I did not intend to imply that historians were writing racist explanations for why Europe was able to colonize most of the world—sorry if that is how it came across! Instead, I believe those views were common among mainstream society. Part of that is because there had not been a cohesive, insightful, and popular alternate explanation.
McNeill is indeed one of the few historians who were investigating this question—and unfortunately I haven’t read any of his work. However, I don’t think that Jared Diamond was just repeating McNeill’s argument because the back of my copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel has this excerpt from a review that McNeill gave the book:
There is nothing like a radically new angle of vision for bringing out unsuspected dimensions of a subject, and that is what Jared Diamond has done.
I dug up the full review online here. There’s certainly lots of criticism in the review—particularly of that epilogue. But also pay attention to how much McNeill praises Diamond for the new ideas he brings forward.
What he has to say about developments in South-east Asia and the islands of the southwest Pacific was nothing short of a revelation.
Diamond’s account of why relatively few herd animals can be successfully domesticated was news to me.
Diamond’s observation that some of the major fertile regions of Eurasia lie at approximately the same latitude, so that crops can travel east and west without having to adjust to seasonal differences in day-lengths, was also an eye-opener for me. … By contrast, the spread of maize from its heartland in Central America was hindered by the fact that its growth pattern, linked to changing day-lengths, had to wait many centuries for random genetic variation to produce plants adapted to different latitudes.
By emphasizing climatic and geographical obstacles to the diffusion of crops and other useful innovations within the Americas and Africa, he brings out an important dimension of the past which I had never considered before.
Once again, much of what Diamond has to say in these chapters was entirely new to me. I was not previously aware, for example, that archaeological investigation in the uplands of New Guinea seems to show that inhabitants of those secluded valleys resorted to food production not very long after the earliest known development of agriculture in the Middle East.
Diamond’s account of how speakers of Austronesian languages expanded their domain across enormous distances was also a surprise … Linguistic affinities and archaeology provide the basis for this reconstruction of one of the most far-ranging human migrations of all time. I had never before understood how its separate episodes combine into a single pattern.
The tone of this review is radically different from those reddit threads. The modern online discourse about Diamond has amplified all of the criticisms from early reviews like McNeill’s, but entirely removed all of the praise. One of the reddit threads compared Diamond to a student faking a chemistry experiment—I certainly don’t think that McNeill had the same perspective! McNeill seems to have an honest disagreement with Diamond, he doesn’t think that he’s a fraud.
Reading those reddit threads can definitely make someone develop a heuristic “to not believe any analysis that Diamond presents, since there’s a significant probability that it’s misleading”. But I think that’s a shame, because Diamond has lots of unique, well-praised insights that are missing from the discussion in those threads.
I did not intend to imply that historians were writing racist explanations for why Europe was able to colonize most of the world—sorry if that is how it came across! Instead, I believe those views were common among mainstream society. Part of that is because there had not been a cohesive, insightful, and popular alternate explanation.
McNeill is indeed one of the few historians who were investigating this question—and unfortunately I haven’t read any of his work. However, I don’t think that Jared Diamond was just repeating McNeill’s argument because the back of my copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel has this excerpt from a review that McNeill gave the book:
I dug up the full review online here. There’s certainly lots of criticism in the review—particularly of that epilogue. But also pay attention to how much McNeill praises Diamond for the new ideas he brings forward.
The tone of this review is radically different from those reddit threads. The modern online discourse about Diamond has amplified all of the criticisms from early reviews like McNeill’s, but entirely removed all of the praise. One of the reddit threads compared Diamond to a student faking a chemistry experiment—I certainly don’t think that McNeill had the same perspective! McNeill seems to have an honest disagreement with Diamond, he doesn’t think that he’s a fraud.
Reading those reddit threads can definitely make someone develop a heuristic “to not believe any analysis that Diamond presents, since there’s a significant probability that it’s misleading”. But I think that’s a shame, because Diamond has lots of unique, well-praised insights that are missing from the discussion in those threads.