When the Europeans joined the American League

I’ve never read Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs and Steel. But as I understand it, the book argues that geography was the reason the native Americans stood no chance when they were invaded by the Europeans.

Diamond says Eurasia presented two geographical advantages.  First, it had vast connected arable lands, especially in temperate and well-watered Europe, where agriculture was easy and domesticatable animals plentiful.  Agriculture flourished, along with its social stability and surplus production that could support a portion of the population working on things not directly tied to immediate subsistence.

Like trading — and here’s where the second Eurasian geographical advantage kicks in: there were easy land (or land and water) east-west trade routes available all across the Eurasian (and North African) land mass. Not only did this add to economic productivity (by fueling comparative-advantage-driven efficiency and diversity), it promoted technological advances, as ideas and practices developed in one place spread relatively easy to others.

For example, Europeans learned about gunpowder from the Chinese. The Europeans took the idea and ran with it, constantly improving their guns while fighting each other.  Pick up  mathematics from the Arabs, printing (and thus literacy) from the Germans, navigation from the Portuguese, universities from the French, etc, etc., and the West Eurasians (ie., Europeans) by 1500 are rapidly making sustained technological progress.

The germs grow out of another side effect of rich agriculture and far-flung trade: cities.  Cities make you sick. They either kill you or make you immune , and they weed out genetic strains that are vulnerable to diseases. The surviving population gets more and more disease-resistant.

I would add another major competitive advantage Eurasians had developed, thanks to agriculture and its surpluses:  the habit of subservience.  From the city to the empire, Eurasians coordinated their efforts on the mass scale. Most people expected to be bossed around by others, and had grown comfortable with the advantages subservience offered: public order, economies of specialization and scale, the possibility of accumulating property, etc.

So when the Europeans came to America, the Native Americans were not equipped to handle them.  It wasn’t that the Europeans were smarter or better or stronger.  The invaders just had thousands of years of agricultural surpluses, boosted by comparative-advantage trade and technological progress, subservience-supported sociological/economic/political mass organization, and robust immune systems.  They’d been in training for a hundred generations.

So from the moment they joined the original American league, the Europeans dominated.

Sounds familiar. Ten of us are the natives, used to our isolated world led by our traditional chiefs.  Now we’ve welcomed a newcomer.  He apparently has a gun. Or maybe some germs. Or better technology.  Whatever it is he’s got, we have to get it quick or we’ll find ourselves under the boot of a new master.