Eurasians had lived for millennia among the livestock who are vectors for diseases – chickens, pigs and rats – and been decimated by wave after wave of smallpox, plague and the rest until the survivors had built up sturdy resistance. Non-Eurasians had no defences and no medicines, and so died in hundreds of thousands. In the centuries to come far more native peoples died of the scourge of smallpox than any other cause. And – an important point – the diseases spread faster than the conquerors. All it took was one contact on a beach and a native to return to his tribe which included foraging parties or raiders or traders and Old World diseases could travel like wildfire inland – with the result that the conquerors often encountered cultures and societies which were already fatally weakened by disease before they even arrived.
We can rephrase the question about the world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? (p.16)
The 1990s saw an explosion in popular science books and this one won prizes (the Pulitzer Prize, over a million copies sold) for its skilful interweaving of a wide range of specialisms – biogeography, archaeology, anthropology, molecular genetics, linguistics and more – to answer an apparently ‘simple’ question. In his introduction Diamond calls it ‘Yali’s Question’, after a New Guinea native he knows (Diamond has spent a lifetime studying the birds of New Guinea) and who once asked him: ‘Why did you white people develop so much “cargo” and bring it to New Guinea and we black people have so little “cargo” of our own?’ where ‘cargo’ stands for the full range of marvellous inventions the white man brought with him.
The jokey sub-title of the book…
View original post 2,743 more words
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
Recent Comments