Mordechai
Ben-Ari
Department
of Science Teaching
Weizmann
Institute of Science
Rehovot
76100 Israel
moti.ben-ari@weizmann.ac.il
According
to Jared Diamond's popular book Guns, Germs and Steel, human history was more
or less predetermined by environmental factors. While Diamond's argument is
clearly argued and supported by a vast amount of scientific evidence, and while
he does give some lip-service to the importance of cultural and personal
factors (Diamond, 1998, pp. 417–420), I believe that these factors are more
important than he allows. Let me start my argument with the description of an
historical incident.
On 22
January 1879, 20,000 Zulu warriors, armed primarily with light throwing spears
called assegais, stormed a camp of the British army near a hill called
Isandhlwana. The British force consisted of 850 Europeans, including the 2nd
Warwickshire, a battalion of veterans with twenty-one years' service. The
British infantry was supported by two field guns and a rocket battery, and
additionally by about 950 native troops who, though poorly armed and trained,
nevertheless provided some support. Within a couple of hours, the British force
was annihilated; only a handful of survivors returned to British lines in
Natal. The Zulu casualties were estimated at 2000.
How was
this possible? Throughout the British colonial experience, small forces of
well-armed and trained troops had achieved overwhelming victories over
`primitive' native troops. In fact, just a day after Isandhlwana, 4,000 Zulus
attacked a mission station at Rorke's Drift which was used as a supply dump and
hospital. Rorke's Drift was defended by only 100 British troops, many of them
wounded and sick. Yet by morning, the Zulus retreated, and the British, though
they suffered many casualties, were left in possession of Rorke's Drift.
In both
cases, the British troops fought bravely, so to what can we attribute the
difference in the outcomes? Donald Morris's detailed account makes it clear
that the decisive factor was the quality of leadership. The British officers at
Isandhlwana were complacent and conducted themselves and arranged their troops
as if they were in a rear area; they did not distribute sufficient ammunition;
they failed to send out enough patrols and they downplayed the reports of those
that were sent out. In contrast, with only a few hours’ notice, the officers at
Rorke's Drift brilliantly improvised fortifications from bags of food; they
placed their troops with care and supplied them with ammunition. During the
battle itself, they exercised impeccable tactical judgment.
Jared
Diamond describes the defeat of the Incas by Francisco Pizarro at Cajamarca on
16 November 1532, where an Inca army of 80,000 was defeated by a mere 62
mounted men and 106 foot soldiers of the Spanish force. According to Diamond's
thesis, the defeat was foreordained by massive advantages that the Spanish had
over the Incas, such as superior weapons and horses, and that these advantages
ultimately arose from a favourable ecology in Eurasia in terms of geography,
climate, and plants and animals available for domestication. Yet as Morris
claims, `A nimble man afoot with an assegai was almost a match for a mounted
man with a single-shot carbine, ...' (Morris, 1965, pp. 530-531). One cannot
help wondering that if the Incas had pressed home an attack with the courage
and fortitude of the Zulus, or if Pizarro had been as negligent as Col. Anthony
Durnford at Isandhlwana, the result would have been a massacre of the
Spanish.
Of
course, one battle does not a war make, and the Zulu state was eventually
destroyed when the full might of the British empire was brought to bear upon
them, as predicted by Diamond's thesis. Here we come to the second part of my
argument.
Diamond
is adamant that the differences in the development of the different continents
were not caused by any genetic inferiority or cultural inadequacy (though
recognizing significant cultural diversity). This is proved by noting that once
a new technology is introduced, it can be rapidly assimilated by indigenous
peoples. Notable examples are the adoption of the horse by native peoples of
North America and the re-invention of writing by Sequoyah. But why did the
adoption stop there? Why do we not see musket factories springing up
immediately after the first contacts with European imperialists? If Sequoyah could re-invent writing, why did
no one re-invent field guns? Diamond describes how the Chimbu people of New
Guinea took rapidly to Western technology, while their neighbours remained
conservative. Surely, some cultures should have taken to manufacturing modern
weapons, if not to repel the Europeans, then at least to gain ascendancy over
their neighbours.
This
would all be speculation if there were not an historical precedent, namely, the
Japanese adoption of Western technology. The Japanese culture in the nineteenth
century was feudal and conservative, and had even abandoned technologies
(firearms, long-distance seafaring) that it had once had. Yet less than forty
years passed from the Meiji restoration in 1867, which led to a decision to
modernize the nation, to the Japanese victory over the European Russians in
modern land and sea battles in 1904-5.
The
eventual defeat of the Zulus at Ulundi was foreordained despite the setback at
Isandlwana. By the mid to late nineteenth century, European
technology—steamships, railroads, and breech-loading guns with rifled
barrels—was so advanced that no pre-industrial society was likely to catch up
(though the Japanese did). But before then, the Spanish hold on South America
must have been tenuous in the sixteenth century, and the technological gap
between them and the Incas was much less than that between Japan and Europe in
the nineteenth century. If the Incas had massacred Pizarro's troops at
Cajamarca, they would certainly have won a respite in which they could have
copied or re-invented the Spanish technology. All they really needed was a Shaka
to mould their army into a formidable fighting force and an Ito Hirobumi to
lead them to modernize.
Presumably,
Diamond's answer would be that the Japanese were already living within the Eurasian
ecology with domesticated plants and animals, so they were able to form a
society that could both produce the leaders and then follow them into
modernization. But this cannot be the whole story, because European imperialism
easily overcame other Eurasian societies in China, Indo-China, India, North
Africa and the Middle East. I doubt that the Incas could have overcome the
European head start and captured Spain, but I do not believe that the
domination of the Americas by Europeans need necessarily have been as complete
as it was. Diamond is able to explain why the Europeans had a massive
head-start, but he does not explain a significant empirical fact of history:
Why, when confronted with European technology, did the leaders of almost all
cultures not realize that their political and cultural independence depended
upon mobilizing their people to adopt European technology?
References
Diamond,
J. 1998. Guns, Germs and Steel: A Short History of Everybody for the Last
13,000
Years.
London: Vintage.
Morris,
D.R. 1965. The Washing of the Spears: A History of the Rise of the Zulu Nation
Under
Shaka
and Its Fall in the Zulu War of 1879. New York: Simon & Schuster.