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

had Diamond juxtaposed the words “New Guineans” and “Europeans.” Are we to believe that Columbus lacked the brain function to make a “mental map” of unfamiliar surroundings in an empty ocean?
    The efforts of those who seek to reduce history to biology and geography deprecate the power and mystery of culture, and so often turn desperate. While Chinese civilization did give the world gunpowder and printing, it never developed the prerequisite receptive cultural environment that would allow those discoveries to be shared by the populace at large and thus freely to be altered and constantly improved by enterprising individuals to meet changing conditions. This rigidity was not because of “China’s chronic unity,” or a result of a “smooth coastline” and the absence of islands, but because a complex set of conditions favored imperial autocracy that became entrenched in a natural landscape not at all that different from the Mediterranean.
    In contrast, Rome, whose continuous rule was comparable in duration to many of the dynasties of imperial China, was an especially innovative empire, which drew strength from its unity and nearly four centuries of tranquillity. Despite the general anti-utilitarian nature of classical science, the Romans developed and then dispersed among millions of people sophisticated building techniques with cement and arches, screw presses and pumps, and factories to produce bulk supplies of everything from arms and armor to dyes, woolen cloth, glass, and furniture, as the government had little control over the dissemination or use of knowledge. The Greeks likewise found even greater power vis-à-vis other cultures during the Hellenistic period, when their national armies devastated the East. Hellenistic applied science under the Successor dynasties made practical strides unknown during the classical period when Greece was composed of over a thousand squabbling and autonomous polities. Political unity outside of China has brought other cultures advantages as well as atrophy. Neither the geography nor the political history of China alone accounts for its culture.
    We must remember also that farmland in America is as rich as Europe’s—and gave many New World palatial dynasties prosperity. China, India, and Africa are especially blessed in natural ores, and enjoy growing seasons superior to those of northern Europe. True, Rome and Greece are situated in the central Mediterranean and thus were a nexus of sorts for traders arriving from Europe, western Asia, and northern Africa—but so was Carthage, whose location was as fortunate as Rome’s. The fact is we shall
never
know the precise reasons why Western civilization in Greece and Rome developed so radically on a diverse path from its neighbors to the north, south, and east, especially when the climate and geography of Greece and Italy were not especially different from those of ancient Spain, southern France, western Persia, Phoenicia, or North Africa.
    In this most recent sort of biological determinism, natural advantages like irrigated arable land in the Fertile Crescent or expansive plains in Persia and China encourage political unity, which is a “bad” thing, while climatological and geographical adversity lead to war and fighting, which is ultimately good. Yet the East possesses no uniform geography—who indeed can sort out the differing characteristics of a small isolated valley in Greece from its nearly identical counterpart in Persia or China? Modern biologists have unknowingly returned to the Greeks’ crude historical determinism, the theories of Hippocrates, Herodotus, and Plato that asserted the harsh Greek mainland made Hellenes tough, even as the bounty of Persia enervated its population.
    Few ancient societies, in fact, were situated in a more
disadvantageous
position than Greece, neighbor to a hostile Achaemenid empire of 70 million, directly north of the warring states of the Near East, with less than half its land