The great colonial mystery

Literature

The great colonial mystery ...of Europe’s explosive expansion

By Nicolas

Rothwell

Why was it that

European civilisa

tion, and no other, colonised the globe?

What was it about the cultures of that particular continent that permitted them such explosive expansion? Why, in short, did white men, who seem, on the face of things, just as quarrelsome and rapacious as any other race, have such material and technological advantage?

These problems, so often pondered in private by anyone exposed to the realities of post-colonial life, and yet so little dis cussed in public, form the trigger for American biogeographer Jared Diamond’s challenging master-work, Guns, Germs and Steel - The Fates of Human Societies.

Professor Diamond, one of the most persuasive and entertaining of science writers, seeks in this book to answer “Yali’s question”, an inquiry put to him by a charismatic Papua New Guinea local politician in July, 1972: “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

Diamond’s answer, a quarter century in the making, leads him on a long and fasci

nating road. He develops a far-reaching

account of human settlement and econom ic interaction, a virtual science of history and a painstaking survey of the geographic patterns of colonisation.

At the core of his theory is a simple observation - that many of the crops and domesticated animals that underpin the practices of agriculture originated in the fertile crescent and Eurasia. This accident of geography gave the human beings fortu nate to live in those regions a "head start” in the race towards advanced technology.

Diamond teases out every implication of this idea. He looks at the shapes and cli mates of continents, the ease with which they can be travelled, the trials of human development in less favoured regions of the world. The upshot is a startling, and ultimately convincing, explanation for the grand themes of human history. Guns, germs and steel then are the tools that allowed colonisers to achieve easy supremacy at the time of first contact - European guns, the infectious diseases the explorers carried in their bodies, and the steel-manufactured goods they brought in their train. History, according to Diamond, “followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peo ples’ environments, not because of biolog ical differences among peoples them selves”. Such is his one-sentence summary of his own work. Succinct and apposite, it yet does little justice to the constant sug gestiveness and informing splendour of the book. There is hardly a page that fails to challenge the reader’s preconceptions, startle with recondite combinations of data, or invert the traditional stereotypes of our received knowledge.

Among the most intriguing of Diamond’s chapters is his section on the first great Pacific colonisation: “Speedboat to Polynesia” - a tale of the origin of the Austronesian language speakers in Taiwan and their gradual radiation through the Indonesian region to New Guinea and on across Oceania. “With the occupation of the Chatham Islands off New Zealand around AD 1400, barely a century before European "explorers’ entered the Pacific, the task of exploring the Pacific was final ly completed by Asians. Their tradition of exploration lasting tens of thousands of years, ended only when it had run out of targets and almost every habitable Pacific island had been occupied.”

Nature provides Diamond with a pre cise check on his theory. Various Polynesian groups evolved in different ways on their respective island homes. The Maori of New Zealand, a dense population of farmers engaged in bitter territorial wars, came upon the tranquil Moriori

hunter-gatherer population of Chatham Islands in late 1835. These peoples were cousins, separated by only a few hundred years of social evolution. The Maori effaced the weaker population; proof, if you will, that variation is in significant degree a product of historical geography.

All Polynesia was a striking stage of diverse environments; ranging from atolls to large high islands, from a micro conti nent to tiny specks of coral. In social sys tem, Polynesian societies ran from “fairly egalitarian village societies to some of the most stratified societies in the world, with many hierarchically ranked lineages and with chief and commoner classes whose members married within their own class”.

"All these differences among Polynesian societies developed, within a relatively short time and modest fraction of the Earth's surface, as environmentally related variations on a single ancestral society.” The grand conclusion Diamond is reaching for becomes, as a result of hun dreds of well-argued examples, clear: that human diversity has a direct and environ mental explanation, and hence arguments that trace different outcomes to differences in capability between peoples are not merely “loathsome” - they are wrong.

More controversial is Diamond’s attempt to sketch a full-fledged ‘"science of history”, placing this discipline on a par with such hard sciences as geology and cli matology. Perhaps we should still leave some room for the action of the individual human being - even while applauding Diamond’s eager coupling of such diverse fields as genetics, linguistics, biogeogra phy, politics and archaeology. If we are to unravel, and leant from, the patterns of the past, we need all the help we can find. ■

Guns, Germs and Steel - The Fate of Human Societies by Jared Diamond published 1997 by WW Norton, NY, USA. $U527.50