamentally still a worker's state, even though it was deformed. Because the economic basis was still proletarian. The Incas? Light-years apart. It was not proletarian, not even peasant-based or serfdom, it was based on slavery. How can anyone suggest that a slave-lord state, no matter how "advanced" (even though frankly the Incas were no more advanced than the Chinese during the Shang period more than 2000 years earlier), is in any way socialist?



And French colonists, along with Portuguese colonists, were primarily interested in establishment of trade routes rather than permanent settlements. While the English were interested in permanent settlements, colonial New England functioned with an agrarian non-capitalist market economy.
It was still a capitalised kind of agrarian market economy in operation in the early United States, like the United Kingdom was feudal in name only after the "glorious" revolution.



Aztec Mesoamerica was feudalist, and the territory of the Inca empire in Western South America was, if we adhere to Leninist doctrines, arguably characterized by vertical socialism, as stated by Mann.
I cannot accept this at all, sorry. Both empires were slavery societies judging by their economic basis. To be sure, they were relatively advanced slavery societies in many ways, in some ways rivaling slavery Rome. But they were still slavery societies.



The Mali and Songhai Empires were "tribal"? You don't say? Or did "most of Africa" mean the land mass and not the population, along with sub-Saharan Africa specifically?
Most of African was tribal. Even the Mali and Songhai were semi-tribal semi-feudal judging by the Eurasian standard.



Or actually, of disease and natives conquering natives, in line with historian William Prescott's prescient observation that, "The Indian empire was in a manner conquered by Indians." That comment, incidentally, was written in 1843. Why are people regurgitating historical myths 167 years later? There's also the fact that people spread over two continents in vastly heterogenous political configurations cannot be accurately characterized with uniform descriptions such as "slavery," particularly when groups such as the Iroquois were characterized by a level of internal freedom alien to contemporaneous European societies.
Maybe you need to be careful here, lest your zest to prove the greatness of the Incas become a subtle justification for slavery.



Political and economic power was held by effective aristocratic priest-lords in contemporaneous European societies and continues to be in religious fundamentalist regions. Can you identify some unique deficiency?
The level of politicisation in feudal Europe was actually higher than in the theocratic states of the Americas, even though it doesn't compare with feudal China of the same period. I think some times people exaggerate the darkness of the dark ages too much.



If agricultural productivity was lower, it was caused by the sparsity of the same number of domesticated crops and arable land, not some intangible cultural issue.
It's not "cultural", it's due to productivity - lack of iron/steel tools, which are frankly far more efficiently than bronze tools - ancient China had an advanced bronze age from 2000 BCE to 500 BCE, 2000 years before the native Americans did. Shang dynasty Chinese bronzeware were among the highest quality in all of world history, some weighing up to nearly a ton of pure bronze, but the Chinese transitioned from bronze to iron in the 1st millennium BCE, not the other way around. In fact, every single human bronze culture that has discovered iron metallurgy made the transition to iron, never any exceptions. What does this fact tell you? The difference between bronze and iron (and later steel, first invented in Han dynasty China) is hardly "intangible".

Also, in terms of productive relation, peasants and even serfs are generally more productive than slaves, who have no real incentive to work at all apart from the fear of coercion.

However, there is no reason why in the ideal situation, native Americans could not have developed their own culturally unique brands of feudalism and capitalism without any external influence given sufficient time, so no it is not due to cultural factors.



I wouldn't think there was a huge disparity prior to the invention of the movable-type printing press and Age of Enlightenment, or much basis for comparison after the decimation of the majority of the Indian population in the sixteenth century.
Europe and Asia already had universities 1000 years ago, these are the ancestral forms of modern colleges and universities today. By that time novels appeared in China, designed for an urban middle class readership for the first time in human history. Where is the middle class in the Inca empire? It was either slave-lords/priests or slaves.

For all the advancement of the Inca empire, why is it that they had no unique form of true writings (which the Aztecs had)? Why is it that in Europe and China movable-type printing developed independently of each other but never in the Americas?



Well, to repetitively reiterate, was Western Europe united in a gargantuan social organization, as the Inca Empire was? Wright notes this:

Mann concurs:

And as I said, the relative abundance generated by the command economy of the Andes reflects a superior form of social organization to the others than in existence, and can be contrasted with the poverty generated by the feudalism of Europe, as well as the Aztec feudalism of northern Mesoamerica.
A "command economy" is not necessarily socialism or semi-socialism. This is only the political superstructure, whether or not a system is feudal, slavery, capitalist or socialist is primarily determined by the economic base, not the superstructure. The Soviet Union was still a worker's state in Stalin's time despite his dictatorial deformation of the system because its economy relied on a proletarian basis. I see no proletarians in the Inca empire, not even peasants or serfs. Therefore it was a slavery economic system, regardless of whether it is divided at the superstructure level like the Aztecs or centralised into a command economy, which is irrelevant.

If a "command economy" is all it took for a society to be socialist, then there is no doubt that the Western Han dynasty in China 2000 years ago was socialist. Most of the dynasty's economy was state-owned and controlled directly from the capital. The imperial state owned massive iron and salt mines and iron foundries employing hundreds of craftsmen at the very least. Emperor Wudi essentially took over all the power of every single regional landlord beyond a certain size. The Western Han empire was a near-homogenous spread of small peasants and independent small landlords organised directly into imperial districts administered by a professional civil service and bureaucracy recruited and appointed directly by the imperial court of the Han. Bureaucrats were not allowed to form local power blocs. It even had progressive taxing and a welfare system. The state financed every single bit of disaster management and relief against floods, earthquakes etc, for the benefit of the people. Slavery and serfdom were virtually non-existent. Most slaves and serfs were just convicted criminals. Virtually no liangmin or "good people" (i.e. people who have not broke the law and did not become social outcasts in their own family clans) would ever have the risk of becoming a slave.

But I still wouldn't call the Han dynasty socialist or even semi-socialist, because its economic base still rested on landlordism (albeit small scale landlordism) and peasant agriculture.



Mayan astronomer-priests generated scientific readings of indisputable accuracy; Roman Catholic officials, by contrast, burned Giordano Bruno at the stake and placed Galileo under house arrest for contradicting their doctrines about the nature of the solar system and universe. Which form of theocracy would you describe as more counterproductive?
Yeah, so did the Shang dynasty in China 2000 years earlier. I thought you were talking about the Incas and not the ancient native Mexicans?

Obviously I have no interest to apologise for Christianity, but people sometimes attack it excessively. The relationship between Christianity and science was not completely an antagonistic one, as modern history of science has demonstrated. The majority of the British Royal Society in Newton's day were very pious Christians, and Issac Newton himself was as much a theologian as a physicist. European theology had a philosophical depth, thanks largely to borrowing of Greco-Roman philosophy from the Islamic Arabs, that native American theology did not. Most old universities in Europe, like Oxford and Cambridge, started off as centres of theological learning.

Christianity in the Middle Ages played a dialectical role, it was not totally negative. Also, modern historical research has shown that the fate of the likes of Copernicus and Galileo were primarily due to political rather than direct theological reasons.



This board's Maoists might have a thing or two to say about your apparent veneration of Chinese feudalism and insinuation that it was not characterized by deeply reactionary social practices such as foot binding.
Foot-binding vs. human sacrifice has no contest. Actually, it is interesting to note that some women in ancient China volunteered to foot-bind themselves just like many women today volunteer to starve themselves or wear very high-heeled shoes. Obviously it is quite likely these were, like their modern counterparts, ultimately victims of the oppressive system. But it is not on the same level as human sacrifice.

Foot-binding incidentally only began during the Song dynasty, relatively late in China's long feudal history. Did you know that during the early Tang dynasty, Chinese women had more freedoms than anywhere else in the feudal world? It is fashionable at the time to cross-dress (albeit only female-to-male cross-dressing not the other way around which was still socially frowned upon - after all, the Tang Chinese were partly nomadic and were relatively warlike, so for females to "masculinise" themselves was a sign of strength while for males to "feminise" themselves was a sign of weakness) for young ladies, and also for them to ride horses and play polo. (Name me one other ancient civilisation where cross-dressing became a mainstream activity)

Of course, I have no desire to "vernerate" Chinese feudalism. But in the case of Mao, he was not totally negative in his comments of China's long feudal past, he said one should take out the positive aspects - "throw away the feudal junk, but keep the democratic essense". Mao was actually very well-versed in the Chinese classics and poetry, as well as calligraphy. Most of his political poems were in the classical Chinese style.

However, as far as the thread here is concerned I think it is somewhat wrong to emphasise that saying some positive things about Chinese feudalism is so reactionary while praising the system of the Inca slave-lords is not. The Han dynasty actually has more of a case of being labelled as "socialist" than the Incas.

As for the Incas, sorry if this sounds somewhat "sinocentric", but essentially the Incas were no more advanced than the Chinese during the Shang dynasty in the 2nd millennium BCE (more than 2000 years earlier) in most aspects, and actually the Shang had a developed system of writing, whereas the Incas only knew how to tie things on knots. Of course, ancient Egypt, which was also a slave-lord state, was even more advanced and even more ancient.

I doubt you can name a single key Inca technology or social element that the ancient Shang and Egyptians did not already have 2000 - 3000 years earlier.



Perhaps, in the relative sense, considering the higher rate of executions in Europe. Quoting from 1491 again, which every single person here who insists on conveyance of their Eurocentrism (and all modern Europeans, I've noticed), the author writes this:

Oh, well...
But it's not primarily the number of deaths, but what people died for. I'd say to die in religious wars is more progressive than to die as a sacrificial victim, and to die in a purely political war is more progressive than to die in a religious war. Not all deaths are equal. Wars tend to kill the weakest of the population, which though deeply reactionary, is better than human sacrifice which blindly kills the strong and the weak alike. At least in war there is a chance of survival and even progression to the higher ranks of society if the soldier is really strong and skillful. His fate is to some extent in his own hands, despite the brutal social darwinist nature of feudal militarism. But if one is a human victim to be sacrificed to the gods, well, it doesn't matter how strong or skillful or clever one is, there is no escape from death, from fate. The latter is obviously a more reactionary form of killing people.



Eurocentrism doesn't preclude acknowledgment of the accomplishments of other cultures except in its most extreme form, which involves tales of ancient Europeans giving those cultures technology and/or advanced social structures and then disappearing. The more radical Eurocentrists dismiss the undeniable advancements of the Maya, for example, by insisting that they were gifted by European patrons. More moderate Eurocentrism is exposed through cultural bias, such as the double standard of insisting that Mesoamerican human sacrifice represents social backwardness without mention of the barbarity of European religious tradition. I've literally copied and pasted some of the same text that I've used in arguments against white supremacists here in this thread.
But I cannot be Eurocentric. I'm not even European myself. My point is that I cannot agree with your glossed over-exaggeration of Inca "greatness" to the extent of almost labelling it as semi-socialist. This is not being strict about the Marxist analysis of history, and politically it has the risk of indirectly apologising for a reactionary slavery system (yes, much worse than Chinese feudalism) in the disguise of "socialism".

[Queercommie Girl]

A comparison between the Shang dynasty (1600 - 1000 BCE) and the Inca empire: (1438 - 1533 CE) (these are comparable in most ways despite a time gap of 2500 years)

Length of imperial rule: Shang - 600 years; Incas - 100 years

Territorial size: Shang - 1,500,000 - 2,000,000 square kilometres; Incas - at its height 2,000,000 square kilometres maximum

Population: Shang - 10 million minimum; Incas - estimate uncertain, ranging from 4 to 37 million

Economic base: Shang - slavery-based agarian economy, but slaves sometimes were treated quite well, it is interesting to note that many slave sacrificial victims during the Shang went onto the sacrificial altar willingly and voluntarily (talk about the brain-washing power of the ruling class), in Shang China slave sacrifice had less superstitious connotations and was rather largely a matter of "courtesy" to one's lord after the lord's death; Incas - slavery-based agarian economy, slave treatment dependent partly on tribal origin, the human sacrifice of captured prisoners of war more prevalent than in Shang China, more superstitious religious connotations, the sacrificial ceremonies were more brutal and bloody

Political superstructure: Shang - semi-centralised absolute theocratic monarchy; Incas - semi-centralised absolute theocractic monarchy

Foreign relations: Shang - centralised core region + peripheral tributary regions; Incas - semi-centralised/semi-federalist

Theology: Both heavily superstitious and lacking any philosophical depth like later feudal religions such as Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, but Shang religion had a heavier ethical component and less super-natural

Tool-making: Shang - highly advanced late bronze age, producing some of the greatest examples of bronzeware in all of human history, with some bronze containers weighing up to a ton, also producing large numbers of weapons and tools; Incas - advanced late bronze age, producing large numbers of bronze weapons and tools

Transport: Shang - advanced two-wheel horse-drawn chariots, in some ways superior to ancient Egyptian and Hittite designs of the same period, chariots also widely used in the army, relatively advanced boat-making technology, enabling the Shang to move up and down the Yellow River and the Yangtze River, as well as coastal regions, with ease; Incas - no horses, no wheels, boat-making technology unclear

Military: Shang - standing army size approx. 100,000 in total, armed with bronze armour, bronze helmets, bamboo armour, spears, short swords, chariots, war boats; Incas - army size uncertain but flexible and quite large as many farmers could become soldiers, armed with bronze, wooden and leather armour, spears, clubs and slings, no swords, no chariots

Agriculture: Shang: large-scale irrigation/damming; Incas: large-scale irrigation/damming

Astronomy: Shang: relatively advanced; Incas: relatively advanced

Writing: Shang: fully developed writing system with thousands of characters, and words of every type; Incas: no developing writing system, use quipus (ancient Chinese texts say the ancestors of the Chinese also used knots on strings but much earlier than the Shang, perhaps 2500 - 3000 BCE or earlier, showing that a quipu-like system developing into Chinese characters later)

So I can't see a single key element of the Incas surpassing that of the Shang Chinese who existed 2500 years earlier.

[Franz Fanonipants]

But I cannot be Eurocentric. I'm not even European myself.

lol forever

[Queercommie Girl]

lol forever

OK, provide a single piece of concrete evidence where I have been Eurocentric anywhere in this thread, I don't think you can do it.

Just because I don't jump into your pea-brained idiotic wagon of "Inca slave-lord state = socialism" bullshit, doesn't mean I'm Eurocentric in any way.

[Franz Fanonipants]

OK, provide a single piece of concrete evidence where I have been Eurocentric anywhere in this thread, I don't think you can do it.

Just because I don't jump into your pea-brained idiotic wagon of "Inca slave-lord state = socialism" bullshit, doesn't mean I'm Eurocentric in any way.

http://img.waffleimages.com/dfe3362d58cb6da9c84b5d0fa692064083faacad/fzakba.gif