My history teacher says “geography is destiny” and made us watch guns germs and steel. I think bad empanada said this narrative promotes a lack of remorse for colonization because it’s characterized as inevitable. He didn’t explain why it was wrong though iirc. My teacher (who likes orwell) says it’s just material conditions. It could be argued that geography is created the original conditions that led to class society before class forced largely took over, though this could be taken to the extent of class being secondary. Anyone know about this?
I wrote out a long comment and deleted it, might come back to this, but check out world systems & dependency theory guys.
I really really recommend Eurocentrism (2nd edition) by Samir Amin
I forgot Diamond was trying to explain why the west has all the “loot.” Obviously, dependency theory makes way more sense. I was just wondering about the geographical explanations for why colonization worked. It’s clear he’s wrong in both.
Samir Amin’s got some good writing abt the lack of capital controls of European feudalism & why that + the need to monopolize certain natural resources led to imperialism