U should be able to see it with the germs. He's not explaining germs, but using germs to explain capitalist conquest of the globe. cb
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Diamond has so many problems, I wrote a four page post to touch on some of them, and decided nobody would read it. See James Blaut's critique posted by Louis Proycet and linked by Alan Rudy. Nevermind
Besides not studying cultural anthropology or Marx, Diamond has little grasp of history, basic economics, and simple human understanding. Consider the European conquest of the `New' World.
Think junior high school history class where my teacher Mister Berg talked about the Dutch East India Company. Investors put money into shipping and expedition voyages to the new world as an investment scheme (crisis of accumulation) to rake in money and plunder. England, Netherlands, Spain, France were all pumped to go rape a distant continent of all its people, natural resources, and accumulated wealth in whatever form, and by God and all that's Holy, they did just that. The skeptical Italian bankers like the Medici decided it was too risky, so Columbus went to Spain where the really greedy waring bastards were in power. And besides the Italians had their Silk Road connection with the Arabs.
What's to this shit anyway? You don't need complicated theories to understand what happened and why.
The European powers discovered they couldn't force or persuade enough of their masses to labor sufficiently to bilk the lands of the Americas, and they couldn't enslave enough of the indigenous masses over there, so they went to Africa to buy more people to do the work.
Factoid I learned recently, Latin America bought more slaves from Africa than North America and there is a whole Afro-Latin movement in DC's public university to research this. Hail to them.
CG