:shocked-pikachu: It turns out it was colonialism and unequal exchange all along.

  • TrudeauCastroson [he/him]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    Bad Empanada had a good detailed takedown of that book. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kq6EuZj4axA

    It was an interesting way of looking at history, it was somehow less racist than what came before it (instead of being like “skill issue that you were colonized”, it at least went "well there were environmental factors)

    He goes into detail about questionable stories being taken at face value, since conquistadors tended to exaggerate their exploits to get more recognition.

    • SSJ2Marx [he/him]@hexbear.netOP
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      9 months ago

      When I read it as a kid, it was the first thing I ever read that tried to answer the question of why the world is the way it is in a materialist way. Most history books have even bigger nonsense in them like “Thomas Jefferson’s ideas caused Americans to be hard working and freedom loving :)”, compared to that the theory of “this place had all the farm animals” seems pretty plausible.

  • Hello_Kitty_enjoyer [none/use name]@hexbear.net
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    9 months ago

    Complete concise history of global inequality:

    20,000 years ago Americans colonized America. People like foraging and not doing rote farm labor, so they didn’t

    10,000 years ago, Afroeurasia was full, bc it had been settled for 10x longer than America. Thus, people starved killed and rworded each other. The ability to subsist off of inferior foods was selected (lactose, grain, plant fat)

    500 years ago, America was still empty. Because it’d only been settled for 19,500 years. After all, Afroeurasia was also empty in 81,500 BCE. Americans lived a paleo/early-neolithic lifestyle by Asian standards, bc they could! (euros are northwest asians).

    The above made them easy to genocide, bc they lacked both numbers (10x lower popdensity except Mexico) and the tech (metal) that arose from neolithic Iranians and Chinese (and later on all Asia) living in cities.

    None of this is remarkable, it would also be very easy to genocide the Indoeuropeans, or Rome, or even 1930s Britain, if we traveled back in time with modern tech

    Northwest Asians discovered the Americas, because it’s right next to them. Also wind naturally blows in that direction. The path between East Asia and the Americas is 6x larger.

    The Americas are two huge continents, so Northwest Asians got turbo-rich off them.

    It’s easy to invent and experiment when you have 5x extra food and leisure time.
    When you are starvation-farming, you can’t experiment bc you starve to death if the experiment goes wrong.
    This is how nations like Britain were able to evolve from living in swampholes to having advanced navies.