Carnage and Culture: Landmark Battles in the Rise of Western Power Read Online Free PDF Page A

Europeans in Europe
with non-European weapons.
That European colonial armies sometimes found themselves vastly outnumbered, often opposed by courageous indigenous warriors equipped with Western firearms, and then were annihilated tells us little about Western military weakness.
    Sometimes critics of the idea of Western military predominance point to the easy transference of technology in arguing that, say, American natives became better shots than European settlers or that Moroccans quickly mastered Portuguese artillery. Such arguments have the paradoxical effect of proving the opposite of what is intended: Englishmen were in the New World and selling guns to natives, not vice versa. Moroccans were not in Lisbon teaching Portuguese the arts of indigenous Islamic heavy gunnery. Here the human quality of utilizing, mastering, and improving a tool is confused with the cultural question of providing an intellectual, political, and social context for scientific discovery, popular dissemination of knowledge, practical application, and the art of mass fabrication.
    As we shall see with Carthage and Japan, the very controversial question of Westernization has a reductionist and sometimes absurd quality about it: there is no military concept of “Easternization” within the armed forces of the West, at least in which entire Western cultures adopt wholesale the military practices and technology of the non-West. Meditation, religion, and philosophy are not the same as industrial production, scientific research, and technological innovation. It matters little where a weapon was first discovered, but a great deal how it was mass-produced, constantly improved, and employed by soldiers. Few scholars, however, can disconnect the question of morality from energy. Thus, any investigation of why the military of the West has exercised such power is far too often suspect of cultural chauvinism.
    Nature Over Culture?
    Is Western hegemony a product of luck, geography, natural resources, or itself a late phenomenon due largely to the discovery and subsequent conquest of the New World (1492–1700) or to the Industrial Revolution (1750–1900)? Many cite the West’s natural and geographical benefaction. In this line of thinking—made most popular by Fernand Braudel and most recently by Jared Diamond—the West’s apparent “proximate” advantages in technology like firearms and steel are due largely to more “ultimate” causes that are largely accidental. For example, the Eurasian axis favored a long crop season, a different sort of animal husbandry, and species diversity. The resulting rise in urban population and animal domestication created a lethal brew of germs that would decimate outsiders without long-standing exposure and ensuing biological immunity. European topography both prevented easy access by hostile nomads and promoted rival cultures, whose competition and warring led to constant innovation and response. Europe was blessed with abundant ores that made iron and steel production possible, and so on.
    Natural determinists are to be congratulated in their efforts for the most part to dismiss genes. Europeans were not by any means naturally smarter than Asians, Africans, or the natives of the New World. They were
not
genetically dumber either—as Jared Diamond, the purportedly natural determinist, has unfortunately hinted at. In an especially disturbing reference to racial intelligence, Diamond argues for the genetic inferiority of Western brains:
    New Guineans . . . impressed me as being on the average more intelligent, more alert, more expressive, and more interested in things and people than the average European or American. At some tasks that one might reasonably suppose to reflect aspects of brain function, such as the ability to form a mental map of unfamiliar surroundings, they appear considerably more adept than Westerners. (J. Diamond,
Guns, Germs, and Steel,
20)
    One wonders what would have been the response of critics