However, I don’t think this is the whole explanation. The technological advantage of the conquistadors was not overwhelming.
With regard to the Americas at least, I just happened to read this article by a professional military historian, who characterizes the Native American military technology as being “thousands of years behind their Old World agrarian counterparts”, which sounds like the advantage was actually rather overwhelming.
There is a massive amount of literature to explain what is sometimes called ‘the Great Divergence‘ (a term I am going to use here as valuable shorthand) between Europe and the rest of the world between 1500 and 1800. Of all of this, most readers are likely only to be familiar with one work, J. Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel(1997), which is unfortunate because Diamond’s model of geographic determinism is actually not terribly well regarded in the debate (although, to be fair, it is still better than some of the truly trash nationalistic nonsense that gets produced on this topic). Diamond asks the Great Divergence question with perhaps the least interesting framing: “Why Europe and not the New World?” and so we might as well get that question out of the way first.
I am well aware that when EU4 was released, this particular question – and generally the relative power of New World societies as compared to Old World societies – was a point of ferocious debate among fans (particularly on Paradox’s own forums). What makes this actually a less central question (though still an important one) is that the answer is wildly overdetermined. That is to say, any of these causes – the germs, the steel (through less the guns; Diamond’s attention is on the wrong developments there), but also horses, ocean-going ships, and dense, cohesive, disciplined military formations would have been enough in isolation to give almost any complex agrarian Old-World society military advantages which were likely to prove overwhelming in the event. The ‘killer technologies’ that made the conquest of the New World possible were (apart from the ships) old technologies in much of Afroeurasia; a Roman legion or a Han Chinese army of some fifteen centuries earlier would have had many of the same advantages had they been able to surmount the logistical problem of actually getting there. In the face of the vast shear in military technology (though often not in other technologies) which put Native American armies thousands of years behind their Old World agrarian counterparts, it is hard not to conclude that whatever Afroeurasian society was the first to resolve the logistical barriers to putting an army in the New World was also very likely to conquer it.
(On these points, see J.F. Guilmartin, “The Cutting Edge: An Analysis of the Spanish Invasion and Overthrow of the Inca Empire, 1532-1539,” in Transatlantic Encounters: European and Andeans in the Sixteenth Century, eds. K. J. Andrien and R. Adorno (1991) and W.E. Lee, “The Military Revolution of Native North America: Firearms, Forts and Politics” in Empires and Indigenes: Intercultural Alliance, Imperial Expansion and Warfare in the Early Modern World, eds. W.E. Lee (2011). Both provide a good sense of the scale of the ‘technological shear’ between old world and new world armies and in particular that the technologies which were transformative were often not new things like guns, but very old things, like pikes, horses and metal axes.)
With regard to the Indian Ocean, he writes:
the Portuguese cartaz-system (c. 1500-c. 1700) [was] the main way that the Portuguese and later European powers wrested control over trade in the Indian Ocean; it only worked because Portuguese warships were functionally unbeatable by anything else afloat in the region due to differences in local styles of shipbuilding).
I don’t really see this as in strong conflict with what I said. I agree that technology is the main factor; I said it was also “strategic and diplomatic cunning;” are you suggesting that it wasn’t really that at all and that if Cortez had gifted his equipment to 500 locals they would have been just as successful at taking over as he was? I could be convinced of this I suppose.
With regard to the Americas at least, I just happened to read this article by a professional military historian, who characterizes the Native American military technology as being “thousands of years behind their Old World agrarian counterparts”, which sounds like the advantage was actually rather overwhelming.
With regard to the Indian Ocean, he writes:
I don’t really see this as in strong conflict with what I said. I agree that technology is the main factor; I said it was also “strategic and diplomatic cunning;” are you suggesting that it wasn’t really that at all and that if Cortez had gifted his equipment to 500 locals they would have been just as successful at taking over as he was? I could be convinced of this I suppose.