Tim Burke Critiques Jared Diamond
Tim Burke (who knows Africa) has an intelligent critique of Jared Diamond's understanding of Africa:
Easily Distracted: [T]here are some legitimate criticisms of Diamond to be made, both problems that are particular to his work and problems that are more general in sociobiological or materialist histories....
Diamond clings to the term "blacks" as racial category within which to place most pre-1500 sub-Saharan Africans except for Khoisan-speakers and "pygmies", even as he explicitly acknowledges that it is an extremely poor categorical descriptor of the human groups he is placing in that category. The chapter's central interest is the migration of Bantu-speakers across the continent, with the argument that iron working and agricultural knowledge were what enabled them to displace autochthonous Khoisan and pygmy societies. This is an uncontroversial argument, but the point is that it doesn't require a category of "blacks" to function.... There's no need for him to enfold the African populations of West Africa, who are not Bantu-speaking: their history isn't what interests him in the chapter.... Why not call Bantu-speaking societies what they are?....
Diamond has a tendency to exclude--not even mention or argue against, but simply bypass--deeply seated causal arguments and evidence that don't fit his thesis. Let me take the Bantu-speaking migration again. There's no question that iron working and farming were very important to driving their movements across the central, eastern and southern portions of the African continent, and were the central reason why older populations of pastoralists and hunter-gatherers were either absorbed into Bantu-speaking societies or fled from their advance. But Diamond takes it as a given that iron working and farming are sufficient explanation of the migration itself, that they made the expansion of the Bantu-speakers inevitable. That may be so, but he doesn't even bother to discuss segmentary kinship... and its possible role in pushing expansion. This is the key explanation that many Bantu-speaking societies offer themselves for their migrations, that when there was at some past point strife or tension among kin, a portion of a lineage would break off behind a charismatic lineage head and move on. That's obviously not the whole story, but I think it's part of it. Diamond's materialism is so confidently asserted and at such a grand scale that he doesn't even pause to defend it trenchantly the way someone like Marvin Harris does....
This is especially acute, as many readers of GGS have noted, with his views on Chinese history and the venerable question of why China did not industrialize but the West did. There's a tremendous weight of evidence that the general political traditions of the Chinese state plus the particular decisions of its political elite at key moments are much more powerfully explanatory of China's failure to expand or dominate in the post-1500 era than the big-picture materialism that Diamond offers.
Third, he is a bit prone... to... scooping up all the cases of human practice or culture that fit his assertions about universal patterns or behaviors.... Diamond is by no means as egregious in this kind of cherrypicking as some evolutionary psychologists are, but the selectivity of his evidentiary citation grates a bit on anyone who knows the ethnographic literature....
Fourth, on Yali's question, I have a few problems. Though Brad DeLong insists that Diamond only means his answer to explain the relative imbalance in material wealth and power between many non-Western societies and the West up to 1500 and not afterwards, I think it's clear that Diamond thinks that post-1500 events are no more than the icing on the cake, that the fundamental explanation of post-1500 inequalities and disparities in the world derive from the grand arc of pre-1500 development, from the luck of the geographical draw....
Because the grand argument of GGS turns on the slow accumulation of geographical advantage to people inhabiting the Eurasian continent, it sometimes ignores much more short-term material explanations which are potentially in and of themselves sufficient explanations. To explain the Atlantic slave trade in materialist terms, for example, you may need nothing more than the relative proximity of Africa and Europe, the trade wind system across the Atlantic, improvements in European nautical capability prior to 1450, and the relative lack of harbors plus poor habitability of the West and Central African coastline.... That['s]... a much more constrained set of factors with a much shorter temporal scale than what Diamond puts into play. And the Atlantic slave trade may itself be a nearly sufficient explanation of the expansion of the West after 1500, given the cascade of effects it unleashed....
Anthropologists and historians interested in non-Western societies and Western colonialism also get a bit uneasy with a big-picture explanation... that seems to cancel out... the many small differences and choices after 1500.... [I]f you want to answer Yali's question with regards to Latin America versus the United States, you've got to think about the peculiar, particular kinds of political, legal and religious frameworks that differentiated Spanish colonialism in the New World from British and French colonialism, that a Latin American Yali would have to feel a bit dissatisfied with Diamond's answer.
For me, I also feel a bit at a loss with any big-picture history that isn't much interested in the importance of accident and serendipidity at the moment of contact between an expanding Europe and non-Western societies around 1500. That seems a part of Cortes's conquest of Moctezuma, or the early beginnings of the Atlantic slave trade, when West African practices of kinship slavery fed quite incidentally into exchange with Portuguese explorers who weren't there for slaves at all.(1) It may be that such accidents are not the cause of the material disparity that Yali describes, but in many cases, they're what makes the contemporary world feel the way that it does. It's not that Diamond argues against such matters, but he doesn't leave much room for them to matter, either.
Let me make just four points in response...
First, explaining the 1550-1850 rape of west Africa by the Atlantic slave trade requires more than "proximity... trade wind[s]... European nautical capacity... lack of harbors plus poor habitability of the west and central African coastline" (plus sugar islands where slave plantation labor can be exploited extremely profitably). It also requires a west Africa that doesn't have its own gunpowder armaments industry, and where small amounts of "advanced" European military technology can upset the balance of power and induce slave raiding-driven chaos for centuries.
Second (and this is tentative, for here I am out of my depth), all societies develop internal strife. Whether the strife is resolved by internal civil war and purge or by the breaking-off and migration outward of a portion of the society depends crucially on just who is over the next hill, whether they are friendly, and whether it matters whether they are friendly. Bantu-speakers' technologies of farming meant that they could support much higher population densities in areas they chose to move into. Bantu-speakers' technologies of iron working meant that they had sharper tools and weapons than others in areas they chose to move into. Without these edges, lineage splitoffs would have found migration next to impossible.
Third, I think that Tim Burke is right when he writes that "Diamond thinks that post-1500 events are no more than the icing on the cake." Diamond thinks that, given inequalities as they existed in 1500, post-1500 history is unproblematic--the interesting things, for Diamond, are what happened before 1500, so that's what he thinks is worth studying, and that's what he writes about. I think that Diamond is wrong: I think that post-1500 history is not the icing on the cake, and is very problematic. But it would be grossly unfair to focus a critique of Diamond on what he does not write about, rather than on what he does.
Fourth, let me agree with Tim Burke that most of the questions I think are most interesting about world history are not ones that Diamond has much purchase on. Europe v. China. South America v. North America. What happened to Islamic civilization after 1000. Diamond has little to say about any of these.
I even think that Diamond massively overstates the ability of his model to hel us understand sub-Saharan Africa's development. Yes, climate is different and a great deal of the Middle Eastern biotechnological toolkit is not directly applicable. But a lot of the biotechnological toolkit is. And the whole rest of the technological toolkit is. And it's not as though east Africa was cut off from news about what was happening in Eurasia: the most important seaport on the central east African coast--the House of Peace--is named not in Swahili but in Arabic: Dar es Salaam. The writers of 1 Kings were especially impressed with what the Indian Ocean trade fleets brought: gold, and silver, and ivory, apes, and peacocks.
Why, from 1000 to 1800, weren't the areas around Timbuktu and Dar es Salaam a lot more like the areas around Samarkand and Tashkent (in some centuries they were, weren't they?)? Diamond's model doesn't help us to understand why not. I don't understand why not.
Note
(1) Barbara Solow long ago convinced me that the westward migration of sugarcane carried unfree labor with it. From Egypt to Cyprus to the islands of the eastern Atlantic, the idea that one would grow sugarcane in plantations with overseers "supervising" workers who were not free to leave was a settled part of the mode of production from 1000-1500. The captains of Dom Enrique may not have been looking for slaves, but when they found them they certainly knew where they could sell them for a very good price: to sugarcane plantation owners.
