17:56 He said North America, not "The Americas" and the paper you show on screen actually puts the number in North America as 900k on the low end and 18m on the high end. Book still sucks, but I've never heard a figure as high as 60m in NA alone.
Ah, you're right! I knew I was going to mix up a "the Americas" and "North America" there-- I did it a few times in my drafts and thought I caught them all.
@@Rosencreutzzzplease do one on British conquest of india. Many british imperialists think indians didn't fought while hindutvabadis blame Mughal Empire.
@@SafavidAfsharid3197I've read a book or two on the matter and I couldn't explain how such a small British force could impose its will on the people who lived there. It just seems absurd. Maybe Rosencreutz' explanation will stick. But then I'm Dutch and I don't fully understand how Dutch East India was made or how it worked. I can see how a group of seventeenth century sailors could genocide their way through a small island, but Java is huge and there's so many people there, yet for a while Dutch rule seemed inevitable. How did that happen?
One thing I feel would be really cool would be to model the dialectical back and forth between environment and culture by having the value and benefits of land be tied to development and other traits. Giving different regions different buffs depending on triggers meaning that some land is at one time less valuable and later maybe the most valuable depending on what you can do with it. In a more futuristic setting for example owning vast grasslands would first loose value do to the industrialization of farming and then regain it again if say you needed somewhere to put a shit load of wind turbines. In the past when colonizing the land itself could start of as less valuable cause of incompatible tech like the Europeans struggled to farm in Africa but once they learned from the natives it would gain that value. I think a history themed strategy game can never be accurate as long as it assumes a static notion of what is helpful and valuable.
@@fallingphoenix2341I vaguely remember my History class that the VoC relied on Divide and Conquer, where rather than using their own army directly to conquer, they lent themself to a kingdom fighting another, then use that debt after they won as a stepping stone to nickel-and-dime us to subjugation. The most salient example in my mind is the Bugis-Dutch alliance against Gowa-Tallo.
If you are asking yourself how in hell Diamond could think that an aardvark is similar to a hyena, I think he confused the aardvark with the aardwolf, which is an animal in the same family as the hyenas
@@Rosencreutzzz it feels weird to say that he would confuse aardvark with aardwolf. he is certainly describing an aardvark in his passage with the melon (cucumber) talk, and I think it'd be weird to talk about an aardwolf later. he's also considered a biologist (13:35) which may be in a branch unrelated to zoology to be fair but still. I think it may just be a joke he thought up as a play on words between aardvark and aardwolf, and in that sense, it may ironically show his knowledge of animals through an obscure, obtuse, and objectively kind of weird dad joke that or he did genuinely forget or didn't know an aardvark isn't an aardwolf. a better editor was needed P.S. enjoyed the videos, thank you
@@formerelydmsp Who was his editor? Its entirely possible that his editor changed that, believing it to be a spelling mistake, and when diamond skimmed the passage he didn't see the change.
@@timedraven117 I don’t know who the editor was. maybe one could check through the publishing company who published the book. as for it being a spelling mistake, I’m sure he intended it to be an aardvark since the passage is related to the aardvark melon (cucumber) to which the aardvark is most notable for eating. the correction was probably removing or replacing the excerpt about it being like a hyena as seen in the video than a spelling mistake. maybe the melon talk was all wrong but I think that was more important for the entire context of that section than describing the animal with an analogous animal
As a guy who played EU since the first game in 2001, I'm so happy we're moving toward more dynamic and less deterministic gameplay, especially in regards to population and trade. In fact, seeing mods like MEIOU & Taxes and Anbennar simulate religious and racial minorities, respectively, made me so much more aware how it was affecting the game's content.
Me too (well, except that I only played EU 2 and EU 4). I like in general the direction of less hardcoded things and more organic and detailed simulation. That being said, I miss seeing the actual historical rulers which EU 2. I actually learned some history from that, by checking out on Wikipedia a few of the more interesting-looking (mostly stat-wise) rulers. No longer possible, unfortunately. I like that the development is addressed. Interesting that there was a bit of a population mechinic in EU 2 that is no longer in EU 4. But I can't wait to have something similar with Victoria 3 (I guess Victoria 2 too). Should help a lot in having much more detail in how provinces function and how different policies work. Also, no longer instant development increase or nice-to-have-but-waay-too-easy cultural conversion. If they do (slow) automatic culture assimilation, I hope they have something like a cultural power. Something like asimilating the greeks, should be basically impossible without extreme measures (aka very forced and bloody), as the greek culture is much stronger than anything close by. I also hope that in general we'll have much less instant-impact action (with the development one being the worst offender). That has become my main gripe with EU 4 and I hope EU 5 gets better here. It would help with having more strategy, immersion and I guess also force in having a better (hopefully not too good) AI.
Another Rosencreutz banger. As someone who really enjoys CK3 and somewhat enjoys Vic3, but could never get into EU4, I hope the devs take yours and others comments and critiques in mind. I'm hoping I can get in on the ground floor with project caesar and come to explore and enjoy alt history gameplay in that time period when it releases.
What?? my favorite anarchist also likes grand strategy???? Thanks for making me feel less weird as a black girl enjoying games that also treat atrocity and colonialism oddly
So first is the first group of people to migrate to North America, then I'm no expert but I believe there are at least two more migrations, one is possible the Na Dene people like the Navajo and the other is the Inuit who possibly brought archery with them. Then for people from the "Old World" there's only two pre Columbian contacts that I know of that are likely, there's the Norse in what's now Atlantic Canada, which we know for sure definitely happened, and there's Andean trade with Pacific Islanders as seen with words for I believe sweet potatoes looking similar between the languages of the two areas, showing that humans brought sweet potatoes to the Pacific Islands, not a rafting event. So based on my incredibly non expert opinion Columbus was actually 6th.
Discovering something doesn't mean no one else discovered it before. Humanity could barely be considered a single collective even now, certainly not so in the past. Columbus's discovery is what led to the VAST majority of humanity even knowing the Americas existed at all, which would have been delayed by some time if he hadn't gone over there. I supposed the natives would've preferred the latter...
@@kurttrahan5892 well I think the use of "vast majority" there is spurious since the pre columbian Americas had *at most* around a third of the world's population but certainly not less than 5%, what would be necessary for a "vast majority". Considering how you literally caps locked "vast" I think it's important to remember just how populated the Americas were pre Columbus.
This channel has single handily made me feel better about my times playing paradox games by showing me the things I missed, assumed, and took for “truth” by showing me how to think historically. Forever thank you for making this :)
Paradox games have wildly different portrayals of history depending on the game, but fundamentally each game has a distinct view of history CK3 is high on great man and plot intrigue, arguing that this period was much more about strong men and otherwise stateless societies. This, btw, makes byzantium suck and china nonexistant, because these are countries that do not work like that; where interpersonal relationships matter sure, but they're not feudal or big man oriented. The byzantine emperor isn't the biggest guy who ensures the safety of everyone else, the system is reversed, and in return their rule is legitimised. This is something CK3 struggles greatly with.
Have you seen the upcoming DLC where they will introduce the unique administrative government that is modelled after medieval Byzantium? It seems to go heavily into exactly that direction where the governors of the Themata hold the power and the Basileus has to work to legimitise their rule.
@@dftpI mean while its probably going to make Byzantium suck less, its still a duct tape solution and doesnt change the fundamental problem that Byzantine bureaucracy poorly fits the focus and philosophy of CK3. And unlike China it cannot be simply removed due to geography. So unless they make entirely new mechanics that contradict the focus of the game (which is unlikely) playing as Byzantine Empire will still feel odd compared to over countries
I think where you're going wrong here is implying that Paradox games are "arguing" anything. As Rosencreutz stated they're games first and foremost and portrayals of history second. The reason CK's mechanics lean so heavily into "strong men" is because the game is much more focused around the characters that rule and govern "states" (for lack of a better term since state is wildly anachronistic for the medieval ages), especially under a feudal system. That's just naturally going to lead to emphasis on those characters.
@@TheRedKing247 they didn't say the games were arguing anything but that the way they're designed are made to model specific ideas of how things work, with CK being about people
@@anarchosnowflakist786 Did you read the original comment this was replying to? And I quote "CK3 is high on great man and plot intrigue, ***arguing*** that this period was much more about strong men and otherwise stateless societies. "
6:20 To be fair, World War 2 is also "living memory" still. My grandmother still remembers experiencing and personally surviving the ethnic cleansing of ethnic German (or more broadly Germanic, due to questions ranging from statehood to linguistics) people from her home land in what is today Czechia which happened after World War 2, but started around it's ending year.
Yeah, that's a fair point. I had a longer digression written in that section at one point, but removed it. I used to do interview and transcription for holocaust survivors and, of course, the only ones left at this point and for the last several years were children when it happened, but every year that number dwindles lower, just due to the advancement of time, so it is "less" in living memory than other things, but it is still, to a degree, there.
@@Rosencreutzzz That's fair. I always like a longer video, but if you have to make cuts I can see why that may be one area to cut. One question on those terms, which Eu4 has in the past also had issues with depicting I think, is what if a "culture" or a tag vanishes from the map completely and how the game (or mods) depict the emergence of new tags and "cultures" over time - or the resurrection of stuff, while the basegame vanilla Eu4 has clear lines wherein something will vanish forever if it isn't on the map.
@@BlueGamingRage Czechia was ethnically cleansed of its German population that had been living there for centuries. That was not Stalin's doing but primarily Czech nationalists.
Rosencreutz dismisses environmental determinism because Eurasia has mountains and deserts and Cortes could have chosen not to invade the Mexica, but Eurasia did ultimately have more domesticated animals and greater disease burden. Are we supposed to believe that Columbus's genocide of the Taino, Cortes's conquest of the Mexica, and Pizarro's conquest of the Inca were one-offs? If those three men had chosen differently no other Europeans would have invaded and conquered the Americas? Are we further supposed to believe that the Native Americans wouldn't have been decimated by old world diseases regardless? The only way I can see either happening is if Europe and the Americas were highly centralized respectively. A powerful European emperor would be needed to prevent would-be conquistadors trying to make their fortune, and a powerful American emperor would be needed to limit trade interactions with Europeans to prevent the spread of disease. In both cases that degree of centralization is ahistorical. I get that environmental determinism leads to uncomfortable places but that doesn't mean it is false. For one, a thing can be inevitable and still horrifying - death, for example. Moreover something being bad doesn't make it false. The black plague was bad but that doesn't make it fake. It is a non sequitur to say that environmental determinism can lead to justifications of racism and therefore environmental determinism is false.
Modern historiography of the conquest of the americas show that old world disease only trully decimated the natives after they had been conquered, inm places where this conquests didnt took place the population of natives kept either increasing or being stable. Furthermore. You mention those three spaniards, but you fail to talk of the many failed expeditions, the many lost wars and the many failuers the spaniards in general had during their conquest of the americas, just a few years after Cortes conquered the aztecs, the spaniards would lose wars againsr the chichimeca and the pueblans. And cases like these are very common
@@guairescp6847 The Chichimeca and Pueblans each lost ~90% of their population subsequent to contact with Europeans. I'm interested to know where you get the idea that any native population increased in the period between contact and conquest. The Mississippian Shatter Zone, for instance, declined 80% from contact in 1540 to conquest in the early 18th C. Furthermore, hill nomads who lacked capitals to siege and desert peoples who lacked goods worth taking were able to escape the Spanish for a time, but it is a real stretch to say the Spanish lost wars against them. Sure the Chichimeca fought valiantly for 40 years, but 1) the Chichimeca eventually lost and were greatly diminished in population, 2) most of the fighting was done the Spaniards' native allies, and 3) the only treasure to be seized was land for cattle grazing. And sure the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 gained the Pueblans a decade of independence, but they had been ruled for nearly a century at that point already and they were reconquered in 1692. Also, the revolt largely succeeded because the Spanish were distracted by the Apache (who had horses by that time), and of course it was nearly two centuries after Columbus by that point - Spain had already absorbed and squandered the wealth of the Americas in European wars by the 1680s.
@@darkmiles22 90% of population lost didnt happen, neither did 80%, believing so reflects and outdated model of historiography that fails to take into account modern knowledge. Similarly, your depiction of those wars are fully wrong. The chichimeca didnt just escape the spaniards, the spaniards lost many battles and they were forced to sue for peace giving the chichimeca tons of land and privilege.They didnt lost in any way a rational person would consider a loss.
@@guairescp6847I could not find recent figures but I would be delighted if you could direct me to some. For the Chichimeca the best I could find was The Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol II, Part 2, pg 112 which indicates based on compilations of earlier work from the 1970s a 1519 precontact population of 142-625k and a postcontact population centuries later of 50.7k. Clearly these figures are flawed. I suspect that assimilation into settled peoples accounts for much of the decline in the nomadic population, but the text is unclear. For the Puebloans the figures I could find are even worse. The wiki population history section declares that the Puebloans declined from a precontact population of 313k to a 1907 low of 11.3k. I could not verify either figure. Regardless, I'm not sure how much it matters. I readily concede that the Spanish did not conquer and kill/enslave every last tribe of the Americas. It's the urbanized, metal-rich great empires that were conquered first for a reason. Their gold made them tempting targets for European fortune-hunters. The argument that Cortes and Pizarro were flukes with unusual amounts of ambition/military acumen/debased morals is ridiculous. They were just the first to pluck the low-hanging fruit. History has room for free will in some things, but some things actually are baked in and predetermined.
@@darkmiles22 I dislike the the determinist model for its vaguity. Diamond's read of the conquest of Mesoamerica and the Incas is essentially fabricated for example, he seems to regard it as simple and overwhelming military victory. From my reading of Pizarro and Cortes, there was a certain political naivete to the Aztecs and Incas, whose leaders were kidnapped in their own homes or in a diplomatic procession, leading to real difficulties in formulating a response. This isn't ground that Diamond covers, because I doubt he knows it even happened. Now there's an element to geographic determinism involved here, in that perhaps geographical isolation leads to inferior political acumen, but that's far outside the realm of quantifiable historical data so determinists won't touch it. But you can compare to the contemporary Spanish/Portuguese contact with states in Asia, where they simply never had the chance to just bumrush their enemy's leader and tie them up.
hoi4: nonono, we cant have the holocaust in a world war 2 game. thats in poor taste. thats not fun. stellaris: you can manually set exactly what kind of genocide you want to inflict on each alien species
To be fair, there's a big difference between simulating a real world genocide that still has living survivors and killing slug people from the planet Dikkenbols.
I am a trained academic and I have a hard time following your points. No wonder my father, a layman, likes the book so much. It’s a very easy to understand “just so”- story and while I want to stay critical myself, I find it really difficult to see past it. It is a very solid theory, Diamond’s, and what I would critique is its difficulty to test and argue against. Ideas that are “build” like that are often too good to be true
The argument about the domesticity of plants is kind of wild considering potato's were introduced in Europe as an extra carb to help protect against the price shocks of flour.
Domesticity of plants does not mean that plants are always abundant and available. Nor does the domesticity of potatoes invalidate the theory, even if price of flour were common. furthermore, it was the domestic of certain animals in Europe that helped. And the fact that many parts of the world had seasonal flood-based irrigation systems that provide stable crops. That they were famines in Europe and Asia therefore domesticity of plants is not important or is not as significant is wrong. Furthermore over alliance on agriculture that does not lead to industrialization can make civilization more vulnerable to colonialism or imperialism.
25:34 I find this argument really hard to believe. There are flat plains all the way from Brittany to the far off Ferghana Valley in Afganistan. There is absolutely a highway of long east-west travel across Eurasia, and it even comes with horses for people to ride. If this wasn't true, various steppe peoples wouldn't have been absolutely everywhere; e.g. Scythians made it all the way to aforementioned Brittany and Ferghana.
Not to mention that the Mediterranean had been nurturing civilization since its beginnings. Stable, pleasant climate for both growing food and fishing, easy to sail and thus trade across. The Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and medieval Christians were all undoubtedly benefactors of this. I don't believe the American Mediterranean Sea is comparable.
Another thing I forgot to mention, North and South America are choked out by the Darian gap which is one of the most inhospitable places in the world, it still doesn't have a road connecting North and South America. The Eurasian steppe absolutely was more conducive to global trade and the spread of peoples and ideas
But the route actually taken by (most of) the trade wasn't though the steppe, it was through the mountains and deserts. The Darien Gap is indeed a barrier, but we also have signs of trade between the continents and it was clearly passable since there are humans on both sides and people making the trek now with children in tow. They lacked the large ships of the Europeans at that time, but they still had seaworthy canoes and the Caribbean
@@kalacaptain4818the section of the video you are mentioning specifically only talks about north america. also, quite famously, north america does also have plains from top to bottom.
The central assertion of the critique of Diamond’s thesis given by James Blaut in the quotations seems to be because it ‘rhymes’ with older theories that are adjacent to, or directly participatory in, colonial apologetics. In other words, the critique is centered on the potential political (in the broadest sense) ramifications of his theory rather than how well it explains the data in question.
The stupid thing is that Diamond meant it to be a critique OF COLONIALISM. It was supposed to debunk Racial and Cultural “Differences” as credible answers as to how societies developed differently, and mentions it in GGAS’s first pages: “The question motivating the book is: Why did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren’t: . . . [T]he answers to the question don’t involve human racial differences at all.” Even more ironically, on page 17, he says: “One objection [to answering why societies developed differently from each other] goes as follows: If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? . . . . This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results. What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself.” I.e., this book is not a colonialist apology!
@@SamuelKoepke-r3o you don't get it tho! GGS basically does not deny that they are inferior, it only states that the differences are caused by the existence or absence of evolutionary factors within people's environment. The issue progressive have with this theory is because it cannot be used to justify that a white or east-asian data scientist is equal to a duck/cat-hunter from Haiti. GGS admits being evolutionary, he only states that it's not because of "bad genes", but because of bad or lack of good mutations.
Haven't read the book, but 12:30 he may have mistaken an "aardvark" as an "aardwolf", a fairly hyena-like animal. Don't know the full context however. Love the vid and your channel btw.
surely project caesar will provide us with Pacifica Universalis I hope your time gets better, I think this deals with a lot of the fun of EU4 in fun ways. I used to read Devereux's blog a lot but haven't really since I changed jobs, and I really liked how they engaged with the games as methods of history. I think the biggest problem with EU4, and one that is somewhat likely to be a similarly big problem with EU5, is that the game is designed mostly with a fixation on being easy. The reason you don't need allies to conquer the New World is because your army has to be big enough to beat everything. The reason you don't need allies to collapse the Ming dynasty is because then other people would be able to get interior allies in you, so instead you're able to make your army big enough to beat Ming. The reason you don't need allies to beat the entirety of the HRE and France as the Pope is because players need to have as few limits to personal agency as possible. Your allies being bad isn't fun.
@@AbeYousef its a lot harder to develop different "difficulties" of AI so I understand why developers don't, but yeah, frustrating. i wish AI improvement mods didn't so routinely break with new updates.
I think the biggest problem with EU4 is that its fundamentally set in an awful time in history and that nothing you do will make life fundamentally "good" for the poorest of the poor, at least Viccy 3 is honest!
@@electricVGC They just need to take a page out of AI chess difficulty: make a really good AI and then tell it to make sub-optimal moves at a variable rate and intensity
I have a lot of hope in Paradox putting efforts in non-state states to get beyond the Westphalian system, as mentioned in the Tinto Talks. I really want to be able to play the non-state agencies, like a business , a missionary army, an international bureaucracy, a church, a cultural group, etc.
I think any and all these ways of playing will seek to ultimately "settle" and rule over an organized country. I seriously doubt they can or will even try to make all these "country types" playable for the entire runtime without it becoming boring
@27:48 I am trying to understand the point being made here. Maybe it is true that Diamond is "assuming the inevitability of conquest and Imperialism" but... why is that a bad thing? When we look at premodern societies, while I wouldn't say they *all* became expansionist and Imperialist, many of them did, in every part of the world we can look at. Some people even accuse modern liberal democracies of being Imperialists but wielding soft power. So.... why *should we not* assume that if you have an area that gives societies that arise there an advantage that at least some of those would use that advantage for conquest?
>Some people even accuse modern liberal democracies of being imperialist. …I have some bad news for you about 21st century liberal democracy. To actually answer your question, it’s bad because it’s a conflation of the potential to do harm with the inevitability of actually doing it (which is a classic apologetic argument for “might makes right”; they were going to die anyway, the argument goes, so why not have it be me that reaps the spoils?). Put another way, what compels a society with steel to build swords instead of plowshares? Historical events can’t be explained solely by the possession of a given tool or technology, they’re contingent upon the politics, culture, and structure of a given society. For instance: How does a society reproduce itself, both in the sense of gaining more people than die off each year and in the sense of its political structures remaining solvent? Who controls production- decides what is produced, where, by whom, how, and how much- and who reaps the benefit? What would compel someone of a certain social class within this society to choose this or that course of action? These are questions that can’t be answered by biogeography and tech alone; they are decided by how people of a given time and place exercise their personal and collective agency.
@@Squalidarityand the answer is everybody did conquer and subjugate when it's suited them and modern native tribes speak about their peaceful ways cause they are sour losers in need of the narrative.
@Squalidarity you didn't really answer my question though. You say it conflated the ability to do harm with the inevitability of doing so, which I agreed was the case in my post. My question was, given the fact that so many historical cultures (and by your post I guess you'd argue our liberal democracies too) DO make the choice to be Imperialist and expansionist when given the chance, why is this a bad assumption to make? If the Spanish in the 1400s were super nice and progressive, and upon discovering the Americas they said "oh, someone already lives here, we must respect their right to self determination", do you think we'd still have Aztec polities today, or would a different European group have just stepped up to carry out the Conquest?
To be fair to "Development", "Base Tax" was even *more* abstract before it got replaced. It was just a single unchanging number that did the job of all three scores (though buildings could slightly improve it). Development as a mechanic has issues, but it is an improvement over what eu4 released with, and eu4 was not even (originally) designed with it in mind. It also brought with it the end of Westernization by helping replace it with Institutions, which are still weird, but *less* fixed. I'm glad that you did touch on the fact that base game hewed a lot closer to Diamond. Regarding Terrain determinism "making sense, kinda", eu4 used to not have one terrain type per province. Every battle in a province used to have a die roll added to leader maneuver multiplied by the area that province took up in a global terrain map, which would determine which terrain that battle would take place on. But that makes for... interesting gameplay if random chance can give +2 to all rolls by one side randomly, so they made it a smoother experience pretty early on. I wonder if the old non-simple terrain system would have had an effect on development cost.
Yeah, oh boy did I not want to put my game into the oldest patch to get some "basetax" images, but it was a lot worse and a lot more deterministic by extension. A good point to acknowledge/bring up.
I sort of don't find the problematizing of Environmental Determinism particularly satisfying as a route towards dressed up racist arguments since if its not about non-human factors having a major influence on the course of history, then that just leaves the door open to claims about cultural superiority being the driver, which is also closely wedded to racist theories about the "Great divergence" and such. Especially in modern conservative thought, the idea that Europeans had a culture that was more dynamic, innovative, risk-taking, outward looking, meritocratic, rational etc etc is usually used to explain things like the conquest and settlement of the Americas and the massive overseas empires of the 19th century. I kind of feel like I'm getting tired of the issues being raised in various critiques about "agency", everything I've ever learned in any academic history setting is that counterfactuals are a waste of time, and that historians generally aren't fond of things like the Great Man theory of history anymore that basically nothing but agency. Diamond trying to offer explanations that are based on broader trends and long term factors rather than the arbitrary decisions of a few key figures feels like it would not get these kinds of objections in almost any other context, and it brings with it a sense that this is mostly just moralizing rather than particularly serious academic work when these kinds of critiques crop up, that the problem isn't that Diamond is wrong in his understanding of things like the basic series of events in Cajamarca (which he is), its that its seen to be letting the colonizers "off the hook" and that's the bigger problem than his more grounded mistakes. Also regarding the north/south crop argument in the Americas, stuff about it still sticks with me, like its my understanding that Maize rapidly spread in Central America and then down into South America, but it was a much slower process to get into the present day United States and especially into places with cold winters, like wasn't the development of varieties of Maize that could survive and grow in these regions only something that happened in the late first millennium AD, and that was important in supporting the population of cultures like the Mississippians that were much larger and denser than what came before? I'd want to know if I'm wrong about this but it does seem to be a big contrast to how crops like wheat and barley spread in Eurasia and Africa. Then you have the lack of spreading of some crucial elements of Andean farming like Potatoes or Llamas which I don't think ever made their way to North America, that does seem like a contrast to the spread of various plants and animals across Eurasia.
You are unaware what post-colonialists claim. They argument for why Western Europe built colonial empires is because they were morally inferior to the other skins who are rather respectful to other people's lands. They may even use the term "white devil" to refer to it. Through this notion they say that it is not the case that other people did not attempt to build a colonial empire, but that they did not desire so, expect the Europeans who were wicked enough to do it. I'm not even joking, they consider "western" culture to be savage and bloodthirsty and use the two world wars and the colonial oppression as evidence.
7:57 What a monster would use this map mode?! I have 2500 hours in this came and I had to think for some time what am I looking on. xD 49:22 Estate missions clearly explain that this is conversion of the ruling class and upper strata (something that happened to in Lithuania were nobility slowly adopted more prestigious Polish language and culture, while nobody cared about burghers and peasants culture), not universal germanization/russification adopted later by Prussia and Russia, or straight up Teutonic genocide on Poles, Prussians and other Baltic people.
Yeah tbh I don't think I ever use terrain mode... but the funniest cursed memory is that old old EU4... terrain was default on the menu and nation selection screen.
@@Rosencreutzzz After watching the whole video either I was too tired to watch it or this was your most rambling video I watched. Until like minute 40 you sounded as if geography had nothing to do with who conquered Americas, whereas even if Chinese or Japanese were ultra expansionist maritime nations they would logistically had much harder to profit from America due to... geography, because, you know, Pacific is much larger than Atlantic and also from my understanding (I may be massively wrong here, I am mathematician not oceanographer) even ocean current favoured Europeans, because North Atlantic currents are stronger than the North Pacific ones - so not only North Atlantic routes are shorter but you can move on them faster. Also for I while you sounded as if massive dying out of people in Americas was not inevitable and I just cannot thing about a timeline that it would not happen, regardless who discovered America. And only like 40 minutes into the video you started to admit that Diamond just put to much significance on some things, while ignored the others, not that things he was writing about were completely meaningless. Also you sounded a little bit as if Americas given more time could industrialize on their own, which I am also highly sceptical. Most, if not all of Americas (probably all) were still in bronze age so in terms of metallurgy they were like 2,500 years behind. Regardless who would invade, Europeans, Asians or Africans, the biggest issue was logistics. I just don't see a timeline that Americas are not doomed or even more absurdly, they pull off Sunset Invasion CK2/EU4 style. But I completely agree that EU4 colonial gameplay sucks and is extremely unrealistic, and most of geographical barriers in EU4 are meaninless.
I understand your critiques of Jared Diamond but I don't understand what your alternative theory for European Divergence is. You implicitly claim a cultural element because you (or the reviews you cited) mention Diamond's lack of attention to it which I agree is a massive fault of his grand narrative. But, I don't see how you can posit that other Eurasian social formations like Ming, the Mughals, and the Ottomans had no cultural or institutional drive to domination and expansion (which you seem to suggest is the decisive 'cultural' divergence). The Ottoman empire was vigorously expansionist and strove to dominate states and societies surrounding it. Obviously the divergence between them and Western Europe must rely on something else.
I second this. There seem to be a few implicit and unsaid claims that are nudged at without any real alternative or reasoning given. A big one being that the old world plague’s devastating the new world were not inevitabilities. I struggle to see how that would not have taken place and I was interested in hearing his reasoning for that
Basically the Ottomans 'won', they dominated their entire region and became the economic and military powerhouse of their entire region, and were unassailable politically or economically. They had no real need to expand further than they did, and had very little impetus to do so, as the states at their borders were either too poor to bother with, or too difficult to conquer. They had no need to colonise, as they dominated trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Until eventually the European colonial powers had circumvented them enough to establish control over trade with India and China, and had been enriched enough by colonies to challenge them and gradually whittle their territory away over the course of the 1800s. The Mughals collapsed before they could expand outside of India, and were never very politically stable. That's basically it. The Ming/Qing had also 'won'. By the height of Qing China they had tributaries across their region, were fantastically wealthy, they didn't even need to leave their own borders for trade as foreign traders came to them, and were militarily the strongest power in Eurasia with only sparsely-populated grasslands and some of the world's largest mountain ranges at their borders, which made further expansion basically pointless, as it would cost them more resources to expand than they would gain by doing so. Why would they even bother with global dominance at that point? As far as they were concerned, they had achieved it. The basic ideological difference Europeans had over all of these, critically, was white supremacism. If your institutions were basically set up over the entire society to treat any non-European you encountered as your immediate inferior, and justify any and all exploitation and treaty violation with them by private citizens, then that makes it much easier to enforce control over a decentralised maritime empire which relies on private companies and small numbers of colonists.
Why can't we have multiple things at the same like yeah the enviroment definitely has a effect but it's not the only thing? I just don't get why so many find it like racist or colonalist.
On the subject of the "difficulty" of playing in The Americas, I think the extra time granted by the earlier start date would make the eventual invasion of the European powers less frustrating than in EU4. In my mind it could operate like the End Game Crisis system in Stellaris. The extra time afforded to the players means the difficulty could be higher, making it a challenge run of sorts.
Question for both you, and also just for anyone else in the comments who may be curious. Have you ever read or listened to the following? - "Why the West Rules (For Now)" by Ian Morris - The "Tides of History" Podcast (the Early Modern period ones in pariticular) by Patrick Wyman, or his book "The Verge" - "The Great Divergence" by Kenneth Pomeranz The Ian Morris book (and most of his work in general) feels like a more historic lens for looking at big history vs Jared Diamond (with him actually having a historical background for one). It still is a big sweeping work subject to the pitfalls of generalization and lack of depth, but it feels like much of the historian community likes it as a "at least it's better than GGS" alternative. I feel like it's a great place to start, but not end, anyone's journey into the Great Divergence as a subject. It's very easy to read compared to other works, albeit with the pitfalls one might encounter with such works as well. Tides of History and the Verge are also pretty digestable even with Patrick Wyman being an academic historian himself, as he's a great storyteller that also interviews many many subject area experts, he can be a great gateway to the many different areas of history he covers. For the Great Divergence questions, his Early Modern Period works sheds a deeper light I think into a lot of aspects of European history that are often very unknown in the modern pop history understanding (although quite understood among historians). Another great entry point! The Great Divergence is also a great read that really dives into the deep details of a European and Chinese comparison, but it's also much more academic and dense. However, the sheer amount of details and data it holds compared to pop history really helps color in between the outlines drawn out by the previous works. If you (or anyone reading these comments) haven't read these works, I would highly recommend going through them! With a healthy degree of salt and a critical eye as one always should, don't take then as gospel truth but a good primer that really dives into this topic *far* more than Jared Diamond ever did
I saw GGS and immediately thought Lady Saffron should voice something in the video (I've seen y'all motherfuckers talking before I was forcefully liberated from The Everything App) Though it would've been funnier to make her read from Diamond himself instead.
I just dont think it would have ever been possible for native americans as they had come to be by the 1300's and 1400's to have created the same institutions of colonialism as the europeans did but in reverse. This may be considered "environmental determinism" but they neither had the ability or desire to do so. Imperialism wasnt and still isnt a moral decision of europeans to do evil but an economic calculus and project based on the conditions of the societies which created them. England in these games ought to have more of a drive and ability to colonize the new world than say the Mughals and I would prefer this be reflected in EU5. With not just "flavor" but I think different countries should play different and have different goals than others.
@axiomsofdominion I dont think theyre at all the same projects. The expansion of the muslim empire had very different goals and methods than european empires 500 years later.
Thing is, imperialism often isn’t driven purely by “economic calculus”. It often had ideological or strategic motives that were independently significant from economic ones. This is part of why imperialist states have often tried to retain colonies even when doing so is a net cost to the “metropole”. It’s not always about the money.
I don't think the Native Americans need to "have created the same institutions of colonialism as the europeans did but in reverse," I think that's the point. Not only was that not the mindset they were viewing the world through, but they could have banded together to deny Europeans a toehold and if they, like the player, knew that was coming they might have spent 100 years working towards that. From there, you are able to capture guns and gunpowder, perhaps you establish friendly trade and ultimately learn how to make your own and maybe try colonizing a now much poorer Iberia or British Isles.
@@spkennedy951 A player can already resist European colonisation in EU4, it stands to reason they will be able to do the same in the next instalment. The real question is whether it'd be fair to think of the European conquest of the Americas as already a mostly settled matter by 1337; whether we should expect an AI only game ought to generally follow what happened in history, or whether it's early enough in the timeline that seeing a divergence is fairly likely.
It's not about "determinism" or "darwinism" vs. "human agency". It's about whether society is treated as a complex system or not. Starting conditions do determine outcomes notwithstanding quantum effects, but you can't skip over such complex systems with claims such as "east-west continent -> high development". Refining the models doesn't make them less darwinist, it makes them more accurately, holistically darwinist. (Google holistic darwinism)
Paradox does have a cancelled Cold War game. It's not because of the setting being uncomfortable but because they were supporting a mod team and the development fell apart. I prefer the word "tag" in all cases because the political entities in EU are almost always not nations.
So in a philosophical and storytelling sense, I totally agree with you. The arbitrary things (trade routes, trade goods, province density) that favor Europe aren't exactly good for simulating history. However, I think there is something to be said about EU4 wanting the player to experience snapshots of real scenarios. This is easy at the start of the game-- the Mali and Majapahit empires are collapsing, so they get an instant disaster. Since there hasn't been time for the game to play out a new alt-history, these disasters feel fine. It's weirder with the Ming. Since the Ming have to exist for 100 years before the bad stuff happens, the disaster can feel a bit arbitrary. The same could be argued for the dutch leaving a protestant, powerful HRE due to an event. But I still do like that the Ming are forced to collapse. The Qing existed in real life from 1644 to 1821, and that's a huge chunk of the game time. Thus, I want to see the Qing appear in the game, at least most of the time. It's hard to exactly describe why, but I want to interact with major real world nations within the timeframe of EU4, and for some nations (Prussia, Qing, Mughals, Iran), this requires a bit of railroading. Honestly I find it a bit weird how favored the starting nations of EU4 are just for being at the 1444 start date. Qara Qoyunlu, the Uzbek Khanate, the Jaunpur Sultanate, the Bahmani Sultanate, and Timurid Ajam all collapsed pretty soon after the start date. Thus if someone was naming major early modern nations, you'd expect these to barely make a blip. Yet because they're strong at the 1444 start date, they end up being quite important. So while I can see how this could happen for these kingdoms, it feels weird that they get so much more screen time than other big names like Prussia, the Mughals, or the Qing. I can fully understand why people wouldn't want railroading that forms major historical players, so it's more a difference of opinion than a critique. Perhaps if EU4 was better at making empires split up, I wouldn't mind as much, as this would give space for new players to rise over the course of the game. But as it stands now in EU4, I'm certainly not a fan of the presence of the starting nations.
I never realized people actually though that the environmental conditions of Europe guaranteed European dominance. I always thought of it as like rolling a slightly weighted die, yeah you're more likely to roll a six but it's not absolute. I'm sure if you ran the simulation of human history a thousand times European dominance probably only happens in a fraction of them. On top of that even if it was guaranteed to happen that doesn't mean it was earned, it would be the opposite the game was rigged Europeans got lucky nothing was achieved by their own will, and that most certainly wouldn't justify colonialism, that just makes the universe out to be sadistically cruel.
Yeah I can get critizing the book if you don't think it's accurate but then I see alot of them then say it's justifying colonalism, which I don't get. I haven't watched the video yet but have seen similar videos do the same thing,
I don't think Europe should even have a weighted die. If Alexander dies after being stabbed in the lung, does he go on to shatter Persia? Maybe Temujin doesn't survive his childhood (it was rough) or maybe some random dude who took an arrow for some other important dude slips instead and the important guy dies before whatever would make him important. History is driven by "great men" but the death of an individual can certainly change the outcome of the movement they're attached to.
@jaredmccain7755 I don’t get it either, because I read the book, and it explicitly considers itself a debunking of Racial or Cultural “Differences” (White Supremacy, really) as justifications for colonialism. On the first page, Diamond says: “the answers to [this book’s] question don’t involve human racial differences at all.” And on page 17, he disproves the notion that his work is an attempted defense of colonialism through “inevitability”: “If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? . . . This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes, with a justification or acceptance of results. . . . Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it.” So if anyone tries peddling the idea that Guns, Germs, and Steal is somehow pro-colonialism, now you know better.
Nice video. I'm very excited to see development go out the window in favor of pops. I'm also excited to see some of the ways that EU4 'abstractly' favors Europe and railroads historical circumstances go (institutions, trade nodes, colonial nations). Historical circumstances will feel more organic when they are downstream of populations, economics and technological advancements enabled by (among the first two) culture. I've been thinking about how to make North American gameplay historical yet fun in EUV. I'm thinking native populations should have to follow food to sustain their populations, whether that be following herds of bison or abandoning an area which has become agriculturally unviable. This should lead to competition between populations for resources. The player would have to weigh the tradeoffs between traveling and settling, between trading and raiding with foreign groups. I do think the American plague should be fairly hard-coded. It should be difficult to play as these nations and resist European encroachment as smallpox devastates the population base. You seem to suggest that this is less inevitable than I think it was, but I fail to see how that could be the case, considering how colossal the devastation was. Are you thinking along the lines of the "Chinese culture is more hygienic, would have spread less disease" argument? I think civilizational progress a la Eurasia should be possible in the Americas but it should be capped by material concerns, primarily agricultural productivity. Not enough large urban centers with sophisticated division of labor trading with each other. Of course, after Columbus it should be more possible to learn from colonists and traders, but still very difficult compared to starting in Eurasia. Anyways, can't wait to spread the English throughout North America 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
I will always hold the belief that timing (in regards to prior Eurasian events and international circumstance on a millennia scale) an culture (religious and cultural values, ideals, ambitions, development path and what is more likely to be changed with greater prosperity) are the true main powers europe had. Geography is important and particularly on an early stages of development post Stone Age, but it’s the cultures that are to an extent influenced by geography that matters most. Without having all the nuances of poly vs monotheism, external views on other ethnicities, religions and cultures, likelihood of trending to liberty and improved quality of life even for slaves, accounting for chance of ending slavery and all such things result in, interest and capacity for advancement, competitiveness on a more local regional level and so on. The fact europe is so comparable to China is inescapable, the important differences including shape, but more based on ethnic, linguistic, cultural, even religious and more general geopolitical variances that make European unity so difficult. Forcing those populations culturally and locationally well suited for increasing development to now develop through need to compete for survival/autonomy from a number of neighbours, and to outcompete those neighbours in all metrics. That is what makes europe collectively so capable of outclassing China and being more interactive with its outside world. At least that’s what I see it as
China didn't pop up overnight, or even over a few centuries, it's history is essentially of the same make. A country as large and populous as China naturally contains geopolitical variances, and the various periods of Chinese division speak to this. The major difference is that a general appreciation for centralized of government barred China from pursuing high-risk economic policies like those that collapsed Spain, the Netherlands, or France.
Shame people expect the geographical determinism as the only thing meaning anything because CGP grey also said it on the web and everyone saw his video about america pox which is 100% based on germs guns and steel. It, with his video on fixing traffic are sadly currently doing harm by never being taken down or modified with new information which is a great shame.
GOD I hate Guns, Germs and Steel as a book. It very plainly says it's incredibly biased right at the start of the book at the ending is really damning. It fundamentally isn't scientific or even historical in it's writings. It's a book that fundamentally takes a few core assumptions, fails to explain them in any real capacity and then comes to a slap job of a bad conclusion as a result. The only props I'll give it is it mentions food yields, which is actually critical in history in a way most modern people don't understand. And, it properly puts some emphasis on when Europeans encountered crops in the Americas, they very quickly multiplied it's food yield through highly successful artificial selection and other methods.
I find his video on The Rules For Rulers to be equally damaging, for the same reasons. A profoundly dubious political theory, being presented as indisputable fact by a trusted personality. It's arguably even worse, actually, because it purports to teach its audience how to understand and act effectively within "all" political systems. So it can't even claim to be a dispassionate description of how political rulers behave. It is an active endorsement of Keys Theory, and the ugly conclusions of its arguments.
@@tbotalpha8133 Keys Theory is not perfect, and there's definitely other factors that influence it including human desires separate from power structures, but where precisely is the "profoundly dubious" issue with the theory in your view? In my opinion it provides a far better explanation for the actions of dictators than demoncracies, but is still generally true, and certainly better than alternative explanations, especially in the long term.
The worst part is CGP Grey outright said he knew G.G.A.S is a really faulty book but used it anyway because he wanted to "make nerds angry". Pop science, everyone.
EU4 is just EU3 in a new engine that saw marginal improvements over the years. A new engine, Introduction of trade nodes, use for light ships, idea groups, mana and rebels were the only significant changes when the reboot happened. A lot of emphasis has been put on including Asian continent culminating in EU3 DW and making the ottomans the focal point of EU4 (timeframe roughly corresponds to it's rise and fall). The pain point is the limitation of the game. When it was released there was only static development (until 2015). The only distinction that existed between entities was technology cost by technology group (until 2016). Back in the day the game simply tried to simulate it. It was very gamy and simplified. It saw Technological superiority in the muslim world, military superiority by nomads and divergence mechanic through tech cost by group. We see that it has advanced so much and needed to address the cause. Therefore it attempts to become more accurate in doing so. In my games I see that colonialism is no longer an inevitability in Africa and Asia. MEIOU pushes the game to its edges in this regard and gives room for other factors such as the social contract and geoeconomic factors.
I don’t understand your framing of Diamond’s unspoken opinion as that of an ‘earned edge’. I think there are plenty of direct citations which state exactly the opposite. More broadly, The Divergence has to be explained, doesn’t it? I don’t like Diamond but I think his detractors are mostly on the same team as he. He tried to explain The Divergence by way of historical accident, rather than intrinsic superiority. Isn’t that the mission? Or is the mission just to deny that there ever was a divergence? Instead to hand wave and, fashion a moral historiography where Europe ascended because it was duplicitous, underhanded, and simply evil at the level of individuals, institutions, and states?
This. I also think the emphasis on agency is kind of weird. Not to say that Columbus, Pizarro, or European kings or whoever didn't make any choices, but.. Rosencreutz's criticism of Diamond seems primarily to be that Diamond overplayed geography in a way that diminishes the reprehensibility of specific figures and the culture that created them. I don't see this as very necessary because any amount of reading tells you these guys were violent seekers of resources. And I just don't see this mission as special to Western Europe at all, even though we can obviously say the Reconquista played an immediate role in how the Spaniards thought about their mission. Did empires not arise on four of five continents fairly/completely independently? Was Eurasia not filled with large states warring with each other over resources? It seems like Rosencreutz is trying to justify possibilities that are outside the "box" of conquest and exploitation, supposedly the Western way of thinking. I admire the imagination. But have we ever seen civilizations more complex than, say, Mohenjo Daro, be peaceful and not exploitative? At the same time, the Spanish were better geared and had more economic incentive to stick around and exploit the Americas in a particular way, rather than just sack and leave. And this, zoomed into the timeline, is certainly due to geography (valuable resources), and zoomed out of the timeline is also due to culture, which is ultimately downstream of geography. There's no reason to pretend like the Mediterranean isn't a temperate, mild body of water which facilitated trade and colonization in antiquity on a scale that the New World never saw before Columbus. Really, how do you differentiate "they just happened to be thinking about stuff in a way that worked better" from the geography of Eurasia, and more specifically Europe? I think it's pretty plausible that Europe's advantage over China was due to its diversity of urbanized states and cultures, incentivized by a wider spattering of fertile regions than the fairly Egypt-like river-centralization of the latter. I guess we'll never really know for sure though.
Yes, but the way in which he explains it is basically a just-so story. Based on his criteria, there is no general reason why China, for example, should not have dominated the entire world, other than 'but it didn't though'. The basic reasons for European dominance rely on a slow growth in prominence of a small number of powerful European states over time, due to their ability to militarily conquer/subjugate less organised, less populous, and more precarious peoples, and then exercise little to no qualms about brutally exploiting other peoples via slavery, forced labour, and general violence. They took over peoples who were unable to resist them first, or got treaty concessions from larger empires who saw benefit in European trade posts, then used those as springboards to start military and economic domination of the entire region. This relied on them having a certain level of technology (primarily to allow for long ocean voyages), but also on the unique European political situation, where there were several large, relatively stable, and well-organised states in close proximity that were unable to politically or economically dominate each other, thus creating an incentive to gain an edge over each other economically (and thus militarily by proxy), by setting up maritime empires with strings of trading posts to get to the large, profitable resource markets in Africa, India, and China to the east, and resource-extraction operations wherever they could, primarily in the Americas. China had no need to do similar because they already dominated trade in the entire Indo-Pacific, for example, and had no major enemies powerful enough to warrant concern about their economic position. It also relied on the unique European religious/ideological situation, which was already primed to morph from 'anyone not Christian is inferior, and deserves death or enslavement should they not convert' in the 1300s to 'anyone not European is inferior, and deserve death or enslavement should they refuse our superiority' by the 1500s, which was a fairly key tool to allow the kind of social violence necessary to enforce control over large overseas populations with relatively few of your own people. This was a fairly critical missing feature of most other contemporaneous empires. Even then it took a very long time. It took the better part of 150 years for British colonists to be able to completely militarily subjugate the indigenous population of *only New England* but the economic benefits of colonies and overseas trading posts eventually snowballed into global domination over a (roughly) 400 year period. Even then it wasn't until the mid-1800s before European powers had enough of an economic, technological, and political advantage to be able to exert dominance over other large empires: European powers had only limited success making inroads into India until the Mughals collapsed, the Ottomans resisted nearly completely until the early 1800s and collapsed very slowly, African states were very successful at resisting European rule basically until the Europeans had enough logistics to be able to field large military forces in Africa, and the Qing had to be weakened significantly by several internal crises before European powers could exert any significant influence over them.
@@therat1117 That's all because it is a given in human history, it's a given in the human psyche. 99% of all human cultures, races, ethnicities, nations, religions, whichever, has done all of those "reprehensible" acts for their own reasons. The only peoples I know who were 100% peaceful were the original inhabitants of New Zealand who were slaughtered by the Polynesians because they didn't want to fight back. Humans are fucking animals, and despite all of our sympathy and empathy, all of generosity and compassion, all of our literature, history, culture, art, music, and dance, war is our bread and butter, and there is no animal better than us at it, although ants are a good contender.
@@therat1117Many of those colonies were not even profitable thoughbeit. Their income was also usuallly small compared to the total revenue the crown had access to. If you take into account all the money spent subjugating the natives and the French the whole 13 colonies were not the reason why Britain was able to rise. Colonialism was significantly less relevant for European domination than is usuallly portrayed imo.
@@Testimony_Of_JTF Rosencreutz himself talks about this argument in another comment. While on paper the colonies weren't profitable for the state, that is only one facet of the immensely complicated web of benefits colonies and colonization provided. For the state it might have been unprofitable, but for the mercantile business owners or the traders or the people who owned the farms and plantations, etc. it was immensely profitable. You should really ask, if they weren't profitable, then why did Europeans spend nearly 5 centuries doing it?
I just want to say, this is maybe my favourite part of RUclips. Even though quite a large amount of comments are in disagreement to the videos points, everyone acts civilly and is willing to respond with full paragraphs of argument and discussion rather than instantly devolving into emotional responses and snide, vaguely morally superior one-liners.
23:05 You have not illustrated a meaningful reason as to why Diamond's theory he explicitly claims is contra to racial theories is merely a modernization thereof. At the end of the day the divergence has to be explained in material terms and geography is obviously, at a minimum, a component of that. This ties into your argument at 25:34 just plainly discounting his main geographic theory on the basis "Eurasia has mountains too" Despite there being zero proper mountain ranges between the English Channel and Caspian Sea. If you did the interrogation into geography you claim he is missing you will find it confirms his summations that you otherwise discount. 27:45 I don't think there's anything wrong with assuming the inevitability of conflict and that it is sufficiently explained by the medium state competitive framework in Europe. Nation-states are fundamentally in competition with one another, and the only real examples of regions (from all over and cultures) and time periods free of state conflict have been after periods of warfare that produced a single global or regional Hobbesian-esque sovereign hegemon (China, Pax Romana, Pax Americana, Victorian UK and the concert of Europe, etc).
As Diamond himself wrote on page 17: “If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? . . . This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification of results. What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself.”
@@SamuelKoepke-r3o Precisely. People who are unfamiliar with dealing in politics from a realist (or even simply materialist) perspective will often confuse conclusions of fact totally isolated from any moral analysis as moral endorsement, which ties into the reflexivity to avoid coming to certain conclusions because you connotatively associate them with other, much wronger opinions that I find to be one of the more annoying rhetorical tendencies of the modern left.
It isn't the environment, it isn't the people, what is it then? So far, some critics of Diamonds seem confident enough to attribute it solely to "culture," but where does this magical entity come from?
Afraid there is no singular "it" that caused it. "Culture" is an umbrella that gestures towards a lot of small factors, so does "enviroment", "people" and "technology" for that matter.
All of the above but even more importantly, choices. Europe did not *have* to conquer the Americas, they chose to, same with the other colonies, and it was the loot from these conquests that ultimately paid for the start of the industrial revolution that I'd argue was the real divergence.
@@HiddenDragon555 Blaut (1999, p. 392), quoted in the video, refuses to accept the environment as even something important for this matter and it is contrasted with cultural factors. The redefinition of culture to include environment, among other things, is not part of the counterargument presented by the video or its sources. And I am highly sceptical that any of Diamond's critics would even dare to suggest that significant differences between the "people" exist and that it would help to explain the divergence.
I think writing and history can be a significant driver of what defines culture and enriches it. The old world has, and had, scores of documents and ideas that date back 3000+ years, though the most important starting points would be Biblical history and the Clasical greece for the most part. The new world has records too, yes, but not to the same extent. The tomahawk may have caused a domino effect of tribal migration westward like the mongols or turk, but that didn't exactly spawn great epics or great religion that was widely circulated around the greater continent. The "Mississippi peoples" likely hardly knew of the Mexican peoples and definitely not the incans. No significant great "Lingua Franca" switch to Cannonize a particular culture and its feats for the continent to revere thousands of years later. Meanwhile greeks like Homer and Herodotus espoused believable history and legend that we still read and quote today, though not without the cynicism of hindsight. This likely emboldened the writers and court scribes the "write everything down" across the old world for thousands of years. Science would also be aided by the everchanging hands of thinkers, mathematicians, monks, and mystics. If there is anything that the West can likely agree on, is that greek thinkers like Arostotle and Plato and great Conquerors like Alexander and Caesar are the most influential men in the history of the world as they would spawn countless thinkers and Kings alike that would try to embody and emulate such grand feats. The fact that we know of such grand feats would thanks to the overt amount of writings they made or others made of them and their feats. People can denounce great man history all they like but it's hard to argue how monumental influential these men and their deeds were on the western psychology as a whole. These grand stories is what drove many Kings and Wisemen to make their mark on history and when those works decayed with age in old libraries and the average european figured farming was more worth it than the reading, culturally things stagnated barring the movement and settlement of the slavs and Magyars. The Renaissance lit a metaphorical fire under the asses of the west as they realized how great civilization could once again be. They may have gone a bit overboard, but you don't Conquer the world by only wishing you could as historical significant as classical greece and Rome.
There is a big historical problem "colonies" where never profitable. Spain hit the jackpot with Mexico and Perú, but even then inflation diluted their gains and most wealth generated in the new world was re-invested in Mexico and Perú. This where no "Belgian Congo" colonies as the XXth century tried to popularize.
@@dharmictribulations Same as any criminal organization. But in this games we don't play as them, we play as the state. And colonies as profitable adventures have to be gamified since they weren't. As i said the problem is that they weren't "colonies" they were states like any other of Spain itself, ruled by a Viceroy, all of Spain was ruled by different Viceroys. The excess gold and silver was profitable for a while but even then, the Tax generated by the former Dutch provinces was higher. It was costly to transport the metal and only 20% was paid to the king. Not to mention it was a historical fluke to be able to get both Mexico and Peru and a diplomatic victory not military one. How is this modeled in EU4? by giving the same tech to both north american natives and Mex and Peru natives...
Now, the issue with that phrase is that it gets used in certain political circles to justify colonialism as an altruistic uplifting that had no "benefit" for the colonizers. Even when it isn't used for that purpose, the general idea is deeply flawed, and requires isolating government expenditure from wealth acquisition by individuals and trade companies and the like. In reality, colonialism did bring benefit back to the "home country," but since it wasn't as direct as raw pillage into coffers, it both gets mildly abstracted AND tended to be diffuse and even cross further borders. There's a whole discussion to be had about the concentration of colonial wealth into countries that "didn't even colonize", into places like the German states and Northern Italy, and the role of banks and the burgeoning financial systems. In some sense, Spain did directly profit from colonialism, but a lot of that money then made its way towards other monarchies, expenses like war, and eventually into fueling the economic growth of places like Germany. "The Economy" was also very different back then, when nation states were in their infancy if they existed at all. Wealth moved with families, more than sticking to a "nation" to Spain. It did make the Habsburgs richer. And the Habsburgs, famously, had a lot of dominions to manage.
@@Rosencreutzzz Agreed. I definitely did not use the word in that altruistic sense, at all. I'm only referring to the bottom line of the state budget. A million caveats to that, yes. But if anything the "Quinto real" was so significant to Spain (Castille really) because it was a direct injection to the King's income. Lets dissect the "Spain did directly profit from colonialism" as a representative phrase of your post. Which i do, generally agree. We just have to parse it out, we are talking about 300 years of history after all. There has to be a very clear separation about the Spanish project vs all the others, even Portugal was very, very different in how its american holdings where managed. Mexico and Peru had Universities since the very begging of "colonization" In the 1540's Brasil got its first in the 1800s. Spain also had important cities in the interior of the American viceroyalties, Portugal had only coastal cities, etc. Think about Ancient Mexico and Peru as more like the HRE than anything else, ofc Mexico was much smaller but still it was a patchwork of kingdoms and city states held together by whomever had more power at the time, although the Aztec did hit above their class. The Inca integrated hundreds of small kingdoms, cities and a few big kingdoms into a massive conglomeration that by the time of the Spanish incursion was deep into a horrific civil war. Not much info is there in English about Huascar v Atahualpa but it was really bad. After the Spanish consolidate their rule the Spanish King was adopted as a successor to the Inca and ally for the freedom of this many kingdoms, in turn the Spanish recognize the rights and privileges of each. This is the main reason for the rebellion of the Encomenderos (who wanted a feudal system) a big civil war fought amongst the Spanish but the Crown won, the New Laws were implemented, giving full rights to the natives, in exchange they would be part of the massive Spanish Empire and access to trade with all the world. We know the taxes imposed into the local population several products where taxed but the main one was 20% of all Silver and Gold income from the mines in the Americas, the rest was re-invested into the territories. This 20% did went directly to the King though. It was a fluke though, they found massive amounts of Silver in Potosi and mercury in Huancavelica to be able to extract it cheaply, for the first 100 years it was the key to Spanish power in Europe, a very cheap influx of metal but as you well know it was not well invested it just evaporated in wars and wars not to the benefit of Spain but Austria and arguably the Catholic faith (although reconquering Morocco, Algeria and Tunis for the Holy See would've been better i think) We do have an example of Haiti as a "profitable" colony for France, by 1780 it made more money than ALL of Spanish America, more money for France that is. Of course you know what kind of exploitation went on there to be able to have this "profits". Now what was profitable was trade, you don't need massive continental colonies for that though, the Manila Galleon which enabled trade from China to Peru to Mexico to Europe was a big source of wealth but disseminated among private individuals more than going to the Crown itself. There were many attempts at centralization and consolidation but they all failed. Most interesting to me was the Union de Armas but it was not to be. Sorry if this is a bit disjointed its 5am here, i'll go to sleep now. Cheers!
What does even profitable mean? All countries which engaged in colonialism were getting richer at their peak and nobody denies this. This whole "colonies were a budgetary whole" started with colonial apologists saying that it was all about God knows what and not about exploitation.
The problem with determinism is when one mistakenly assumes a causal relationship between two things when there are none, or weighs their influence and impact wrongly. Determinism is a very attractive concept, to which I'm not opposed to in general. But the problem starts when wrong assumptions are made. Now what we learn from reality is that the world is (almost) always more complex than we originally assume, and that's why deterministic arguments should always be met with skepticism and be questioned.
One thing is for certain though, whether or not EU5 takes inspiration, heavily or lightly, from Guns Germs and Steel, it ABSOLUTELY SHOULD continue the Guns DRUMS and Steel music from EU4 because those tracks SLAPPED! Jokes aside, I really appreciate you making this video. Personally, I had not heard of Jared Diamond or Guns Germs and Steel until the couple of videos that CGPGrey made on the topic way back when, and as an impressionable, young(er) fella with an interest in history but no academic background in it, it was easy to accept this narrative as it came from a source I trusted and sounded plausible. Over time I've obviously come to dismiss more and more of what was said in the video and in the book itself, though it is still a little embarrassing to remember how earnestly I believed in this pop history.
I also had a lot of the more... easy to consume stuff, but my source was a teacher who wanted to make learning fun. And she did and like, most of the things she taught held up, but some of it was the kind of thing I ended up just sorta... waking up one day and being like "did he really say that?" "did that silly event really happen?" and it was like a 70/30 split on real vs (at the least) unsourced. I think it's only natural for it the unlearning to be gradual, and to accept that we sometimes don't even know that what we know errs closer to pop. On some intrinsic level, trust is the biggest part of education, or maybe more like authority, and authority can come from trust, or it can come from authoritative symbols, like, a print book. There's a reason even the most deranged crank weirdos out there seek to transcend their (unfortunately) popular blogs peddling pseudoscience and enter the realm of being a "published author," and it's not just a question of reach. RUclipsrs that do education content don't have the time to present dense citations usually, so they have to trade in trust. Hell, I have to trade in trust to a degree. And it's natural to be a trusting person, I suppose. I do like the music tracks... usually. It's funny they come on during a moment of relative calm or a war on another continent you totally forgot you joined as an ally.
@@king_simp2715 so? The whole development system was added even later, how's that relevant? Good thing it will not return in eu5 tho, because its universally bad
I'll add a cool piece of data, Until 1950, about 50% of Peru's population spoke a native language and only 60% spoke Spanish (overlap is both Spanish and Quechua+others)
@@404_nowheresnotfound3 Mass migration to the cities, where Castilian (Spanish) was dominant. There was a "military revolutionary government" in the 70s that wrecked the economy, specially the rural economy, it hit the big players and small ones. And there was specifically super mass migration to the capital which is in the coast and people had to adapt to the city.
The whole thing about these theories is that they are based on a false premise. It wasnt European nations that colonised the world. It was, very specifically Western European Natons and not only that **the most Western** European Nations and only four of them. Portugal, Spain, France and England/Great Britain/the UK. Those are the only four nations who managed to establish expansive, stable and lasting imperalist projects. The only other nation that even got close was the Netherlands and again, they are on the Western periphery. Also interestingly, those nations are on a pretty narrow North South Axis.
And critically, they were internally stable (relatively), long-lasting states in direct competition with each other for resources and trade dominance over an extended period of time, whose access to easterly trade was roadblocked by a large empire. Those are some pretty compelling reasons to start a maritime empire, create trading companies, and colonise whatever economically-exploitable territory you can get your hands on.
Spain, Portugal, and England also got “test-runs” with the canaries, Azors, and Ireland and were more successful than France in the “initial” run of colonization.
Interesting point but I would also bring up Russia, which at the time engaged in its own no-less-brutal colonization of Siberia, which they still own directly to this day in contrast to the western four
But they aren't the only ones to have colonies. Basically every European state had an ambition and ability for them. So when Italy and Germany formed they soon got a colonies of their own.
So, help me out please, you mean the question "why did western europe colonised the world" is answered (in a very simplistic and crude way, as the question is also crude and simple) by "cause they were big enough, stable enough, with enough resources enough and with easy access to an uncontested sea/trade route"?
I think there is some truth to the theory of difficulties with a north-south continental shape. In afroeurasia there was continent-spanning trade routes, at both sea and land. Merchant republics and leagues were formed. The american empires were mostly landlocked, and there werent cows or horses to drive carriages. That being said, is this a main reason that this "divergence" happened? I'm sure it has an impact, but it also wouldnt necessarily matter if a mass disease kills millions regardless. It's also not like cities like Tenochitlan weren't impressively large
Yeah I'd say the disease thing was what removed the mesoamerican elites from being able to detach from the Spanish through a few generations just out of simple separatism. The only thing you can really note about them is a certain political naivete, as the Spanish were able basically bumrush and kidnap extremely important people in a way you couldn't get away with less isolated places like India or Japan
The total conversion mod MEIOU&Taxes for EU4 tries something similar to what EU5 seems to be doing: simulate population growth. You build your cities, populations grow in those cities, make money, and development is nothing but a description of how much money a city makes, rather than the prescriptor. Some of the M&T community have declared that EU5 is just the mod but in the official game
A couple notes on development and population as someone with only 600+ hours in EU4: 1. Development can be bought using ducats by using colonists or by playing as Zimbabwe, which have a bonus that buying buildings gives development 2. Native populations are very very slightly represented as a "Goods Produced" bonus based on how large the native population was before colonization These are very minor points though so i understand why they weren't brought up
5:10 I feel as though they've changed positions on this, since the inclusion of detailed purge mechanics in the Soviet rework forces the player to particpate in mass murder and try to control a psychopath. They made the worst thing person can do into a mechanic you have to interact with. This makes the exclusion of any reference to the Holocaust even worse, with the only hope being they'll rectify it in a future update. I'd also argue it isn't really the safest option since you are enabling the deniers, which is objectively more dangerous than having a slightly harder time selling the game. The fact there is 0 mention of it, despite there being references to Unit 731, is egregious at the very least
How you depict the Holocaust specifically is legally tricky across a lot of central Europe. Including it as a system you can interact with like the Soviet purges would almost certainly get it banned. Mentioning it as something the faction you're running is doing might be OK, but it also might not. From a purely commercial perspective, Paradox would have to be insane to mention the Holocaust in a WW2 game unless Germany is a non-playable villain. Anything else carries a risk of their game getting banned in one of the biggest markets for grand strategy titles. As I understand it, other genocides and atrocities don't have the same specific legal protections when it comes to how they're depicted.
@@mdt105 you are absolutely correct, I should've clarified that I'm not demanding they make it interactive. That would be way more trouble than it's worth, as you explained. But I do think it needs to be referenced in the game, whether through news events, blurbs in a national focus, or the occasional pop-up. You could make Kristallnacht a news event with minimal detail that just happens without any input or fault from the player, or give an allied country a pop-up when liberating certain areas that acknowledges the existence of a camp or two. SOMETHING has to be included somewhere, otherwise you make your game a breeding ground for the stupidest people on the planet. Imagine, let's say, you made a mechanic called "Stalin's paranoia" but the people that play your game are inept because you didn't take any steps to mitigate that possibility, so they complain enough that you give in and rename it to "political paranoia". Games about history, specifically those set in it the way these ones are, have responsibilities. You can't just choose appeasement, especially when you make a game SHOWING WHY THAT'S BAD.
@@aydenbrudnakvoss4535 I mean, I don't disagree, but we're not talking about people on the internet getting mad here. We're talking about German media standards bodies making it flat out illegal to sell the game in Germany. As I understand it, the laws in question were deliberately made overly broad and a bit fuzzy in order to discourage certain types of people from doing stuff like making 'holocaust documentaries' that implied that the Jews had it coming, or that actually it was a nuanced topic with multiple valid sides, etc etc, without actually crossing the line into openly saying it didn't happen or was a good idea. The fact that this would also nuke a lot of 'incidental' presentations like you would have in HoI was deemed an acceptable price to pay. Bear in mind that, as I understand it, this stuff predates the internet and even the existence of widespread personal computers by a couple of decades, it's really not designed for a modern media environment.
@@mdt105 Paradox is also now a multi million dollar corporation and not a little indie studio. They could approach lawmakers and officials to discuss the limitations, and the booming VPN industry circumvents a lot of this anyways.
@@aydenbrudnakvoss4535 OK, first, I'm pretty sure 'stuff to do with the holocaust' is a third rail in German politics; the level of lobbying and the expense incurred in order to add a couple of flavour events would be insane. Secondly, I'm not sure 'multi million dollar gaming corporation lobbies government to relax media laws on the holocaust so they can put it into their game where you can play as Nazi Germany' will go over quite the way you think it will, nor present Pardox in the light adding events into the game is supposed to. Furthermore, one plausible result of that is that, in weakening those laws, you end up with *more* disgusting holocaust denial content produced by other people who take advantage of the more lax legal regime. Third, I'm pretty sure that even with the current proliferation of VPN services, the vast majority of people do not use them when browsing the web or buying games online.
Definitly agree on EUV having a lot of chances to be much more nuanced than its predecessor in how it portrays the "great divergence". However, I think that you overlooked in your video how the fact that institutions, the role they play in technology and how much they are predetermined to spawn in Europe is a bit problematic and is a very limiting tool for EUV to work with and to simulate Europe's rise in influence. I think that, just like you, the pop system is definitly the thing I'm most excited about, but on the other hand, institutions and the tech system are the things I'm most dissapointed with by very far. Therefor I'm really surprised you did not mention it as it has a very important place in how much of a deterministic game EUV will be.
@axiomsofdominion There's no point in railroading history, just allow for simulations to happen given as many important tools (like technology, geography, demography and economics) and then let the game play out. There shouldn't be a tell tale "China will 100% collapse in every single game" or that the "Spanish will always win against the Aztecs" or that "The Brits will always manage to take over India". Let the natural factors play out, and if done properly, the game should already model the rise of non-serf based, urbanised early capitalist economies slowly but surely outcompeting other societies (which also shouldn't be exclusive to Europe or any other part of the map, but should almost always arise in Europe)
@axiomsofdominion I do not agree, I think there are specific reasons that made Europe more "powerfull", I just don't think that technological advantage didn't play as big of a role as we might think (at least during most of the timeframe of EUV) and I also don't think that Europe should be the technological powerhouse by default when there could be other ways to portray Europe getting a technological advantage (competition for ressources, population density, scarcity of certain goods, high military competition...)
@axiomsofdominion Good, paradox games aren't actually "history retelling" games, if that's what you perceived them to be, but rather a simulation of world history that uses important mechanics that had deep underlying effects on the development of our real world. They are "history themed", if you will. The game has 0 obligation to replicate, or even want to replicate the real course of history in a railroaded manner because that is a fallacious argument of determinism, where nothing except what happened irl could be close to acceptable, even if real history sometimes reads off like an edgy teenagers fantasy world building fan-fiction. If you want to learn history I would suggest you to read a book pertaining to history, and not rely on Paradox games to railroad artificial and seemingly unexplainable modifiers for a game totally based on the premise of "alt-history" in order to meet a criterion where something ought to happen irl. Flavour makes sense, but not railroading, no thanks, mechanics are good enough.
The genocide of the Americas was conducted through a superior socio-economic system and technology though. The colonizers won because they were better organized. Their logistical superiority was literally due to technology and economics, which you can't seperate.
I think I took a collage corse that used this book as the lense and looking back I feel like the teacher was more nuanced with the idea. Someone said the book was shit to me but never explained WHY and it’s good to see this video
Europe did not dominate. The very western edge of Europe did. Spain, Portugal, France and England/Great Britain/United Kingdom did. A North South Axis as well.
@@dairallan Italy dominated the world culturally. People from across the world went there to be educated. The Scandinavians at around this time had some of the most powerful militaries on earth. Poland and Russia smashed the Ottomans and would go to dabble into Colonialism.
@@christophernakhoul3998 Firstly, Italy didnt dominate anything from 473 until... well never. Its been largely irrelevant other than through ties to the Vatican/Papacy but none of that was "Italy". We're not talking cultural victories, we're talking about establishing an expansive, stable, globe spanning empire. This same caveat applies to those nations which simply expanded their borders for a period. Thats a very different type of imperialism than the one we are discussing.
@@wollebay Well im not writing a book on it. In terms of shared geography the main one was that the sea was the obvious direction to go given that going east was baically blocked by, well Europe. Beyond that, theres going to be lots of probably individual reasons why those particular countries succeeded and the rest of Europe and the wider world did not. The UK had all the resources necesary for the Industrial Revolution, it had an extremely narrow climate range within ideal growing conditions (even today, if you look at yield per acte, the UK is off the charts) as well as the ideal storage conditions and of course the UK had the massive benefit of Scotland accidentally invented Universal Public Education 200 years before anyone else.
I'm coming back to this video a month later to comment (mostly because I want to write this somewhere) but an interesting thing that Paradox could do with EU5 is the inclusion of runaway slave maroons on the map. Across the plantation colonies in the Caribbean, there were de facto independent communities made up of runaway slaves across the islands. People from these maroons, especially in San Domingue, played a big role in the Haitian Revolution. However, it's relatively late-game in terms of the EU timeline, and even more so for EU5, so I am unsure of Paradox would do anything more than adding a negative modifier on some Caribbean provinces or something.
I'm excited for eu5. I think it'll be a terrific game whether it goes on the nore realistic route or not. I do agree I'd be more immersive with the things you said here.
Also, for I think a more aligned model of state behaviour in EU4, I'd strongly suggest checking out the IR school of offensive realism as exemplified by the works of Mearsheimer. "States as identical black boxes that favour expansion when given the opportunity" is pretty much offensive realism summarized.
One thing I never get about the fight against 'geographical determinism' is insisting on talking about how 'culture plays a role too'. Like, ok, sure, but why then the different culture? Seems to me the only options from there are great man history, racial supremacism, or going back to geography. As the replies to this show, its the opponents of "geographical determism" who are the handmaidens of racism. The cultural differences have to come something material. Everytime you insisting on looping back to culture you give racists another shot to say the material that matters is the races & not the environment.
Honestly to a decent ammount of those people it basically comes down to some cultures being good and others bad. The bad ones conquers, im not saying everyone looks at it that simply but I definitely have seen it. While they also have a bad understanding of history and think white cultures were the only ones to be like that. Not saying the academic ideas are even that but just, idk laypeoples idea of it.
Culture is based a ton on religion, and simply Catholism and Feudalism paired together are crack for a civilisation. Because Europe was so divided politically it meant that everyone had to develop to not fall behind. Competition really does breed innovation, and the Church helped accelerate that innovation. Clergymen were some of the lead thinkers who led Europe into its technological ascendancy. Catholicism emphasised education which led to a culture of learning developing. The culture that Catholism and chivalry promoted also lead to ascendancy in military matters. Even back during the 1st Crusade the Muslims spoke of the Europeans in awe when considering their battle prowess.
Environment has influences, but it doesn't determine them. Any society plopped into NW Europe is going to end up with some amount of seafaring tradition, but what their government, religion, and society look like will depend on what it was going in. Great man history posits that these specific people "drive" history, but that's not the same thing as "these specific men attached themselves to movements that were already happening and ended up in the driver seat." The Roman Republic didn't fall because Caesar gonna Caesar, it fell because of ~100 years of internal instability created a situation where any number of men could have seized power (several rather pointedly had seized power and several others were likely trying) but Caesar just happened to be the one on top. History is about the choices of individuals taken en masse and occasionally a specific person becomes the face of that movement and they end up with the credit in the history books. Caesar may be the one we remember, but don't the choices of his legionnaires to follow him matter at least as much as Caesars choice to try? Or more relevant to daily life, the car the causes the traffic jam you're in isn't because they're special, it's usually just someone hitting their brakes at the wrong time and it slowly cascades back through traffic because some people were following too closely. Some people may be disposed to drive too close to the car ahead of them, but the only matter if there is a car ahead of them and the car behind them also follows too close and has to use their own brakes, and on and on. People have versions of this incident all the time, but it only causes traffic if the situation is already primed for it with lots of people on the road, but even that's not a guarantee of stop and go traffic, maybe you *did* leave enough space this time so you're just coasting.
There are these options only as long as you consider culture to be something unmoving and unchangeable. It is of course influenced by the environment, but how exactly it interprets it and adapts to it comes down to a ton of different things from religion, neighboring cultures, political events etc.
I heard they aren't planning to have natives playable on release, I'm assuming they couldn't find a way to make gameplay both fun and historical but they seem to still be trying
I think, what this meant was more like... the "on map natives" of EU4 would remain playable, but the "gray province" natives will be modeled on release but not playable.
@@Rosencreutzzz No, it was specifically about the "Societies of Pops", the new country type they introduced to model groups like the sapmi. (and the other "on the map" natives that get "normal" countries, like the andes/mesoamerica will be playable)
While I understand the point you're trying to make, and agree with it, there's a gap in your argument. That is, you mention that environmental/geographic determinism has historically been used as a continuation of racist or religious dogma, you don't actually demonstrate that link. You need to actually concretely show "Geographic Destiny" turning into "Manifest Destiny" to actually sell that criticism that Diamond is reinforcing those older beliefs under a new name. (A sense that something was "inevitable" is not the same as passively endorsing manifest destiny.) The problems with EU4 making it so you have no issues supplying an army months away from an established agricultural center or that development (or worse, trade) is hard-coded aren't really issues of environmental determinism as it is pure Eurocentrism in the original game that was honestly a lot *worse* than any problem Jared Diamond might have inspired. (I remember when China had a massive technology penalty and started the game having to *import* technology from Europe to learn the secrets of gunpowder *from Europe,* and any non-European nation had to "Westernize" to lose the massive technological advancement penalty they took from not being born white. As I remember the forums putting it, you can either remain behind forever, or you can give up everything that makes your culture unique to just be another "westernized" generic European idea tree...)
I get there are lots of problems with Guns Germs and Steel, but the key idea, at least as I understand it, is that because Europe had more easily domesticable animals it was able to colonise the world. Put sheep, cows, horses etc in South America, and it's likely we would be living in a world where the Incas would have colonised the world (obviously history would be changed so radically there wouldn't be an Incan Empire). I haven't understood what the error with this specific idea is as a broad, generalised theory of why large scale events like European colonialism happened. It makes sense to me that colonialism happened for materialistic reasons rather than Europeans being uniquely brutal in conquering other peoples. If anyone could explain anything I've misunderstood or missed that would be greatly appreciated.
@@oke5403 The leading theories I am aware of are 1) that Europe was divided by the Alps and thus hard to unify which led to a stable equilibrium of competition rather than despotic centralized empires and that competition bred productivity and technological progress, and 2) that Europe lacked spices so it incentivized powerful states to sponsor naval expeditions that enabled colonization of distant lands rather than army-based colonization of nearby lands.
If geographic determinism is so wrong, whats really at play here? What can I read that posits an alternative explanation to Europes dominance? As far as I can see the conquest of America *is* inevitable and I cant possibly imagine how native polities could have prevented it.
it was inevitable, some empire would always eventually make trade with the east incovinient, then some coastal nation would have always tried to find a route to asia through the atlantic, at which point they would find the americas with alot of gold and civilizations with a lot of gold to be plundered, which then would devolve into an attempt into conquest of the continent or a more slow colonization, and they would always win because of the sheer advantage it is having your enemies being ravaged by diseases your people are already "used to".
What made the colonization of the Americas "inevitable" was the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, and that was a lot more down to sheer dumb luck than what most people assumed. Without that initial jackpot, the Spaniards would've never acquired the obscene amounts of wealth needed for them (or their rivals for that matter) to sail across the Atlantic in never seen before volumes. Even with the smallpox, the technological disparity and the divide-and-conquer mentality in mind, it's very likely that if things had shaken just slightly differently, the Americas would've remained overwhelmingly indigenous-controlled, with a handful of European-controlled colony ports here and there, and Columbus' stunts in the Caribbean would been seen as a historical fluke rather than a precedent
@@fish5671 For the first point, you could argue that the spanish made trade with the east inconvenient for themselves, they weren't "coastal" in a sense, gold wasn't that much in the Americas, as there was 200 metric tonnes of it. The correct world is silver. Many parts of the Americas were only "Spanish" in name, with these areas acting functionally independent
Now that we’ve affirmed the Lady Saffron convergence, I for one call for a new tradition of this channel in which once an academic contention or review is quoted, Saff has to read it in the most caricatured posh manner as possible for maximum impact.
Both environment and genetics will impact a population's cultural evolution. Some populations, due to mutation, will have different average intelligences and different average social characteristics. Their environment will give them certain advantages as well, and shape cultural characteristics. The idea that Europe's geography effected its ability to conquer the world can be 100% true, but this doesn't mean that genetics play no part. Also, Jared Diamond is a Jew whose parents both immigrated to the United States from Easter Europe (particularly Bessarabia) either during or (more likely) following World War One, which will undoubtably have influenced his views of Europeans as a hostile people. (My assumption is that his father emigrated from Moldova after it was annexed by Romania during the Russian Revolution, but I have no actual evidence outside of the small info on his wiki). I don't care if it makes people uncomfortable, someone's racial background is relevant to their work when their work centers on race.
@@novinceinhosic3531 Would someone being Japanese and having family who died in the firebombing of Tokyo be relevant if they wrote a history book on the Pacific War?
Modern scholarship has failed to produce a theory that allows all societies to have agency especialy within the time period. I think that would be impossible to create within the EU 5 framework. it would certainly help If they included the institutions that were developing outside the West like the development of the Muslim slave trade or the development of maroon states as a response to European colonization to create a more dynamic world.
The design of these games is that the player should change history, not the AI. It's not about environmental determinism, it's about historical determinism. The game is meant to hew as closely as possible to historical events until the player takes it off the rails.
One thing I want to note in EU4 and im not sure if this is true in history but Europe in EU feels like the largest area for geopolitical interaction what I mean is in EU4 you have alot of these shattered regions with many local rivalries occurring that leads to power conflict that will eventually consolidate. Think India but most of these are self contained once those regions are consolidated that power has to look outward into a disconnected region. Europe in EU4 is not like this it has regions from which nations consolidate but all these regions are part of a broader geopolitical region France may ally the Russians or Ottomans England Austria or Spain the whole continent interacts in a way I feel like most Eu4 regions dont. Im not sure if there is a reason for this from a historical perspective lense and want to know if anyone has any insight.
If we are going to compare america's geography with eurasia's, I would say that sea conections played a bigger role than open plains. The mediterranean is a great example of that in the benefit of europe, but the Caribbean could have easily played the same role while there weren't hurricanes. Between the apalachians and the rockies there are open farmlands with giant rivers like the missisipi, and in South America the Rio de la Plata Cuenca had these same properties, plus a mixture of rainforest with forestry plains. I think a sumer-like civilization could have formed in one of these areas, expand into other settlements, collapse, resurge, and commerce it's discoveries to help nearby villages discover new technologies, and river-based commerce could emerge in the parana as well as caribean commerce with a proto-phoenicia in lousiana. But I have to admit that the fact that the most advanced civilizations on the continent were a mountain-expansive empire and multiple nation-states on the jungles of southern mexico seems to work opposite as to how african jungles and asian mountains worked. It makes me realize civilizations do not follow a fixed standard procedure and that just because it is easier to build on flatland, does not mean it is worth it to every cultire. And that is so fascinating. I love your videos, there is still a lot of eurocentrism in history, and seeing you so brilliantly, formally and objectively fight it with the best of intentions fills me with inspiration. Keep it up!
What you said about American Geography is true, but you’re leaving vital factors that are mentioned in Guns, Germs, and Steal: In the end, favorable geography means nothing if you have nothing to grow on it. North America had originally maize, beans, and squash, but maize, despite being the best crop of the three, was the hardest to domesticate, far harder than wheat or barley in the Fertile Crescent: It’s ancestor, Teosinte, was actually less productive than wild wheat, and produced few seeds that were encased in hard coverings that had to be broken individually. South America had indigenous crops too, such as the potato, which would indeed thrive in the colder climates of New England, but did not reach North America until during European Colonization, probably due to the climate differences encountered when crossing the Equator, as well as the difficulty of moving through the narrow Panamanian Isthmus. Similarly, Llamas, the only domesticated pack animal in either America, never reached the Great Plains, where they may have thrived, similar to the Pampas of Northern Argentina. Instead, the role was taken by Horses brought from Europe, whose impact was felt by both Native Americans conquered by or conquering with those with or without Horses. Also to be taken into account is the fact that Native American settlement only started/ended in 11,000-10,000 B.C., meaning they would only have thousands of years to domesticated crops and animals, and from that develop to a point where they could resist European Invasion and Infection, while Europeans and Asians had hundreds of thousands of years to do the same. Is it possible that the Incas may have one day been encountered by wayfaring sailers from Tenochtitlan, and eventually established trade? Yes, but it would’ve taken time that was lost to European Settler-Colonizers instead. In the end, whatever achievements that were made by the best Indigenous Societies were not able to stand up to European Invaders, whose ancestors had advanced far beyond them due to having more time to domesticate the more available crops that needed less effort to perfect them in the first place, as well as having similar geography to transport what they had domesticated, without having to adapt those crops to different climates, whether across the Eurasian Step or the Mediterranean. You are also correct that History is generally Eurocentric: That was one of the things Guns, Germs, and Steal was trying to fix. In its opening pages, Diamond says: “Most books that set out to recount world history concentrate on histories of literate European and North African Societies. Native Societies of other parts of the world . . . receive only brief treatment, mainly as concerns what happened to them very late in their history, after they were discovered and subjugated by Western Europeans.” He acknowledged prejudice, and tried to counteract it through his own reasoning as a scientist. Personally, I think Jared Diamond did much more to discredit imperialism than justify it, but you actually have to read his work to understand it.
TL:DW is that Rosencreutz wants to discourage the attempts to make a model for anything in historiography because to make a claim, you must take a stand and shed nuance and ambiguity. GGS is flawed, but ultimately the best holistic explanation of Europe's sudden rise to global dominance that doesn't rely on concepts like Europeans being inherently superior or divine intervention
I feel like the devs graying out "uncolonised" regions like in EU4 and (as seen so far) in Project Ceasar was always the easiest answer to the question of "how to emulate gameplay as a victim of colonialisation?" If you actually want to emulate the experience of the natives facing the overwhelming odds they historically did, *don't give them gameplay.* That's why playing as African or American countries is EU4 basically boils down to "colonise it before the Europeans can" and why trying to come up with some way to actually represent Native (specifically North) American gameplay will always be a great struggle. What EU4 does with its tribal systems has faced a lot of criticism since it was implemented a couple years ago and not without reason, but actually coming up with a system of gameplay to emulate playing as a semi-nomadic not-quite-a-state facing overwhelming odds in terms of materials and technology with an apocalyptic scale biological disaster threatening to bring down society as is... I don't think such a thing can be done while trying to pretend that the experience can be in the least enjoyable as a basis for the design itself. This is why games like Civilisation don't take the time to model "dead civilisations", there's simply a nameless horde of tribal "barbarians" who appear out of nowhere and disappear, leaving behind barely anything recognisably cultural. (This was made in even more poignant by the inclusion of "barbarian artefacts" as archeological objects to be discovered. If you don't want me to think of the barbarians as failed states, don't pretend like they actually had societies outside of blindly destroying everything in their path.) And PDX can always scale the importance of materials and logistics and technology, but the only way to keep the games actually bound to, if not an accurate, then at the very least a realistic version of history, is to model the disastrous consequences of the depopulation of the Americas, which simply cannot ever be turned into an enjoyable gameplay experience. For a real example of this, try playing Stellaris with End-Game dates set to the earliest possible and End-Game Crisis factions set to as strong as possible. The emulation of facing an overwhelming military might while barely managing to mangle a cohesive state together is on an equivalent scale I believe. If PDX were to, say, give the natives some way to fight off the plague (like in the current version of EU4), the actual gameplay experience swiftly turns from a narrative of defending against a conquering force despite overwhelming odds into one of "Noble Savages" averting the predestined collapse of their society by adapting European schools of thought and technology in real time to fight off the "Barbarous Colonisers" using their own methods against them. In effect, it minimises not only the real history at play by giving the player an out from the real consequences of colonialism for the sake of gameplay, but it minimises the expected reality of colonialisation, whatever that may be for the player. This was represented extremely well by the original launch of the native rework with the Leviathan DLC (cue dramatic organ music), which gave the Native Americans more of a chance at resisting the European settlers, and was promptly met with outrage by the community for doing so, for the simple reason of making colonialism too difficult for the Europeans and shattering the existing Great Divergence basis on which most of the game was modeled. Disregarding the not-insignificant consequences of making colonialism "fun and not really that disrupting to the existing population", Project Ceasar does have a much better starting point from tackling pretty much all of the problems that simulating the natives entails. But what they can't then do is claim that not all natives are important enough to model and gray out the regions they consider "uncolonised", a problem to be eliminated with the press of a button, be it "Convert Culture", "Settle Province" or "Attack Natives." You can't have gameplay for historically significant indigenous people and disregard the rest as "not relevant enough" and relegate them to being left as a lingering population of colonisation of old world regions. Again, a good example on how to not do this comes from EU4's Leviathan DLC in the form of the Australian Aboriginal "states" and how they added more gameplay than could historically be justified for a corner of the world that, by most estimates, has relevance in the scope of EU4. The simple fact is that there can be no universal system of gameplay for countries fighting off colonialism, which is why EU4 still has six different ways of representing the non-centralised states of the pre-modern world, none of which overlap in anything but being victims of modern institutions and the states wielding them. How many systems Project Ceasar will come up with by the end of its development cycle is something PDX should focus on before they end up having to deal with the same issues that plagued Leviathan's systems.
The reason it is grayed out is because we have no historical data about them. What did we know of, say North America in the year 1380? Not much, same as we did not know much about Australia 100 years later too.
These comments are too debate brained. My understanding isn't that he isn't saying environmental determinism is completely wrong, but it's more complex. The raising of cultural lens isn't a parallel to environmental determinism, that the Europeans were more culturally advanced, but another point about complexity. Europeans werent just geographically stronger and therefore dominant, they had ideological ideas of superiority and righteous conquest/genocide. I think a separate point is that determinist arguments can seem to excuse colonialism and genocide, environmental determinism especially, like how disease was exacerbated by colonial conflict, it wasn't just an accident, it was furthered because colonialism. Like it's really not that hard to follow friends. He isn't saying only Europeans were the only people culturally inclined to dominance, or that their geography had no causal relationship to colonialism, but that those ideas can inadvertently become colonial apologia especially for pop history audiences, and there is even more complexity to the actual history than the simplistic arguments lead you to believe.
12:31 maybe he’s talking about aardwolves, which really ARE hyena-like animals. in which case it’s an editor’s job to notice this and fix it but also the fact that “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is really map-gamey might be why I loved it so much in middle school
My thinking of how theyll handle the 'american apocalypse' as i refer to it, is that every province will be occupied by some historical or speculative tribe or nation. Then when contact is made with the West(or East, colonial Korea anyone?) There will be probably a 3-5 year period where nothing will happen to give players a time to prepare. Then there will be a cascading domino effect of nations being wiped out entirely, or losing massive swathes of population radiating out from the points of contact. This will allow migration for the remaining nations, and leave 'empty' land to be colonized by outsiders.
17:56 He said North America, not "The Americas" and the paper you show on screen actually puts the number in North America as 900k on the low end and 18m on the high end. Book still sucks, but I've never heard a figure as high as 60m in NA alone.
Ah, you're right! I knew I was going to mix up a "the Americas" and "North America" there-- I did it a few times in my drafts and thought I caught them all.
@@Rosencreutzzzplease do one on British conquest of india. Many british imperialists think indians didn't fought while hindutvabadis blame Mughal Empire.
@@SafavidAfsharid3197I've read a book or two on the matter and I couldn't explain how such a small British force could impose its will on the people who lived there. It just seems absurd. Maybe Rosencreutz' explanation will stick.
But then I'm Dutch and I don't fully understand how Dutch East India was made or how it worked. I can see how a group of seventeenth century sailors could genocide their way through a small island, but Java is huge and there's so many people there, yet for a while Dutch rule seemed inevitable. How did that happen?
One thing I feel would be really cool would be to model the dialectical back and forth between environment and culture by having the value and benefits of land be tied to development and other traits. Giving different regions different buffs depending on triggers meaning that some land is at one time less valuable and later maybe the most valuable depending on what you can do with it. In a more futuristic setting for example owning vast grasslands would first loose value do to the industrialization of farming and then regain it again if say you needed somewhere to put a shit load of wind turbines. In the past when colonizing the land itself could start of as less valuable cause of incompatible tech like the Europeans struggled to farm in Africa but once they learned from the natives it would gain that value. I think a history themed strategy game can never be accurate as long as it assumes a static notion of what is helpful and valuable.
@@fallingphoenix2341I vaguely remember my History class that the VoC relied on Divide and Conquer, where rather than using their own army directly to conquer, they lent themself to a kingdom fighting another, then use that debt after they won as a stepping stone to nickel-and-dime us to subjugation. The most salient example in my mind is the Bugis-Dutch alliance against Gowa-Tallo.
If you are asking yourself how in hell Diamond could think that an aardvark is similar to a hyena, I think he confused the aardvark with the aardwolf, which is an animal in the same family as the hyenas
.... That's a very very funny possibility.
@@Rosencreutzzz it feels weird to say that he would confuse aardvark with aardwolf. he is certainly describing an aardvark in his passage with the melon (cucumber) talk, and I think it'd be weird to talk about an aardwolf later. he's also considered a biologist (13:35) which may be in a branch unrelated to zoology to be fair but still. I think it may just be a joke he thought up as a play on words between aardvark and aardwolf, and in that sense, it may ironically show his knowledge of animals through an obscure, obtuse, and objectively kind of weird dad joke
that or he did genuinely forget or didn't know an aardvark isn't an aardwolf. a better editor was needed
P.S. enjoyed the videos, thank you
@@formerelydmsp Who was his editor? Its entirely possible that his editor changed that, believing it to be a spelling mistake, and when diamond skimmed the passage he didn't see the change.
@@timedraven117 I don’t know who the editor was. maybe one could check through the publishing company who published the book. as for it being a spelling mistake, I’m sure he intended it to be an aardvark since the passage is related to the aardvark melon (cucumber) to which the aardvark is most notable for eating. the correction was probably removing or replacing the excerpt about it being like a hyena as seen in the video than a spelling mistake. maybe the melon talk was all wrong but I think that was more important for the entire context of that section than describing the animal with an analogous animal
@@Rosencreutzzz As DJ Peach Cobbler has taught me,
It is funny, and therefore it is true.
As a guy who played EU since the first game in 2001, I'm so happy we're moving toward more dynamic and less deterministic gameplay, especially in regards to population and trade. In fact, seeing mods like MEIOU & Taxes and Anbennar simulate religious and racial minorities, respectively, made me so much more aware how it was affecting the game's content.
Me too (well, except that I only played EU 2 and EU 4). I like in general the direction of less hardcoded things and more organic and detailed simulation.
That being said, I miss seeing the actual historical rulers which EU 2. I actually learned some history from that, by checking out on Wikipedia a few of the more interesting-looking (mostly stat-wise) rulers. No longer possible, unfortunately.
I like that the development is addressed. Interesting that there was a bit of a population mechinic in EU 2 that is no longer in EU 4. But I can't wait to have something similar with Victoria 3 (I guess Victoria 2 too). Should help a lot in having much more detail in how provinces function and how different policies work. Also, no longer instant development increase or nice-to-have-but-waay-too-easy cultural conversion. If they do (slow) automatic culture assimilation, I hope they have something like a cultural power. Something like asimilating the greeks, should be basically impossible without extreme measures (aka very forced and bloody), as the greek culture is much stronger than anything close by.
I also hope that in general we'll have much less instant-impact action (with the development one being the worst offender). That has become my main gripe with EU 4 and I hope EU 5 gets better here. It would help with having more strategy, immersion and I guess also force in having a better (hopefully not too good) AI.
I wish I could play MEIOU without 30 hours of study
@@Speederzzz i wish i could play MEIOU without the first couple years taking 30 hours :p
@@Speederzzz M&T 2.6 is a lot simpler than 3.0. It's economy is relatively simple, especially compared to 3.0
If you want to try M&T, try 2.6 instead.
@@SpeederzzzWatch CorlisGaming, he explains the game and whag changed with each major update
Another Rosencreutz banger. As someone who really enjoys CK3 and somewhat enjoys Vic3, but could never get into EU4, I hope the devs take yours and others comments and critiques in mind. I'm hoping I can get in on the ground floor with project caesar and come to explore and enjoy alt history gameplay in that time period when it releases.
What?? my favorite anarchist also likes grand strategy???? Thanks for making me feel less weird as a black girl enjoying games that also treat atrocity and colonialism oddly
"my favourite anarchist" 😭😭 @@TwitchyCake
@zeyadalbadawi8774 ?
That’s wild I never would’ve expected to see you here, big fan!!
Fancy seeing you here! I love the episodes you do on "It could happen here"
Firs- uh... second. However like columbus I'll claim first.
I see what you did there. Very clever!!
So first is the first group of people to migrate to North America, then I'm no expert but I believe there are at least two more migrations, one is possible the Na Dene people like the Navajo and the other is the Inuit who possibly brought archery with them. Then for people from the "Old World" there's only two pre Columbian contacts that I know of that are likely, there's the Norse in what's now Atlantic Canada, which we know for sure definitely happened, and there's Andean trade with Pacific Islanders as seen with words for I believe sweet potatoes looking similar between the languages of the two areas, showing that humans brought sweet potatoes to the Pacific Islands, not a rafting event. So based on my incredibly non expert opinion Columbus was actually 6th.
Discovering something doesn't mean no one else discovered it before. Humanity could barely be considered a single collective even now, certainly not so in the past. Columbus's discovery is what led to the VAST majority of humanity even knowing the Americas existed at all, which would have been delayed by some time if he hadn't gone over there. I supposed the natives would've preferred the latter...
@@kurttrahan5892 well I think the use of "vast majority" there is spurious since the pre columbian Americas had *at most* around a third of the world's population but certainly not less than 5%, what would be necessary for a "vast majority". Considering how you literally caps locked "vast" I think it's important to remember just how populated the Americas were pre Columbus.
@@dayalasingh5853🤓👆
This channel has single handily made me feel better about my times playing paradox games by showing me the things I missed, assumed, and took for “truth” by showing me how to think historically. Forever thank you for making this :)
Paradox games have wildly different portrayals of history depending on the game, but fundamentally each game has a distinct view of history
CK3 is high on great man and plot intrigue, arguing that this period was much more about strong men and otherwise stateless societies. This, btw, makes byzantium suck and china nonexistant, because these are countries that do not work like that; where interpersonal relationships matter sure, but they're not feudal or big man oriented. The byzantine emperor isn't the biggest guy who ensures the safety of everyone else, the system is reversed, and in return their rule is legitimised. This is something CK3 struggles greatly with.
Have you seen the upcoming DLC where they will introduce the unique administrative government that is modelled after medieval Byzantium? It seems to go heavily into exactly that direction where the governors of the Themata hold the power and the Basileus has to work to legimitise their rule.
@@dftpI mean while its probably going to make Byzantium suck less, its still a duct tape solution and doesnt change the fundamental problem that Byzantine bureaucracy poorly fits the focus and philosophy of CK3. And unlike China it cannot be simply removed due to geography. So unless they make entirely new mechanics that contradict the focus of the game (which is unlikely) playing as Byzantine Empire will still feel odd compared to over countries
I think where you're going wrong here is implying that Paradox games are "arguing" anything. As Rosencreutz stated they're games first and foremost and portrayals of history second. The reason CK's mechanics lean so heavily into "strong men" is because the game is much more focused around the characters that rule and govern "states" (for lack of a better term since state is wildly anachronistic for the medieval ages), especially under a feudal system. That's just naturally going to lead to emphasis on those characters.
@@TheRedKing247 they didn't say the games were arguing anything but that the way they're designed are made to model specific ideas of how things work, with CK being about people
@@anarchosnowflakist786 Did you read the original comment this was replying to? And I quote "CK3 is high on great man and plot intrigue, ***arguing*** that this period was much more about strong men and otherwise stateless societies. "
I think an underated reason for the start date being pushed back to pre-black death is development starting in q2 of 2020.
6:20 To be fair, World War 2 is also "living memory" still. My grandmother still remembers experiencing and personally surviving the ethnic cleansing of ethnic German (or more broadly Germanic, due to questions ranging from statehood to linguistics) people from her home land in what is today Czechia which happened after World War 2, but started around it's ending year.
Yeah, that's a fair point. I had a longer digression written in that section at one point, but removed it. I used to do interview and transcription for holocaust survivors and, of course, the only ones left at this point and for the last several years were children when it happened, but every year that number dwindles lower, just due to the advancement of time, so it is "less" in living memory than other things, but it is still, to a degree, there.
@@Rosencreutzzz That's fair. I always like a longer video, but if you have to make cuts I can see why that may be one area to cut.
One question on those terms, which Eu4 has in the past also had issues with depicting I think, is what if a "culture" or a tag vanishes from the map completely and how the game (or mods) depict the emergence of new tags and "cultures" over time - or the resurrection of stuff, while the basegame vanilla Eu4 has clear lines wherein something will vanish forever if it isn't on the map.
I am struggling to understand your comment. Are you referring to the Holocaust, or Stalin's anti-German genocide in east-central Europe?
@@BlueGamingRageGoogle. Turns out N-Germany wasn't very unique in its ideas, and ideals.
@@BlueGamingRage Czechia was ethnically cleansed of its German population that had been living there for centuries. That was not Stalin's doing but primarily Czech nationalists.
So glad to see more super high quality critical work on Europa Universalis’s representations of these historical narratives
Rosencreutz dismisses environmental determinism because Eurasia has mountains and deserts and Cortes could have chosen not to invade the Mexica, but Eurasia did ultimately have more domesticated animals and greater disease burden.
Are we supposed to believe that Columbus's genocide of the Taino, Cortes's conquest of the Mexica, and Pizarro's conquest of the Inca were one-offs? If those three men had chosen differently no other Europeans would have invaded and conquered the Americas?
Are we further supposed to believe that the Native Americans wouldn't have been decimated by old world diseases regardless?
The only way I can see either happening is if Europe and the Americas were highly centralized respectively. A powerful European emperor would be needed to prevent would-be conquistadors trying to make their fortune, and a powerful American emperor would be needed to limit trade interactions with Europeans to prevent the spread of disease. In both cases that degree of centralization is ahistorical.
I get that environmental determinism leads to uncomfortable places but that doesn't mean it is false. For one, a thing can be inevitable and still horrifying - death, for example. Moreover something being bad doesn't make it false. The black plague was bad but that doesn't make it fake. It is a non sequitur to say that environmental determinism can lead to justifications of racism and therefore environmental determinism is false.
Modern historiography of the conquest of the americas show that old world disease only trully decimated the natives after they had been conquered, inm places where this conquests didnt took place the population of natives kept either increasing or being stable.
Furthermore. You mention those three spaniards, but you fail to talk of the many failed expeditions, the many lost wars and the many failuers the spaniards in general had during their conquest of the americas, just a few years after Cortes conquered the aztecs, the spaniards would lose wars againsr the chichimeca and the pueblans. And cases like these are very common
@@guairescp6847 The Chichimeca and Pueblans each lost ~90% of their population subsequent to contact with Europeans. I'm interested to know where you get the idea that any native population increased in the period between contact and conquest. The Mississippian Shatter Zone, for instance, declined 80% from contact in 1540 to conquest in the early 18th C.
Furthermore, hill nomads who lacked capitals to siege and desert peoples who lacked goods worth taking were able to escape the Spanish for a time, but it is a real stretch to say the Spanish lost wars against them.
Sure the Chichimeca fought valiantly for 40 years, but 1) the Chichimeca eventually lost and were greatly diminished in population, 2) most of the fighting was done the Spaniards' native allies, and 3) the only treasure to be seized was land for cattle grazing.
And sure the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 gained the Pueblans a decade of independence, but they had been ruled for nearly a century at that point already and they were reconquered in 1692. Also, the revolt largely succeeded because the Spanish were distracted by the Apache (who had horses by that time), and of course it was nearly two centuries after Columbus by that point - Spain had already absorbed and squandered the wealth of the Americas in European wars by the 1680s.
@@darkmiles22 90% of population lost didnt happen, neither did 80%, believing so reflects and outdated model of historiography that fails to take into account modern knowledge.
Similarly, your depiction of those wars are fully wrong. The chichimeca didnt just escape the spaniards, the spaniards lost many battles and they were forced to sue for peace giving the chichimeca tons of land and privilege.They didnt lost in any way a rational person would consider a loss.
@@guairescp6847I could not find recent figures but I would be delighted if you could direct me to some.
For the Chichimeca the best I could find was The Cambridge History of Native Peoples of the Americas, Vol II, Part 2, pg 112 which indicates based on compilations of earlier work from the 1970s a 1519 precontact population of 142-625k and a postcontact population centuries later of 50.7k. Clearly these figures are flawed. I suspect that assimilation into settled peoples accounts for much of the decline in the nomadic population, but the text is unclear.
For the Puebloans the figures I could find are even worse. The wiki population history section declares that the Puebloans declined from a precontact population of 313k to a 1907 low of 11.3k. I could not verify either figure.
Regardless, I'm not sure how much it matters. I readily concede that the Spanish did not conquer and kill/enslave every last tribe of the Americas. It's the urbanized, metal-rich great empires that were conquered first for a reason. Their gold made them tempting targets for European fortune-hunters. The argument that Cortes and Pizarro were flukes with unusual amounts of ambition/military acumen/debased morals is ridiculous. They were just the first to pluck the low-hanging fruit. History has room for free will in some things, but some things actually are baked in and predetermined.
@@darkmiles22 I dislike the the determinist model for its vaguity. Diamond's read of the conquest of Mesoamerica and the Incas is essentially fabricated for example, he seems to regard it as simple and overwhelming military victory. From my reading of Pizarro and Cortes, there was a certain political naivete to the Aztecs and Incas, whose leaders were kidnapped in their own homes or in a diplomatic procession, leading to real difficulties in formulating a response. This isn't ground that Diamond covers, because I doubt he knows it even happened. Now there's an element to geographic determinism involved here, in that perhaps geographical isolation leads to inferior political acumen, but that's far outside the realm of quantifiable historical data so determinists won't touch it. But you can compare to the contemporary Spanish/Portuguese contact with states in Asia, where they simply never had the chance to just bumrush their enemy's leader and tie them up.
hoi4: nonono, we cant have the holocaust in a world war 2 game. thats in poor taste. thats not fun.
stellaris: you can manually set exactly what kind of genocide you want to inflict on each alien species
its always the bronys posting dumb ish
To be fair, there's a big difference between simulating a real world genocide that still has living survivors and killing slug people from the planet Dikkenbols.
@@plebisMaximusSlug ? i know a serb when i see one
@@plebisMaximus Yes. One happened, the other will happen.
@@nerobernardino88 The slimy bastards have it coming anyway.
I am a trained academic and I have a hard time following your points. No wonder my father, a layman, likes the book so much.
It’s a very easy to understand “just so”- story and while I want to stay critical myself, I find it really difficult to see past it. It is a very solid theory, Diamond’s, and what I would critique is its difficulty to test and argue against.
Ideas that are “build” like that are often too good to be true
The argument about the domesticity of plants is kind of wild considering potato's were introduced in Europe as an extra carb to help protect against the price shocks of flour.
Domesticity of plants does not mean that plants are always abundant and available. Nor does the domesticity of potatoes invalidate the theory, even if price of flour were common. furthermore, it was the domestic of certain animals in Europe that helped. And the fact that many parts of the world had seasonal flood-based irrigation systems that provide stable crops. That they were famines in Europe and Asia therefore domesticity of plants is not important or is not as significant is wrong. Furthermore over alliance on agriculture that does not lead to industrialization can make civilization more vulnerable to colonialism or imperialism.
25:34 I find this argument really hard to believe. There are flat plains all the way from Brittany to the far off Ferghana Valley in Afganistan. There is absolutely a highway of long east-west travel across Eurasia, and it even comes with horses for people to ride.
If this wasn't true, various steppe peoples wouldn't have been absolutely everywhere; e.g. Scythians made it all the way to aforementioned Brittany and Ferghana.
Not to mention that the Mediterranean had been nurturing civilization since its beginnings. Stable, pleasant climate for both growing food and fishing, easy to sail and thus trade across. The Phoenicians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, and medieval Christians were all undoubtedly benefactors of this. I don't believe the American Mediterranean Sea is comparable.
Another thing I forgot to mention, North and South America are choked out by the Darian gap which is one of the most inhospitable places in the world, it still doesn't have a road connecting North and South America. The Eurasian steppe absolutely was more conducive to global trade and the spread of peoples and ideas
Even where there are mountains they mostly run east-west too. very poor argument.
But the route actually taken by (most of) the trade wasn't though the steppe, it was through the mountains and deserts.
The Darien Gap is indeed a barrier, but we also have signs of trade between the continents and it was clearly passable since there are humans on both sides and people making the trek now with children in tow. They lacked the large ships of the Europeans at that time, but they still had seaworthy canoes and the Caribbean
@@kalacaptain4818the section of the video you are mentioning specifically only talks about north america. also, quite famously, north america does also have plains from top to bottom.
The central assertion of the critique of Diamond’s thesis given by James Blaut in the quotations seems to be because it ‘rhymes’ with older theories that are adjacent to, or directly participatory in, colonial apologetics. In other words, the critique is centered on the potential political (in the broadest sense) ramifications of his theory rather than how well it explains the data in question.
The stupid thing is that Diamond meant it to be a critique OF COLONIALISM. It was supposed to debunk Racial and Cultural “Differences” as credible answers as to how societies developed differently, and mentions it in GGAS’s first pages: “The question motivating the book is: Why did history unfold differently on different continents? In case this question immediately makes you shudder at the thought that you are about to read a racist treatise, you aren’t: . . . [T]he answers to the question don’t involve human racial differences at all.” Even more ironically, on page 17, he says: “One objection [to answering why societies developed differently from each other] goes as follows: If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? . . . . This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification or acceptance of results. What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself.” I.e., this book is not a colonialist apology!
@@SamuelKoepke-r3o you don't get it tho!
GGS basically does not deny that they are inferior, it only states that the differences are caused by the existence or absence of evolutionary factors within people's environment.
The issue progressive have with this theory is because it cannot be used to justify that a white or east-asian data scientist is equal to a duck/cat-hunter from Haiti. GGS admits being evolutionary, he only states that it's not because of "bad genes", but because of bad or lack of good mutations.
Yeah I do kinda see a guilt by association thing going on.
Haven't read the book, but 12:30 he may have mistaken an "aardvark" as an "aardwolf", a fairly hyena-like animal. Don't know the full context however. Love the vid and your channel btw.
Would love to see a deconstruction of Anbennar's take on the great divergence, what it mimics and what it changes. It'd take quite a deep dive though
surely project caesar will provide us with Pacifica Universalis
I hope your time gets better, I think this deals with a lot of the fun of EU4 in fun ways. I used to read Devereux's blog a lot but haven't really since I changed jobs, and I really liked how they engaged with the games as methods of history.
I think the biggest problem with EU4, and one that is somewhat likely to be a similarly big problem with EU5, is that the game is designed mostly with a fixation on being easy. The reason you don't need allies to conquer the New World is because your army has to be big enough to beat everything. The reason you don't need allies to collapse the Ming dynasty is because then other people would be able to get interior allies in you, so instead you're able to make your army big enough to beat Ming. The reason you don't need allies to beat the entirety of the HRE and France as the Pope is because players need to have as few limits to personal agency as possible. Your allies being bad isn't fun.
bro what are you actually talking about
@@AbeYousef its a lot harder to develop different "difficulties" of AI so I understand why developers don't, but yeah, frustrating. i wish AI improvement mods didn't so routinely break with new updates.
I think the biggest problem with EU4 is that its fundamentally set in an awful time in history and that nothing you do will make life fundamentally "good" for the poorest of the poor, at least Viccy 3 is honest!
@@electricVGC They just need to take a page out of AI chess difficulty: make a really good AI and then tell it to make sub-optimal moves at a variable rate and intensity
I have a lot of hope in Paradox putting efforts in non-state states to get beyond the Westphalian system, as mentioned in the Tinto Talks. I really want to be able to play the non-state agencies, like a business , a missionary army, an international bureaucracy, a church, a cultural group, etc.
I'm especially excited about SoP's, though I'm not super confident they will be playable on release.
I think any and all these ways of playing will seek to ultimately "settle" and rule over an organized country. I seriously doubt they can or will even try to make all these "country types" playable for the entire runtime without it becoming boring
@27:48 I am trying to understand the point being made here. Maybe it is true that Diamond is "assuming the inevitability of conquest and Imperialism" but... why is that a bad thing? When we look at premodern societies, while I wouldn't say they *all* became expansionist and Imperialist, many of them did, in every part of the world we can look at. Some people even accuse modern liberal democracies of being Imperialists but wielding soft power.
So.... why *should we not* assume that if you have an area that gives societies that arise there an advantage that at least some of those would use that advantage for conquest?
>Some people even accuse modern liberal democracies of being imperialist.
…I have some bad news for you about 21st century liberal democracy.
To actually answer your question, it’s bad because it’s a conflation of the potential to do harm with the inevitability of actually doing it (which is a classic apologetic argument for “might makes right”; they were going to die anyway, the argument goes, so why not have it be me that reaps the spoils?). Put another way, what compels a society with steel to build swords instead of plowshares? Historical events can’t be explained solely by the possession of a given tool or technology, they’re contingent upon the politics, culture, and structure of a given society.
For instance: How does a society reproduce itself, both in the sense of gaining more people than die off each year and in the sense of its political structures remaining solvent? Who controls production- decides what is produced, where, by whom, how, and how much- and who reaps the benefit? What would compel someone of a certain social class within this society to choose this or that course of action? These are questions that can’t be answered by biogeography and tech alone; they are decided by how people of a given time and place exercise their personal and collective agency.
@@Squalidarityso it's original sin.
@@leptok3736how is people making decisions original sin?
@@Squalidarityand the answer is everybody did conquer and subjugate when it's suited them and modern native tribes speak about their peaceful ways cause they are sour losers in need of the narrative.
@Squalidarity you didn't really answer my question though. You say it conflated the ability to do harm with the inevitability of doing so, which I agreed was the case in my post. My question was, given the fact that so many historical cultures (and by your post I guess you'd argue our liberal democracies too) DO make the choice to be Imperialist and expansionist when given the chance, why is this a bad assumption to make?
If the Spanish in the 1400s were super nice and progressive, and upon discovering the Americas they said "oh, someone already lives here, we must respect their right to self determination", do you think we'd still have Aztec polities today, or would a different European group have just stepped up to carry out the Conquest?
I love me some historiographic discussions and PDX games.
This channel feels like it was created specifically for me
cant watch this right now but i will serve as algorithm fodder
To be fair to "Development", "Base Tax" was even *more* abstract before it got replaced. It was just a single unchanging number that did the job of all three scores (though buildings could slightly improve it). Development as a mechanic has issues, but it is an improvement over what eu4 released with, and eu4 was not even (originally) designed with it in mind. It also brought with it the end of Westernization by helping replace it with Institutions, which are still weird, but *less* fixed. I'm glad that you did touch on the fact that base game hewed a lot closer to Diamond.
Regarding Terrain determinism "making sense, kinda", eu4 used to not have one terrain type per province. Every battle in a province used to have a die roll added to leader maneuver multiplied by the area that province took up in a global terrain map, which would determine which terrain that battle would take place on. But that makes for... interesting gameplay if random chance can give +2 to all rolls by one side randomly, so they made it a smoother experience pretty early on. I wonder if the old non-simple terrain system would have had an effect on development cost.
Yeah, oh boy did I not want to put my game into the oldest patch to get some "basetax" images, but it was a lot worse and a lot more deterministic by extension. A good point to acknowledge/bring up.
Just started the vid- I do believe Diamond confused the 'Aardvark' with an 'Aardwolf'. The two are similar in diet, but the latter is a type of hyena
I sort of don't find the problematizing of Environmental Determinism particularly satisfying as a route towards dressed up racist arguments since if its not about non-human factors having a major influence on the course of history, then that just leaves the door open to claims about cultural superiority being the driver, which is also closely wedded to racist theories about the "Great divergence" and such. Especially in modern conservative thought, the idea that Europeans had a culture that was more dynamic, innovative, risk-taking, outward looking, meritocratic, rational etc etc is usually used to explain things like the conquest and settlement of the Americas and the massive overseas empires of the 19th century. I kind of feel like I'm getting tired of the issues being raised in various critiques about "agency", everything I've ever learned in any academic history setting is that counterfactuals are a waste of time, and that historians generally aren't fond of things like the Great Man theory of history anymore that basically nothing but agency. Diamond trying to offer explanations that are based on broader trends and long term factors rather than the arbitrary decisions of a few key figures feels like it would not get these kinds of objections in almost any other context, and it brings with it a sense that this is mostly just moralizing rather than particularly serious academic work when these kinds of critiques crop up, that the problem isn't that Diamond is wrong in his understanding of things like the basic series of events in Cajamarca (which he is), its that its seen to be letting the colonizers "off the hook" and that's the bigger problem than his more grounded mistakes.
Also regarding the north/south crop argument in the Americas, stuff about it still sticks with me, like its my understanding that Maize rapidly spread in Central America and then down into South America, but it was a much slower process to get into the present day United States and especially into places with cold winters, like wasn't the development of varieties of Maize that could survive and grow in these regions only something that happened in the late first millennium AD, and that was important in supporting the population of cultures like the Mississippians that were much larger and denser than what came before? I'd want to know if I'm wrong about this but it does seem to be a big contrast to how crops like wheat and barley spread in Eurasia and Africa. Then you have the lack of spreading of some crucial elements of Andean farming like Potatoes or Llamas which I don't think ever made their way to North America, that does seem like a contrast to the spread of various plants and animals across Eurasia.
You are unaware what post-colonialists claim. They argument for why Western Europe built colonial empires is because they were morally inferior to the other skins who are rather respectful to other people's lands. They may even use the term "white devil" to refer to it. Through this notion they say that it is not the case that other people did not attempt to build a colonial empire, but that they did not desire so, expect the Europeans who were wicked enough to do it.
I'm not even joking, they consider "western" culture to be savage and bloodthirsty and use the two world wars and the colonial oppression as evidence.
7:57 What a monster would use this map mode?! I have 2500 hours in this came and I had to think for some time what am I looking on. xD
49:22 Estate missions clearly explain that this is conversion of the ruling class and upper strata (something that happened to in Lithuania were nobility slowly adopted more prestigious Polish language and culture, while nobody cared about burghers and peasants culture), not universal germanization/russification adopted later by Prussia and Russia, or straight up Teutonic genocide on Poles, Prussians and other Baltic people.
Yeah tbh I don't think I ever use terrain mode... but the funniest cursed memory is that old old EU4... terrain was default on the menu and nation selection screen.
@@RosencreutzzzTruly the dark ages before manual devving.
@@Rosencreutzzz After watching the whole video either I was too tired to watch it or this was your most rambling video I watched. Until like minute 40 you sounded as if geography had nothing to do with who conquered Americas, whereas even if Chinese or Japanese were ultra expansionist maritime nations they would logistically had much harder to profit from America due to... geography, because, you know, Pacific is much larger than Atlantic and also from my understanding (I may be massively wrong here, I am mathematician not oceanographer) even ocean current favoured Europeans, because North Atlantic currents are stronger than the North Pacific ones - so not only North Atlantic routes are shorter but you can move on them faster.
Also for I while you sounded as if massive dying out of people in Americas was not inevitable and I just cannot thing about a timeline that it would not happen, regardless who discovered America. And only like 40 minutes into the video you started to admit that Diamond just put to much significance on some things, while ignored the others, not that things he was writing about were completely meaningless.
Also you sounded a little bit as if Americas given more time could industrialize on their own, which I am also highly sceptical. Most, if not all of Americas (probably all) were still in bronze age so in terms of metallurgy they were like 2,500 years behind. Regardless who would invade, Europeans, Asians or Africans, the biggest issue was logistics. I just don't see a timeline that Americas are not doomed or even more absurdly, they pull off Sunset Invasion CK2/EU4 style.
But I completely agree that EU4 colonial gameplay sucks and is extremely unrealistic, and most of geographical barriers in EU4 are meaninless.
That's a cool looking thumbnail, I especially like the red behind guns germs, and steel and the painting
I understand your critiques of Jared Diamond but I don't understand what your alternative theory for European Divergence is. You implicitly claim a cultural element because you (or the reviews you cited) mention Diamond's lack of attention to it which I agree is a massive fault of his grand narrative. But, I don't see how you can posit that other Eurasian social formations like Ming, the Mughals, and the Ottomans had no cultural or institutional drive to domination and expansion (which you seem to suggest is the decisive 'cultural' divergence). The Ottoman empire was vigorously expansionist and strove to dominate states and societies surrounding it. Obviously the divergence between them and Western Europe must rely on something else.
I second this. There seem to be a few implicit and unsaid claims that are nudged at without any real alternative or reasoning given.
A big one being that the old world plague’s devastating the new world were not inevitabilities. I struggle to see how that would not have taken place and I was interested in hearing his reasoning for that
They have no alternative. It isn't the environment and God forgive us if someone mentions biological differences.
Basically the Ottomans 'won', they dominated their entire region and became the economic and military powerhouse of their entire region, and were unassailable politically or economically. They had no real need to expand further than they did, and had very little impetus to do so, as the states at their borders were either too poor to bother with, or too difficult to conquer. They had no need to colonise, as they dominated trade between the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. Until eventually the European colonial powers had circumvented them enough to establish control over trade with India and China, and had been enriched enough by colonies to challenge them and gradually whittle their territory away over the course of the 1800s.
The Mughals collapsed before they could expand outside of India, and were never very politically stable. That's basically it.
The Ming/Qing had also 'won'. By the height of Qing China they had tributaries across their region, were fantastically wealthy, they didn't even need to leave their own borders for trade as foreign traders came to them, and were militarily the strongest power in Eurasia with only sparsely-populated grasslands and some of the world's largest mountain ranges at their borders, which made further expansion basically pointless, as it would cost them more resources to expand than they would gain by doing so. Why would they even bother with global dominance at that point? As far as they were concerned, they had achieved it.
The basic ideological difference Europeans had over all of these, critically, was white supremacism. If your institutions were basically set up over the entire society to treat any non-European you encountered as your immediate inferior, and justify any and all exploitation and treaty violation with them by private citizens, then that makes it much easier to enforce control over a decentralised maritime empire which relies on private companies and small numbers of colonists.
Why can't we have multiple things at the same like yeah the enviroment definitely has a effect but it's not the only thing? I just don't get why so many find it like racist or colonalist.
@@therat1117They should have expanded into their own "realm" then. The Ottomans barely controlled half their empire.
On the subject of the "difficulty" of playing in The Americas, I think the extra time granted by the earlier start date would make the eventual invasion of the European powers less frustrating than in EU4.
In my mind it could operate like the End Game Crisis system in Stellaris. The extra time afforded to the players means the difficulty could be higher, making it a challenge run of sorts.
Question for both you, and also just for anyone else in the comments who may be curious. Have you ever read or listened to the following?
- "Why the West Rules (For Now)" by Ian Morris
- The "Tides of History" Podcast (the Early Modern period ones in pariticular) by Patrick Wyman, or his book "The Verge"
- "The Great Divergence" by Kenneth Pomeranz
The Ian Morris book (and most of his work in general) feels like a more historic lens for looking at big history vs Jared Diamond (with him actually having a historical background for one). It still is a big sweeping work subject to the pitfalls of generalization and lack of depth, but it feels like much of the historian community likes it as a "at least it's better than GGS" alternative. I feel like it's a great place to start, but not end, anyone's journey into the Great Divergence as a subject. It's very easy to read compared to other works, albeit with the pitfalls one might encounter with such works as well.
Tides of History and the Verge are also pretty digestable even with Patrick Wyman being an academic historian himself, as he's a great storyteller that also interviews many many subject area experts, he can be a great gateway to the many different areas of history he covers. For the Great Divergence questions, his Early Modern Period works sheds a deeper light I think into a lot of aspects of European history that are often very unknown in the modern pop history understanding (although quite understood among historians). Another great entry point!
The Great Divergence is also a great read that really dives into the deep details of a European and Chinese comparison, but it's also much more academic and dense. However, the sheer amount of details and data it holds compared to pop history really helps color in between the outlines drawn out by the previous works.
If you (or anyone reading these comments) haven't read these works, I would highly recommend going through them! With a healthy degree of salt and a critical eye as one always should, don't take then as gospel truth but a good primer that really dives into this topic *far* more than Jared Diamond ever did
I saw GGS and immediately thought Lady Saffron should voice something in the video (I've seen y'all motherfuckers talking before I was forcefully liberated from The Everything App)
Though it would've been funnier to make her read from Diamond himself instead.
I should have, as penance for her crimes.
We can't even see the occasional shenanigans they do there.
New Rosencreutz video LETS GOOOOOOOO
And it’s long let’s gooooooo
I just dont think it would have ever been possible for native americans as they had come to be by the 1300's and 1400's to have created the same institutions of colonialism as the europeans did but in reverse. This may be considered "environmental determinism" but they neither had the ability or desire to do so. Imperialism wasnt and still isnt a moral decision of europeans to do evil but an economic calculus and project based on the conditions of the societies which created them. England in these games ought to have more of a drive and ability to colonize the new world than say the Mughals and I would prefer this be reflected in EU5. With not just "flavor" but I think different countries should play different and have different goals than others.
@axiomsofdominion I dont think theyre at all the same projects. The expansion of the muslim empire had very different goals and methods than european empires 500 years later.
Thing is, imperialism often isn’t driven purely by “economic calculus”. It often had ideological or strategic motives that were independently significant from economic ones. This is part of why imperialist states have often tried to retain colonies even when doing so is a net cost to the “metropole”. It’s not always about the money.
I don't think the Native Americans need to "have created the same institutions of colonialism as the europeans did but in reverse," I think that's the point. Not only was that not the mindset they were viewing the world through, but they could have banded together to deny Europeans a toehold and if they, like the player, knew that was coming they might have spent 100 years working towards that. From there, you are able to capture guns and gunpowder, perhaps you establish friendly trade and ultimately learn how to make your own and maybe try colonizing a now much poorer Iberia or British Isles.
@@spkennedy951 A player can already resist European colonisation in EU4, it stands to reason they will be able to do the same in the next instalment. The real question is whether it'd be fair to think of the European conquest of the Americas as already a mostly settled matter by 1337; whether we should expect an AI only game ought to generally follow what happened in history, or whether it's early enough in the timeline that seeing a divergence is fairly likely.
@@pascalausensi9592Americas existed isoleted from the old world for thousands of years. Why would another hundred change something?
It's not about "determinism" or "darwinism" vs. "human agency". It's about whether society is treated as a complex system or not. Starting conditions do determine outcomes notwithstanding quantum effects, but you can't skip over such complex systems with claims such as "east-west continent -> high development". Refining the models doesn't make them less darwinist, it makes them more accurately, holistically darwinist. (Google holistic darwinism)
Paradox does have a cancelled Cold War game. It's not because of the setting being uncomfortable but because they were supporting a mod team and the development fell apart.
I prefer the word "tag" in all cases because the political entities in EU are almost always not nations.
So in a philosophical and storytelling sense, I totally agree with you. The arbitrary things (trade routes, trade goods, province density) that favor Europe aren't exactly good for simulating history. However, I think there is something to be said about EU4 wanting the player to experience snapshots of real scenarios.
This is easy at the start of the game-- the Mali and Majapahit empires are collapsing, so they get an instant disaster. Since there hasn't been time for the game to play out a new alt-history, these disasters feel fine. It's weirder with the Ming. Since the Ming have to exist for 100 years before the bad stuff happens, the disaster can feel a bit arbitrary. The same could be argued for the dutch leaving a protestant, powerful HRE due to an event.
But I still do like that the Ming are forced to collapse. The Qing existed in real life from 1644 to 1821, and that's a huge chunk of the game time. Thus, I want to see the Qing appear in the game, at least most of the time. It's hard to exactly describe why, but I want to interact with major real world nations within the timeframe of EU4, and for some nations (Prussia, Qing, Mughals, Iran), this requires a bit of railroading.
Honestly I find it a bit weird how favored the starting nations of EU4 are just for being at the 1444 start date. Qara Qoyunlu, the Uzbek Khanate, the Jaunpur Sultanate, the Bahmani Sultanate, and Timurid Ajam all collapsed pretty soon after the start date. Thus if someone was naming major early modern nations, you'd expect these to barely make a blip. Yet because they're strong at the 1444 start date, they end up being quite important. So while I can see how this could happen for these kingdoms, it feels weird that they get so much more screen time than other big names like Prussia, the Mughals, or the Qing.
I can fully understand why people wouldn't want railroading that forms major historical players, so it's more a difference of opinion than a critique. Perhaps if EU4 was better at making empires split up, I wouldn't mind as much, as this would give space for new players to rise over the course of the game. But as it stands now in EU4, I'm certainly not a fan of the presence of the starting nations.
I never realized people actually though that the environmental conditions of Europe guaranteed European dominance. I always thought of it as like rolling a slightly weighted die, yeah you're more likely to roll a six but it's not absolute. I'm sure if you ran the simulation of human history a thousand times European dominance probably only happens in a fraction of them. On top of that even if it was guaranteed to happen that doesn't mean it was earned, it would be the opposite the game was rigged Europeans got lucky nothing was achieved by their own will, and that most certainly wouldn't justify colonialism, that just makes the universe out to be sadistically cruel.
Yeah I can get critizing the book if you don't think it's accurate but then I see alot of them then say it's justifying colonalism, which I don't get. I haven't watched the video yet but have seen similar videos do the same thing,
I don't think Europe should even have a weighted die. If Alexander dies after being stabbed in the lung, does he go on to shatter Persia? Maybe Temujin doesn't survive his childhood (it was rough) or maybe some random dude who took an arrow for some other important dude slips instead and the important guy dies before whatever would make him important. History is driven by "great men" but the death of an individual can certainly change the outcome of the movement they're attached to.
@jaredmccain7755 I don’t get it either, because I read the book, and it explicitly considers itself a debunking of Racial or Cultural “Differences” (White Supremacy, really) as justifications for colonialism. On the first page, Diamond says: “the answers to [this book’s] question don’t involve human racial differences at all.” And on page 17, he disproves the notion that his work is an attempted defense of colonialism through “inevitability”: “If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? . . . This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes, with a justification or acceptance of results. . . . Understanding is more often used to try to alter an outcome than to repeat or perpetuate it.”
So if anyone tries peddling the idea that Guns, Germs, and Steal is somehow pro-colonialism, now you know better.
@SamuelKoepke-r3o the fact that this is talked about on page 17 makes me feel like the majoirty of people critizing it haven't even read it.
Nice video. I'm very excited to see development go out the window in favor of pops. I'm also excited to see some of the ways that EU4 'abstractly' favors Europe and railroads historical circumstances go (institutions, trade nodes, colonial nations). Historical circumstances will feel more organic when they are downstream of populations, economics and technological advancements enabled by (among the first two) culture.
I've been thinking about how to make North American gameplay historical yet fun in EUV. I'm thinking native populations should have to follow food to sustain their populations, whether that be following herds of bison or abandoning an area which has become agriculturally unviable. This should lead to competition between populations for resources. The player would have to weigh the tradeoffs between traveling and settling, between trading and raiding with foreign groups.
I do think the American plague should be fairly hard-coded. It should be difficult to play as these nations and resist European encroachment as smallpox devastates the population base. You seem to suggest that this is less inevitable than I think it was, but I fail to see how that could be the case, considering how colossal the devastation was. Are you thinking along the lines of the "Chinese culture is more hygienic, would have spread less disease" argument?
I think civilizational progress a la Eurasia should be possible in the Americas but it should be capped by material concerns, primarily agricultural productivity. Not enough large urban centers with sophisticated division of labor trading with each other. Of course, after Columbus it should be more possible to learn from colonists and traders, but still very difficult compared to starting in Eurasia.
Anyways, can't wait to spread the English throughout North America 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸
"I cut a whole section on the nature of bad faith critique because it became a tedious roundabout of exonerating Diamond"
Lol, okay bud.
I will always hold the belief that timing (in regards to prior Eurasian events and international circumstance on a millennia scale) an culture (religious and cultural values, ideals, ambitions, development path and what is more likely to be changed with greater prosperity) are the true main powers europe had. Geography is important and particularly on an early stages of development post Stone Age, but it’s the cultures that are to an extent influenced by geography that matters most.
Without having all the nuances of poly vs monotheism, external views on other ethnicities, religions and cultures, likelihood of trending to liberty and improved quality of life even for slaves, accounting for chance of ending slavery and all such things result in, interest and capacity for advancement, competitiveness on a more local regional level and so on.
The fact europe is so comparable to China is inescapable, the important differences including shape, but more based on ethnic, linguistic, cultural, even religious and more general geopolitical variances that make European unity so difficult. Forcing those populations culturally and locationally well suited for increasing development to now develop through need to compete for survival/autonomy from a number of neighbours, and to outcompete those neighbours in all metrics. That is what makes europe collectively so capable of outclassing China and being more interactive with its outside world.
At least that’s what I see it as
China didn't pop up overnight, or even over a few centuries, it's history is essentially of the same make. A country as large and populous as China naturally contains geopolitical variances, and the various periods of Chinese division speak to this. The major difference is that a general appreciation for centralized of government barred China from pursuing high-risk economic policies like those that collapsed Spain, the Netherlands, or France.
Shame people expect the geographical determinism as the only thing meaning anything because CGP grey also said it on the web and everyone saw his video about america pox which is 100% based on germs guns and steel. It, with his video on fixing traffic are sadly currently doing harm by never being taken down or modified with new information which is a great shame.
GOD I hate Guns, Germs and Steel as a book. It very plainly says it's incredibly biased right at the start of the book at the ending is really damning.
It fundamentally isn't scientific or even historical in it's writings. It's a book that fundamentally takes a few core assumptions, fails to explain them in any real capacity and then comes to a slap job of a bad conclusion as a result.
The only props I'll give it is it mentions food yields, which is actually critical in history in a way most modern people don't understand. And, it properly puts some emphasis on when Europeans encountered crops in the Americas, they very quickly multiplied it's food yield through highly successful artificial selection and other methods.
I find his video on The Rules For Rulers to be equally damaging, for the same reasons. A profoundly dubious political theory, being presented as indisputable fact by a trusted personality. It's arguably even worse, actually, because it purports to teach its audience how to understand and act effectively within "all" political systems. So it can't even claim to be a dispassionate description of how political rulers behave. It is an active endorsement of Keys Theory, and the ugly conclusions of its arguments.
@@tbotalpha8133 Keys Theory is not perfect, and there's definitely other factors that influence it including human desires separate from power structures, but where precisely is the "profoundly dubious" issue with the theory in your view? In my opinion it provides a far better explanation for the actions of dictators than demoncracies, but is still generally true, and certainly better than alternative explanations, especially in the long term.
The worst part is CGP Grey outright said he knew G.G.A.S is a really faulty book but used it anyway because he wanted to "make nerds angry". Pop science, everyone.
@@theabsolutecat915tbf, that does sound like a cop out from someone who wanted to sound like they knew they were wrong
EU4 is just EU3 in a new engine that saw marginal improvements over the years. A new engine, Introduction of trade nodes, use for light ships, idea groups, mana and rebels were the only significant changes when the reboot happened. A lot of emphasis has been put on including Asian continent culminating in EU3 DW and making the ottomans the focal point of EU4 (timeframe roughly corresponds to it's rise and fall).
The pain point is the limitation of the game. When it was released there was only static development (until 2015). The only distinction that existed between entities was technology cost by technology group (until 2016). Back in the day the game simply tried to simulate it. It was very gamy and simplified. It saw Technological superiority in the muslim world, military superiority by nomads and divergence mechanic through tech cost by group. We see that it has advanced so much and needed to address the cause. Therefore it attempts to become more accurate in doing so. In my games I see that colonialism is no longer an inevitability in Africa and Asia. MEIOU pushes the game to its edges in this regard and gives room for other factors such as the social contract and geoeconomic factors.
I don’t understand your framing of Diamond’s unspoken opinion as that of an ‘earned edge’. I think there are plenty of direct citations which state exactly the opposite.
More broadly, The Divergence has to be explained, doesn’t it? I don’t like Diamond but I think his detractors are mostly on the same team as he. He tried to explain The Divergence by way of historical accident, rather than intrinsic superiority. Isn’t that the mission? Or is the mission just to deny that there ever was a divergence? Instead to hand wave and, fashion a moral historiography where Europe ascended because it was duplicitous, underhanded, and simply evil at the level of individuals, institutions, and states?
This. I also think the emphasis on agency is kind of weird. Not to say that Columbus, Pizarro, or European kings or whoever didn't make any choices, but..
Rosencreutz's criticism of Diamond seems primarily to be that Diamond overplayed geography in a way that diminishes the reprehensibility of specific figures and the culture that created them. I don't see this as very necessary because any amount of reading tells you these guys were violent seekers of resources. And I just don't see this mission as special to Western Europe at all, even though we can obviously say the Reconquista played an immediate role in how the Spaniards thought about their mission. Did empires not arise on four of five continents fairly/completely independently? Was Eurasia not filled with large states warring with each other over resources?
It seems like Rosencreutz is trying to justify possibilities that are outside the "box" of conquest and exploitation, supposedly the Western way of thinking. I admire the imagination. But have we ever seen civilizations more complex than, say, Mohenjo Daro, be peaceful and not exploitative?
At the same time, the Spanish were better geared and had more economic incentive to stick around and exploit the Americas in a particular way, rather than just sack and leave. And this, zoomed into the timeline, is certainly due to geography (valuable resources), and zoomed out of the timeline is also due to culture, which is ultimately downstream of geography. There's no reason to pretend like the Mediterranean isn't a temperate, mild body of water which facilitated trade and colonization in antiquity on a scale that the New World never saw before Columbus.
Really, how do you differentiate "they just happened to be thinking about stuff in a way that worked better" from the geography of Eurasia, and more specifically Europe? I think it's pretty plausible that Europe's advantage over China was due to its diversity of urbanized states and cultures, incentivized by a wider spattering of fertile regions than the fairly Egypt-like river-centralization of the latter. I guess we'll never really know for sure though.
Yes, but the way in which he explains it is basically a just-so story. Based on his criteria, there is no general reason why China, for example, should not have dominated the entire world, other than 'but it didn't though'.
The basic reasons for European dominance rely on a slow growth in prominence of a small number of powerful European states over time, due to their ability to militarily conquer/subjugate less organised, less populous, and more precarious peoples, and then exercise little to no qualms about brutally exploiting other peoples via slavery, forced labour, and general violence. They took over peoples who were unable to resist them first, or got treaty concessions from larger empires who saw benefit in European trade posts, then used those as springboards to start military and economic domination of the entire region.
This relied on them having a certain level of technology (primarily to allow for long ocean voyages), but also on the unique European political situation, where there were several large, relatively stable, and well-organised states in close proximity that were unable to politically or economically dominate each other, thus creating an incentive to gain an edge over each other economically (and thus militarily by proxy), by setting up maritime empires with strings of trading posts to get to the large, profitable resource markets in Africa, India, and China to the east, and resource-extraction operations wherever they could, primarily in the Americas. China had no need to do similar because they already dominated trade in the entire Indo-Pacific, for example, and had no major enemies powerful enough to warrant concern about their economic position.
It also relied on the unique European religious/ideological situation, which was already primed to morph from 'anyone not Christian is inferior, and deserves death or enslavement should they not convert' in the 1300s to 'anyone not European is inferior, and deserve death or enslavement should they refuse our superiority' by the 1500s, which was a fairly key tool to allow the kind of social violence necessary to enforce control over large overseas populations with relatively few of your own people. This was a fairly critical missing feature of most other contemporaneous empires.
Even then it took a very long time. It took the better part of 150 years for British colonists to be able to completely militarily subjugate the indigenous population of *only New England* but the economic benefits of colonies and overseas trading posts eventually snowballed into global domination over a (roughly) 400 year period. Even then it wasn't until the mid-1800s before European powers had enough of an economic, technological, and political advantage to be able to exert dominance over other large empires: European powers had only limited success making inroads into India until the Mughals collapsed, the Ottomans resisted nearly completely until the early 1800s and collapsed very slowly, African states were very successful at resisting European rule basically until the Europeans had enough logistics to be able to field large military forces in Africa, and the Qing had to be weakened significantly by several internal crises before European powers could exert any significant influence over them.
@@therat1117 That's all because it is a given in human history, it's a given in the human psyche. 99% of all human cultures, races, ethnicities, nations, religions, whichever, has done all of those "reprehensible" acts for their own reasons. The only peoples I know who were 100% peaceful were the original inhabitants of New Zealand who were slaughtered by the Polynesians because they didn't want to fight back. Humans are fucking animals, and despite all of our sympathy and empathy, all of generosity and compassion, all of our literature, history, culture, art, music, and dance, war is our bread and butter, and there is no animal better than us at it, although ants are a good contender.
@@therat1117Many of those colonies were not even profitable thoughbeit. Their income was also usuallly small compared to the total revenue the crown had access to. If you take into account all the money spent subjugating the natives and the French the whole 13 colonies were not the reason why Britain was able to rise.
Colonialism was significantly less relevant for European domination than is usuallly portrayed imo.
@@Testimony_Of_JTF Rosencreutz himself talks about this argument in another comment. While on paper the colonies weren't profitable for the state, that is only one facet of the immensely complicated web of benefits colonies and colonization provided. For the state it might have been unprofitable, but for the mercantile business owners or the traders or the people who owned the farms and plantations, etc. it was immensely profitable. You should really ask, if they weren't profitable, then why did Europeans spend nearly 5 centuries doing it?
"Terra Universalis" could be a good title for the game! Then instesd if being "the EU series" it's "the Universalis series." E-Z
I just want to say, this is maybe my favourite part of RUclips. Even though quite a large amount of comments are in disagreement to the videos points, everyone acts civilly and is willing to respond with full paragraphs of argument and discussion rather than instantly devolving into emotional responses and snide, vaguely morally superior one-liners.
23:05 You have not illustrated a meaningful reason as to why Diamond's theory he explicitly claims is contra to racial theories is merely a modernization thereof. At the end of the day the divergence has to be explained in material terms and geography is obviously, at a minimum, a component of that. This ties into your argument at 25:34 just plainly discounting his main geographic theory on the basis "Eurasia has mountains too" Despite there being zero proper mountain ranges between the English Channel and Caspian Sea. If you did the interrogation into geography you claim he is missing you will find it confirms his summations that you otherwise discount.
27:45 I don't think there's anything wrong with assuming the inevitability of conflict and that it is sufficiently explained by the medium state competitive framework in Europe. Nation-states are fundamentally in competition with one another, and the only real examples of regions (from all over and cultures) and time periods free of state conflict have been after periods of warfare that produced a single global or regional Hobbesian-esque sovereign hegemon (China, Pax Romana, Pax Americana, Victorian UK and the concert of Europe, etc).
Victorian Britain was not comparable to the Roman empire or China during their respective peaks
As Diamond himself wrote on page 17: “If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people, may this not seem to justify the domination? . . . This objection rests on a common tendency to confuse an explanation of causes with a justification of results. What use one makes of a historical explanation is a question separate from the explanation itself.”
@@Testimony_Of_JTF I did make a point of distinguishing different types of empires right before listing them
@@SamuelKoepke-r3o Precisely. People who are unfamiliar with dealing in politics from a realist (or even simply materialist) perspective will often confuse conclusions of fact totally isolated from any moral analysis as moral endorsement, which ties into the reflexivity to avoid coming to certain conclusions because you connotatively associate them with other, much wronger opinions that I find to be one of the more annoying rhetorical tendencies of the modern left.
@@jeremiahthomas3542 Yes but you called them a hegemon like Rome or China. They were not that
It isn't the environment, it isn't the people, what is it then? So far, some critics of Diamonds seem confident enough to attribute it solely to "culture," but where does this magical entity come from?
Afraid there is no singular "it" that caused it. "Culture" is an umbrella that gestures towards a lot of small factors, so does "enviroment", "people" and "technology" for that matter.
All of the above but even more importantly, choices. Europe did not *have* to conquer the Americas, they chose to, same with the other colonies, and it was the loot from these conquests that ultimately paid for the start of the industrial revolution that I'd argue was the real divergence.
@@HiddenDragon555 Blaut (1999, p. 392), quoted in the video, refuses to accept the environment as even something important for this matter and it is contrasted with cultural factors. The redefinition of culture to include environment, among other things, is not part of the counterargument presented by the video or its sources. And I am highly sceptical that any of Diamond's critics would even dare to suggest that significant differences between the "people" exist and that it would help to explain the divergence.
They fall into a trap then, because culture comes from the people and geography they occupy lol
I think writing and history can be a significant driver of what defines culture and enriches it. The old world has, and had, scores of documents and ideas that date back 3000+ years, though the most important starting points would be Biblical history and the Clasical greece for the most part. The new world has records too, yes, but not to the same extent. The tomahawk may have caused a domino effect of tribal migration westward like the mongols or turk, but that didn't exactly spawn great epics or great religion that was widely circulated around the greater continent. The "Mississippi peoples" likely hardly knew of the Mexican peoples and definitely not the incans. No significant great "Lingua Franca" switch to Cannonize a particular culture and its feats for the continent to revere thousands of years later. Meanwhile greeks like Homer and Herodotus espoused believable history and legend that we still read and quote today, though not without the cynicism of hindsight. This likely emboldened the writers and court scribes the "write everything down" across the old world for thousands of years. Science would also be aided by the everchanging hands of thinkers, mathematicians, monks, and mystics. If there is anything that the West can likely agree on, is that greek thinkers like Arostotle and Plato and great Conquerors like Alexander and Caesar are the most influential men in the history of the world as they would spawn countless thinkers and Kings alike that would try to embody and emulate such grand feats. The fact that we know of such grand feats would thanks to the overt amount of writings they made or others made of them and their feats. People can denounce great man history all they like but it's hard to argue how monumental influential these men and their deeds were on the western psychology as a whole. These grand stories is what drove many Kings and Wisemen to make their mark on history and when those works decayed with age in old libraries and the average european figured farming was more worth it than the reading, culturally things stagnated barring the movement and settlement of the slavs and Magyars. The Renaissance lit a metaphorical fire under the asses of the west as they realized how great civilization could once again be. They may have gone a bit overboard, but you don't Conquer the world by only wishing you could as historical significant as classical greece and Rome.
There is a big historical problem "colonies" where never profitable. Spain hit the jackpot with Mexico and Perú, but even then inflation diluted their gains and most wealth generated in the new world was re-invested in Mexico and Perú. This where no "Belgian Congo" colonies as the XXth century tried to popularize.
Colonies weren’t profitable for the state but they were profitable for the people who the state answered to.
@@dharmictribulations Same as any criminal organization. But in this games we don't play as them, we play as the state. And colonies as profitable adventures have to be gamified since they weren't.
As i said the problem is that they weren't "colonies" they were states like any other of Spain itself, ruled by a Viceroy, all of Spain was ruled by different Viceroys. The excess gold and silver was profitable for a while but even then, the Tax generated by the former Dutch provinces was higher.
It was costly to transport the metal and only 20% was paid to the king.
Not to mention it was a historical fluke to be able to get both Mexico and Peru and a diplomatic victory not military one. How is this modeled in EU4? by giving the same tech to both north american natives and Mex and Peru natives...
Now, the issue with that phrase is that it gets used in certain political circles to justify colonialism as an altruistic uplifting that had no "benefit" for the colonizers. Even when it isn't used for that purpose, the general idea is deeply flawed, and requires isolating government expenditure from wealth acquisition by individuals and trade companies and the like. In reality, colonialism did bring benefit back to the "home country," but since it wasn't as direct as raw pillage into coffers, it both gets mildly abstracted AND tended to be diffuse and even cross further borders. There's a whole discussion to be had about the concentration of colonial wealth into countries that "didn't even colonize", into places like the German states and Northern Italy, and the role of banks and the burgeoning financial systems. In some sense, Spain did directly profit from colonialism, but a lot of that money then made its way towards other monarchies, expenses like war, and eventually into fueling the economic growth of places like Germany. "The Economy" was also very different back then, when nation states were in their infancy if they existed at all. Wealth moved with families, more than sticking to a "nation" to Spain.
It did make the Habsburgs richer. And the Habsburgs, famously, had a lot of dominions to manage.
@@Rosencreutzzz Agreed. I definitely did not use the word in that altruistic sense, at all. I'm only referring to the bottom line of the state budget. A million caveats to that, yes. But if anything the "Quinto real" was so significant to Spain (Castille really) because it was a direct injection to the King's income.
Lets dissect the "Spain did directly profit from colonialism" as a representative phrase of your post. Which i do, generally agree. We just have to parse it out, we are talking about 300 years of history after all.
There has to be a very clear separation about the Spanish project vs all the others, even Portugal was very, very different in how its american holdings where managed.
Mexico and Peru had Universities since the very begging of "colonization" In the 1540's Brasil got its first in the 1800s. Spain also had important cities in the interior of the American viceroyalties, Portugal had only coastal cities, etc. Think about Ancient Mexico and Peru as more like the HRE than anything else, ofc Mexico was much smaller but still it was a patchwork of kingdoms and city states held together by whomever had more power at the time, although the Aztec did hit above their class.
The Inca integrated hundreds of small kingdoms, cities and a few big kingdoms into a massive conglomeration that by the time of the Spanish incursion was deep into a horrific civil war. Not much info is there in English about Huascar v Atahualpa but it was really bad.
After the Spanish consolidate their rule the Spanish King was adopted as a successor to the Inca and ally for the freedom of this many kingdoms, in turn the Spanish recognize the rights and privileges of each. This is the main reason for the rebellion of the Encomenderos (who wanted a feudal system) a big civil war fought amongst the Spanish but the Crown won, the New Laws were implemented, giving full rights to the natives, in exchange they would be part of the massive Spanish Empire and access to trade with all the world.
We know the taxes imposed into the local population several products where taxed but the main one was 20% of all Silver and Gold income from the mines in the Americas, the rest was re-invested into the territories. This 20% did went directly to the King though.
It was a fluke though, they found massive amounts of Silver in Potosi and mercury in Huancavelica to be able to extract it cheaply, for the first 100 years it was the key to Spanish power in Europe, a very cheap influx of metal but as you well know it was not well invested it just evaporated in wars and wars not to the benefit of Spain but Austria and arguably the Catholic faith (although reconquering Morocco, Algeria and Tunis for the Holy See would've been better i think)
We do have an example of Haiti as a "profitable" colony for France, by 1780 it made more money than ALL of Spanish America, more money for France that is. Of course you know what kind of exploitation went on there to be able to have this "profits".
Now what was profitable was trade, you don't need massive continental colonies for that though, the Manila Galleon which enabled trade from China to Peru to Mexico to Europe was a big source of wealth but disseminated among private individuals more than going to the Crown itself.
There were many attempts at centralization and consolidation but they all failed. Most interesting to me was the Union de Armas but it was not to be.
Sorry if this is a bit disjointed its 5am here, i'll go to sleep now. Cheers!
What does even profitable mean? All countries which engaged in colonialism were getting richer at their peak and nobody denies this. This whole "colonies were a budgetary whole" started with colonial apologists saying that it was all about God knows what and not about exploitation.
The problem with determinism is when one mistakenly assumes a causal relationship between two things when there are none, or weighs their influence and impact wrongly. Determinism is a very attractive concept, to which I'm not opposed to in general. But the problem starts when wrong assumptions are made. Now what we learn from reality is that the world is (almost) always more complex than we originally assume, and that's why deterministic arguments should always be met with skepticism and be questioned.
One thing is for certain though, whether or not EU5 takes inspiration, heavily or lightly, from Guns Germs and Steel, it ABSOLUTELY SHOULD continue the Guns DRUMS and Steel music from EU4 because those tracks SLAPPED!
Jokes aside, I really appreciate you making this video. Personally, I had not heard of Jared Diamond or Guns Germs and Steel until the couple of videos that CGPGrey made on the topic way back when, and as an impressionable, young(er) fella with an interest in history but no academic background in it, it was easy to accept this narrative as it came from a source I trusted and sounded plausible. Over time I've obviously come to dismiss more and more of what was said in the video and in the book itself, though it is still a little embarrassing to remember how earnestly I believed in this pop history.
I also had a lot of the more... easy to consume stuff, but my source was a teacher who wanted to make learning fun. And she did and like, most of the things she taught held up, but some of it was the kind of thing I ended up just sorta... waking up one day and being like "did he really say that?" "did that silly event really happen?" and it was like a 70/30 split on real vs (at the least) unsourced.
I think it's only natural for it the unlearning to be gradual, and to accept that we sometimes don't even know that what we know errs closer to pop. On some intrinsic level, trust is the biggest part of education, or maybe more like authority, and authority can come from trust, or it can come from authoritative symbols, like, a print book. There's a reason even the most deranged crank weirdos out there seek to transcend their (unfortunately) popular blogs peddling pseudoscience and enter the realm of being a "published author," and it's not just a question of reach.
RUclipsrs that do education content don't have the time to present dense citations usually, so they have to trade in trust. Hell, I have to trade in trust to a degree.
And it's natural to be a trusting person, I suppose.
I do like the music tracks... usually. It's funny they come on during a moment of relative calm or a war on another continent you totally forgot you joined as an ally.
East vs west was a cold war hearts of iron game game paradox was working on.
Heres a radical suggestion: click on the "random new world" button. Solves the problem instantly
Does it...? Also that wasn't added in until later and is not indicated whether it is returning or not in "project Caesar"
@@king_simp2715 so? The whole development system was added even later, how's that relevant? Good thing it will not return in eu5 tho, because its universally bad
Paradox has published Cold War era games before and planned to do so again with the creators of Darkest Hour before the company collapsed.
I'll add a cool piece of data, Until 1950, about 50% of Peru's population spoke a native language and only 60% spoke Spanish (overlap is both Spanish and Quechua+others)
Is there a reason why it changed so much over the later, half of the 20th century?
@@404_nowheresnotfound3 Mass migration to the cities, where Castilian (Spanish) was dominant. There was a "military revolutionary government" in the 70s that wrecked the economy, specially the rural economy, it hit the big players and small ones. And there was specifically super mass migration to the capital which is in the coast and people had to adapt to the city.
Incredible video, always have wanted to talk about eu4 vs actual history
Worth the wait! Currently reading Guns Germs and Steel and it gives a good perspective on the book.
The whole thing about these theories is that they are based on a false premise. It wasnt European nations that colonised the world. It was, very specifically Western European Natons and not only that **the most Western** European Nations and only four of them. Portugal, Spain, France and England/Great Britain/the UK.
Those are the only four nations who managed to establish expansive, stable and lasting imperalist projects. The only other nation that even got close was the Netherlands and again, they are on the Western periphery.
Also interestingly, those nations are on a pretty narrow North South Axis.
And critically, they were internally stable (relatively), long-lasting states in direct competition with each other for resources and trade dominance over an extended period of time, whose access to easterly trade was roadblocked by a large empire. Those are some pretty compelling reasons to start a maritime empire, create trading companies, and colonise whatever economically-exploitable territory you can get your hands on.
Spain, Portugal, and England also got “test-runs” with the canaries, Azors, and Ireland and were more successful than France in the “initial” run of colonization.
Interesting point but I would also bring up Russia, which at the time engaged in its own no-less-brutal colonization of Siberia, which they still own directly to this day in contrast to the western four
But they aren't the only ones to have colonies. Basically every European state had an ambition and ability for them. So when Italy and Germany formed they soon got a colonies of their own.
So, help me out please, you mean the question "why did western europe colonised the world" is answered (in a very simplistic and crude way, as the question is also crude and simple) by "cause they were big enough, stable enough, with enough resources enough and with easy access to an uncontested sea/trade route"?
I think there is some truth to the theory of difficulties with a north-south continental shape. In afroeurasia there was continent-spanning trade routes, at both sea and land. Merchant republics and leagues were formed. The american empires were mostly landlocked, and there werent cows or horses to drive carriages. That being said, is this a main reason that this "divergence" happened? I'm sure it has an impact, but it also wouldnt necessarily matter if a mass disease kills millions regardless. It's also not like cities like Tenochitlan weren't impressively large
Yeah I'd say the disease thing was what removed the mesoamerican elites from being able to detach from the Spanish through a few generations just out of simple separatism. The only thing you can really note about them is a certain political naivete, as the Spanish were able basically bumrush and kidnap extremely important people in a way you couldn't get away with less isolated places like India or Japan
The total conversion mod MEIOU&Taxes for EU4 tries something similar to what EU5 seems to be doing: simulate population growth. You build your cities, populations grow in those cities, make money, and development is nothing but a description of how much money a city makes, rather than the prescriptor.
Some of the M&T community have declared that EU5 is just the mod but in the official game
Isn't the people of meiou working in eu5?
A couple notes on development and population as someone with only 600+ hours in EU4:
1. Development can be bought using ducats by using colonists or by playing as Zimbabwe, which have a bonus that buying buildings gives development
2. Native populations are very very slightly represented as a "Goods Produced" bonus based on how large the native population was before colonization
These are very minor points though so i understand why they weren't brought up
As with all your videos, this was an amazing exploration of a rather niche topic. Keep up the great work!
5:10 I feel as though they've changed positions on this, since the inclusion of detailed purge mechanics in the Soviet rework forces the player to particpate in mass murder and try to control a psychopath. They made the worst thing person can do into a mechanic you have to interact with. This makes the exclusion of any reference to the Holocaust even worse, with the only hope being they'll rectify it in a future update. I'd also argue it isn't really the safest option since you are enabling the deniers, which is objectively more dangerous than having a slightly harder time selling the game. The fact there is 0 mention of it, despite there being references to Unit 731, is egregious at the very least
How you depict the Holocaust specifically is legally tricky across a lot of central Europe. Including it as a system you can interact with like the Soviet purges would almost certainly get it banned. Mentioning it as something the faction you're running is doing might be OK, but it also might not.
From a purely commercial perspective, Paradox would have to be insane to mention the Holocaust in a WW2 game unless Germany is a non-playable villain. Anything else carries a risk of their game getting banned in one of the biggest markets for grand strategy titles.
As I understand it, other genocides and atrocities don't have the same specific legal protections when it comes to how they're depicted.
@@mdt105 you are absolutely correct, I should've clarified that I'm not demanding they make it interactive. That would be way more trouble than it's worth, as you explained. But I do think it needs to be referenced in the game, whether through news events, blurbs in a national focus, or the occasional pop-up. You could make Kristallnacht a news event with minimal detail that just happens without any input or fault from the player, or give an allied country a pop-up when liberating certain areas that acknowledges the existence of a camp or two.
SOMETHING has to be included somewhere, otherwise you make your game a breeding ground for the stupidest people on the planet. Imagine, let's say, you made a mechanic called "Stalin's paranoia" but the people that play your game are inept because you didn't take any steps to mitigate that possibility, so they complain enough that you give in and rename it to "political paranoia".
Games about history, specifically those set in it the way these ones are, have responsibilities. You can't just choose appeasement, especially when you make a game SHOWING WHY THAT'S BAD.
@@aydenbrudnakvoss4535 I mean, I don't disagree, but we're not talking about people on the internet getting mad here. We're talking about German media standards bodies making it flat out illegal to sell the game in Germany.
As I understand it, the laws in question were deliberately made overly broad and a bit fuzzy in order to discourage certain types of people from doing stuff like making 'holocaust documentaries' that implied that the Jews had it coming, or that actually it was a nuanced topic with multiple valid sides, etc etc, without actually crossing the line into openly saying it didn't happen or was a good idea. The fact that this would also nuke a lot of 'incidental' presentations like you would have in HoI was deemed an acceptable price to pay.
Bear in mind that, as I understand it, this stuff predates the internet and even the existence of widespread personal computers by a couple of decades, it's really not designed for a modern media environment.
@@mdt105 Paradox is also now a multi million dollar corporation and not a little indie studio. They could approach lawmakers and officials to discuss the limitations, and the booming VPN industry circumvents a lot of this anyways.
@@aydenbrudnakvoss4535 OK, first, I'm pretty sure 'stuff to do with the holocaust' is a third rail in German politics; the level of lobbying and the expense incurred in order to add a couple of flavour events would be insane.
Secondly, I'm not sure 'multi million dollar gaming corporation lobbies government to relax media laws on the holocaust so they can put it into their game where you can play as Nazi Germany' will go over quite the way you think it will, nor present Pardox in the light adding events into the game is supposed to. Furthermore, one plausible result of that is that, in weakening those laws, you end up with *more* disgusting holocaust denial content produced by other people who take advantage of the more lax legal regime.
Third, I'm pretty sure that even with the current proliferation of VPN services, the vast majority of people do not use them when browsing the web or buying games online.
20:22 yo saffron cameo? great vid as always
Definitly agree on EUV having a lot of chances to be much more nuanced than its predecessor in how it portrays the "great divergence". However, I think that you overlooked in your video how the fact that institutions, the role they play in technology and how much they are predetermined to spawn in Europe is a bit problematic and is a very limiting tool for EUV to work with and to simulate Europe's rise in influence.
I think that, just like you, the pop system is definitly the thing I'm most excited about, but on the other hand, institutions and the tech system are the things I'm most dissapointed with by very far. Therefor I'm really surprised you did not mention it as it has a very important place in how much of a deterministic game EUV will be.
@axiomsofdominion There's no point in railroading history, just allow for simulations to happen given as many important tools (like technology, geography, demography and economics) and then let the game play out. There shouldn't be a tell tale "China will 100% collapse in every single game" or that the "Spanish will always win against the Aztecs" or that "The Brits will always manage to take over India". Let the natural factors play out, and if done properly, the game should already model the rise of non-serf based, urbanised early capitalist economies slowly but surely outcompeting other societies (which also shouldn't be exclusive to Europe or any other part of the map, but should almost always arise in Europe)
@axiomsofdominion I do not agree, I think there are specific reasons that made Europe more "powerfull", I just don't think that technological advantage didn't play as big of a role as we might think (at least during most of the timeframe of EUV) and I also don't think that Europe should be the technological powerhouse by default when there could be other ways to portray Europe getting a technological advantage (competition for ressources, population density, scarcity of certain goods, high military competition...)
@axiomsofdominion Good, paradox games aren't actually "history retelling" games, if that's what you perceived them to be, but rather a simulation of world history that uses important mechanics that had deep underlying effects on the development of our real world. They are "history themed", if you will. The game has 0 obligation to replicate, or even want to replicate the real course of history in a railroaded manner because that is a fallacious argument of determinism, where nothing except what happened irl could be close to acceptable, even if real history sometimes reads off like an edgy teenagers fantasy world building fan-fiction. If you want to learn history I would suggest you to read a book pertaining to history, and not rely on Paradox games to railroad artificial and seemingly unexplainable modifiers for a game totally based on the premise of "alt-history" in order to meet a criterion where something ought to happen irl. Flavour makes sense, but not railroading, no thanks, mechanics are good enough.
The genocide of the Americas was conducted through a superior socio-economic system and technology though. The colonizers won because they were better organized. Their logistical superiority was literally due to technology and economics, which you can't seperate.
I think I took a collage corse that used this book as the lense and looking back I feel like the teacher was more nuanced with the idea. Someone said the book was shit to me but never explained WHY and it’s good to see this video
We are so back!
But if geographical determinism is bad... then why did Europe dominate?
Europe did not dominate.
The very western edge of Europe did. Spain, Portugal, France and England/Great Britain/United Kingdom did.
A North South Axis as well.
@@dairallan Italy dominated the world culturally. People from across the world went there to be educated. The Scandinavians at around this time had some of the most powerful militaries on earth. Poland and Russia smashed the Ottomans and would go to dabble into Colonialism.
@@christophernakhoul3998 Firstly, Italy didnt dominate anything from 473 until... well never. Its been largely irrelevant other than through ties to the Vatican/Papacy but none of that was "Italy". We're not talking cultural victories, we're talking about establishing an expansive, stable, globe spanning empire.
This same caveat applies to those nations which simply expanded their borders for a period. Thats a very different type of imperialism than the one we are discussing.
@@dairallan Okay but why is that? There still has to be a reason for that, no?
@@wollebay Well im not writing a book on it. In terms of shared geography the main one was that the sea was the obvious direction to go given that going east was baically blocked by, well Europe.
Beyond that, theres going to be lots of probably individual reasons why those particular countries succeeded and the rest of Europe and the wider world did not.
The UK had all the resources necesary for the Industrial Revolution, it had an extremely narrow climate range within ideal growing conditions (even today, if you look at yield per acte, the UK is off the charts) as well as the ideal storage conditions and of course the UK had the massive benefit of Scotland accidentally invented Universal Public Education 200 years before anyone else.
I cant get over the fact that the music flared up as soon as development was mentioned
Brett Devereux mentioned we eating phenomenally boys
I'm coming back to this video a month later to comment (mostly because I want to write this somewhere) but an interesting thing that Paradox could do with EU5 is the inclusion of runaway slave maroons on the map. Across the plantation colonies in the Caribbean, there were de facto independent communities made up of runaway slaves across the islands. People from these maroons, especially in San Domingue, played a big role in the Haitian Revolution. However, it's relatively late-game in terms of the EU timeline, and even more so for EU5, so I am unsure of Paradox would do anything more than adding a negative modifier on some Caribbean provinces or something.
I'm excited for eu5. I think it'll be a terrific game whether it goes on the nore realistic route or not. I do agree I'd be more immersive with the things you said here.
Also, for I think a more aligned model of state behaviour in EU4, I'd strongly suggest checking out the IR school of offensive realism as exemplified by the works of Mearsheimer. "States as identical black boxes that favour expansion when given the opportunity" is pretty much offensive realism summarized.
The question diamond really should be emphasizing is "why you do you white men have so much cargo, and we new guineans have so little?"
One thing I never get about the fight against 'geographical determinism' is insisting on talking about how 'culture plays a role too'. Like, ok, sure, but why then the different culture? Seems to me the only options from there are great man history, racial supremacism, or going back to geography.
As the replies to this show, its the opponents of "geographical determism" who are the handmaidens of racism. The cultural differences have to come something material. Everytime you insisting on looping back to culture you give racists another shot to say the material that matters is the races & not the environment.
Honestly to a decent ammount of those people it basically comes down to some cultures being good and others bad. The bad ones conquers, im not saying everyone looks at it that simply but I definitely have seen it. While they also have a bad understanding of history and think white cultures were the only ones to be like that. Not saying the academic ideas are even that but just, idk laypeoples idea of it.
Culture is based a ton on religion, and simply Catholism and Feudalism paired together are crack for a civilisation. Because Europe was so divided politically it meant that everyone had to develop to not fall behind. Competition really does breed innovation, and the Church helped accelerate that innovation. Clergymen were some of the lead thinkers who led Europe into its technological ascendancy. Catholicism emphasised education which led to a culture of learning developing. The culture that Catholism and chivalry promoted also lead to ascendancy in military matters. Even back during the 1st Crusade the Muslims spoke of the Europeans in awe when considering their battle prowess.
Environment has influences, but it doesn't determine them. Any society plopped into NW Europe is going to end up with some amount of seafaring tradition, but what their government, religion, and society look like will depend on what it was going in.
Great man history posits that these specific people "drive" history, but that's not the same thing as "these specific men attached themselves to movements that were already happening and ended up in the driver seat." The Roman Republic didn't fall because Caesar gonna Caesar, it fell because of ~100 years of internal instability created a situation where any number of men could have seized power (several rather pointedly had seized power and several others were likely trying) but Caesar just happened to be the one on top. History is about the choices of individuals taken en masse and occasionally a specific person becomes the face of that movement and they end up with the credit in the history books. Caesar may be the one we remember, but don't the choices of his legionnaires to follow him matter at least as much as Caesars choice to try?
Or more relevant to daily life, the car the causes the traffic jam you're in isn't because they're special, it's usually just someone hitting their brakes at the wrong time and it slowly cascades back through traffic because some people were following too closely. Some people may be disposed to drive too close to the car ahead of them, but the only matter if there is a car ahead of them and the car behind them also follows too close and has to use their own brakes, and on and on. People have versions of this incident all the time, but it only causes traffic if the situation is already primed for it with lots of people on the road, but even that's not a guarantee of stop and go traffic, maybe you *did* leave enough space this time so you're just coasting.
The idea is that there’s a whole scientific field about how culture affects us and is generated called sociology you might have heard of it
There are these options only as long as you consider culture to be something unmoving and unchangeable. It is of course influenced by the environment, but how exactly it interprets it and adapts to it comes down to a ton of different things from religion, neighboring cultures, political events etc.
I heard they aren't planning to have natives playable on release, I'm assuming they couldn't find a way to make gameplay both fun and historical but they seem to still be trying
I think, what this meant was more like... the "on map natives" of EU4 would remain playable, but the "gray province" natives will be modeled on release but not playable.
@@Rosencreutzzz No, it was specifically about the "Societies of Pops", the new country type they introduced to model groups like the sapmi.
(and the other "on the map" natives that get "normal" countries, like the andes/mesoamerica will be playable)
While I understand the point you're trying to make, and agree with it, there's a gap in your argument. That is, you mention that environmental/geographic determinism has historically been used as a continuation of racist or religious dogma, you don't actually demonstrate that link. You need to actually concretely show "Geographic Destiny" turning into "Manifest Destiny" to actually sell that criticism that Diamond is reinforcing those older beliefs under a new name. (A sense that something was "inevitable" is not the same as passively endorsing manifest destiny.)
The problems with EU4 making it so you have no issues supplying an army months away from an established agricultural center or that development (or worse, trade) is hard-coded aren't really issues of environmental determinism as it is pure Eurocentrism in the original game that was honestly a lot *worse* than any problem Jared Diamond might have inspired. (I remember when China had a massive technology penalty and started the game having to *import* technology from Europe to learn the secrets of gunpowder *from Europe,* and any non-European nation had to "Westernize" to lose the massive technological advancement penalty they took from not being born white. As I remember the forums putting it, you can either remain behind forever, or you can give up everything that makes your culture unique to just be another "westernized" generic European idea tree...)
I get there are lots of problems with Guns Germs and Steel, but the key idea, at least as I understand it, is that because Europe had more easily domesticable animals it was able to colonise the world. Put sheep, cows, horses etc in South America, and it's likely we would be living in a world where the Incas would have colonised the world (obviously history would be changed so radically there wouldn't be an Incan Empire).
I haven't understood what the error with this specific idea is as a broad, generalised theory of why large scale events like European colonialism happened. It makes sense to me that colonialism happened for materialistic reasons rather than Europeans being uniquely brutal in conquering other peoples.
If anyone could explain anything I've misunderstood or missed that would be greatly appreciated.
based on those criteria why is it Europe and not like, China, or India that colonised the world?
the question is "why europe" and not "why not thr americas". that is a substantial part of the second question but not at all part of the first one
@@oke5403 The leading theories I am aware of are 1) that Europe was divided by the Alps and thus hard to unify which led to a stable equilibrium of competition rather than despotic centralized empires and that competition bred productivity and technological progress, and 2) that Europe lacked spices so it incentivized powerful states to sponsor naval expeditions that enabled colonization of distant lands rather than army-based colonization of nearby lands.
@@darkmiles22 I mean, these are not even believable to the average layman.
@@oke5403 The Faustian spirit.
If geographic determinism is so wrong, whats really at play here? What can I read that posits an alternative explanation to Europes dominance?
As far as I can see the conquest of America *is* inevitable and I cant possibly imagine how native polities could have prevented it.
it was inevitable, some empire would always eventually make trade with the east incovinient, then some coastal nation would have always tried to find a route to asia through the atlantic, at which point they would find the americas with alot of gold and civilizations with a lot of gold to be plundered, which then would devolve into an attempt into conquest of the continent or a more slow colonization, and they would always win because of the sheer advantage it is having your enemies being ravaged by diseases your people are already "used to".
The modern progressive opinion: Europeans were lucky and evil.
What made the colonization of the Americas "inevitable" was the Spanish conquest of the Aztec empire, and that was a lot more down to sheer dumb luck than what most people assumed. Without that initial jackpot, the Spaniards would've never acquired the obscene amounts of wealth needed for them (or their rivals for that matter) to sail across the Atlantic in never seen before volumes.
Even with the smallpox, the technological disparity and the divide-and-conquer mentality in mind, it's very likely that if things had shaken just slightly differently, the Americas would've remained overwhelmingly indigenous-controlled, with a handful of European-controlled colony ports here and there, and Columbus' stunts in the Caribbean would been seen as a historical fluke rather than a precedent
@@Мракочёрт-и8й The former has some ground
@@fish5671 For the first point, you could argue that the spanish made trade with the east inconvenient for themselves, they weren't "coastal" in a sense, gold wasn't that much in the Americas, as there was 200 metric tonnes of it. The correct world is silver. Many parts of the Americas were only "Spanish" in name, with these areas acting functionally independent
Now that we’ve affirmed the Lady Saffron convergence, I for one call for a new tradition of this channel in which once an academic contention or review is quoted, Saff has to read it in the most caricatured posh manner as possible for maximum impact.
Guns, Germs and Steel is popular history and has nothing to do with serious scholarship
Only 2 months. A new record for you
AARDVARK MENTIONED, LIKE DEPLOYED
Edit: Wait it was relevant??? I thought you just liked aardvarks, now I learned this guy thinks they're hyenas...
Both environment and genetics will impact a population's cultural evolution. Some populations, due to mutation, will have different average intelligences and different average social characteristics. Their environment will give them certain advantages as well, and shape cultural characteristics. The idea that Europe's geography effected its ability to conquer the world can be 100% true, but this doesn't mean that genetics play no part. Also, Jared Diamond is a Jew whose parents both immigrated to the United States from Easter Europe (particularly Bessarabia) either during or (more likely) following World War One, which will undoubtably have influenced his views of Europeans as a hostile people. (My assumption is that his father emigrated from Moldova after it was annexed by Romania during the Russian Revolution, but I have no actual evidence outside of the small info on his wiki). I don't care if it makes people uncomfortable, someone's racial background is relevant to their work when their work centers on race.
But his supposed bias is also irrelevant. If he is correct or wrong in his study, then that's regardless of his ethnicity.
@@novinceinhosic3531 Would someone being Japanese and having family who died in the firebombing of Tokyo be relevant if they wrote a history book on the Pacific War?
@@EricNapoli-z3d his insight might actually be more valuable.
@@novinceinhosic3531 Maybe, but the point is that it is still relevant to the work.
Modern scholarship has failed to produce a theory that allows all societies to have agency especialy within the time period. I think that would be impossible to create within the EU 5 framework. it would certainly help If they included the institutions that were developing outside the West like the development of the Muslim slave trade or the development of maroon states as a response to European colonization to create a more dynamic world.
Well, it´s called EUROPA Universalis after all... Of course it´s centered around Europe
The design of these games is that the player should change history, not the AI. It's not about environmental determinism, it's about historical determinism. The game is meant to hew as closely as possible to historical events until the player takes it off the rails.
9:45 FWIW, attack natives does reduce the goods produced of a province because you'll get less native assimilation.
One thing I want to note in EU4 and im not sure if this is true in history but Europe in EU feels like the largest area for geopolitical interaction what I mean is in EU4 you have alot of these shattered regions with many local rivalries occurring that leads to power conflict that will eventually consolidate.
Think India but most of these are self contained once those regions are consolidated that power has to look outward into a disconnected region.
Europe in EU4 is not like this it has regions from which nations consolidate but all these regions are part of a broader geopolitical region France may ally the Russians or Ottomans England Austria or Spain the whole continent interacts in a way I feel like most Eu4 regions dont.
Im not sure if there is a reason for this from a historical perspective lense and want to know if anyone has any insight.
Paradox used Guns, Germs and Steel as inspiration because the book gamefies human history.
If we are going to compare america's geography with eurasia's, I would say that sea conections played a bigger role than open plains. The mediterranean is a great example of that in the benefit of europe, but the Caribbean could have easily played the same role while there weren't hurricanes. Between the apalachians and the rockies there are open farmlands with giant rivers like the missisipi, and in South America the Rio de la Plata Cuenca had these same properties, plus a mixture of rainforest with forestry plains. I think a sumer-like civilization could have formed in one of these areas, expand into other settlements, collapse, resurge, and commerce it's discoveries to help nearby villages discover new technologies, and river-based commerce could emerge in the parana as well as caribean commerce with a proto-phoenicia in lousiana.
But I have to admit that the fact that the most advanced civilizations on the continent were a mountain-expansive empire and multiple nation-states on the jungles of southern mexico seems to work opposite as to how african jungles and asian mountains worked. It makes me realize civilizations do not follow a fixed standard procedure and that just because it is easier to build on flatland, does not mean it is worth it to every cultire. And that is so fascinating.
I love your videos, there is still a lot of eurocentrism in history, and seeing you so brilliantly, formally and objectively fight it with the best of intentions fills me with inspiration. Keep it up!
What you said about American Geography is true, but you’re leaving vital factors that are mentioned in Guns, Germs, and Steal: In the end, favorable geography means nothing if you have nothing to grow on it. North America had originally maize, beans, and squash, but maize, despite being the best crop of the three, was the hardest to domesticate, far harder than wheat or barley in the Fertile Crescent: It’s ancestor, Teosinte, was actually less productive than wild wheat, and produced few seeds that were encased in hard coverings that had to be broken individually.
South America had indigenous crops too, such as the potato, which would indeed thrive in the colder climates of New England, but did not reach North America until during European Colonization, probably due to the climate differences encountered when crossing the Equator, as well as the difficulty of moving through the narrow Panamanian Isthmus. Similarly, Llamas, the only domesticated pack animal in either America, never reached the Great Plains, where they may have thrived, similar to the Pampas of Northern Argentina. Instead, the role was taken by Horses brought from Europe, whose impact was felt by both Native Americans conquered by or conquering with those with or without Horses.
Also to be taken into account is the fact that Native American settlement only started/ended in 11,000-10,000 B.C., meaning they would only have thousands of years to domesticated crops and animals, and from that develop to a point where they could resist European Invasion and Infection, while Europeans and Asians had hundreds of thousands of years to do the same.
Is it possible that the Incas may have one day been encountered by wayfaring sailers from Tenochtitlan, and eventually established trade? Yes, but it would’ve taken time that was lost to European Settler-Colonizers instead. In the end, whatever achievements that were made by the best Indigenous Societies were not able to stand up to European Invaders, whose ancestors had advanced far beyond them due to having more time to domesticate the more available crops that needed less effort to perfect them in the first place, as well as having similar geography to transport what they had domesticated, without having to adapt those crops to different climates, whether across the Eurasian Step or the Mediterranean.
You are also correct that History is generally Eurocentric: That was one of the things Guns, Germs, and Steal was trying to fix. In its opening pages, Diamond says: “Most books that set out to recount world history concentrate on histories of literate European and North African Societies. Native Societies of other parts of the world . . . receive only brief treatment, mainly as concerns what happened to them very late in their history, after they were discovered and subjugated by Western Europeans.” He acknowledged prejudice, and tried to counteract it through his own reasoning as a scientist. Personally, I think Jared Diamond did much more to discredit imperialism than justify it, but you actually have to read his work to understand it.
Lady Saffron collab? POG
TL:DW is that Rosencreutz wants to discourage the attempts to make a model for anything in historiography because to make a claim, you must take a stand and shed nuance and ambiguity. GGS is flawed, but ultimately the best holistic explanation of Europe's sudden rise to global dominance that doesn't rely on concepts like Europeans being inherently superior or divine intervention
Hey Rosen, what books do you recommend for learning about the development and expansion of colonialism? Your videos make me want to learn more!
I feel like the devs graying out "uncolonised" regions like in EU4 and (as seen so far) in Project Ceasar was always the easiest answer to the question of "how to emulate gameplay as a victim of colonialisation?" If you actually want to emulate the experience of the natives facing the overwhelming odds they historically did, *don't give them gameplay.* That's why playing as African or American countries is EU4 basically boils down to "colonise it before the Europeans can" and why trying to come up with some way to actually represent Native (specifically North) American gameplay will always be a great struggle.
What EU4 does with its tribal systems has faced a lot of criticism since it was implemented a couple years ago and not without reason, but actually coming up with a system of gameplay to emulate playing as a semi-nomadic not-quite-a-state facing overwhelming odds in terms of materials and technology with an apocalyptic scale biological disaster threatening to bring down society as is... I don't think such a thing can be done while trying to pretend that the experience can be in the least enjoyable as a basis for the design itself. This is why games like Civilisation don't take the time to model "dead civilisations", there's simply a nameless horde of tribal "barbarians" who appear out of nowhere and disappear, leaving behind barely anything recognisably cultural. (This was made in even more poignant by the inclusion of "barbarian artefacts" as archeological objects to be discovered. If you don't want me to think of the barbarians as failed states, don't pretend like they actually had societies outside of blindly destroying everything in their path.)
And PDX can always scale the importance of materials and logistics and technology, but the only way to keep the games actually bound to, if not an accurate, then at the very least a realistic version of history, is to model the disastrous consequences of the depopulation of the Americas, which simply cannot ever be turned into an enjoyable gameplay experience. For a real example of this, try playing Stellaris with End-Game dates set to the earliest possible and End-Game Crisis factions set to as strong as possible. The emulation of facing an overwhelming military might while barely managing to mangle a cohesive state together is on an equivalent scale I believe.
If PDX were to, say, give the natives some way to fight off the plague (like in the current version of EU4), the actual gameplay experience swiftly turns from a narrative of defending against a conquering force despite overwhelming odds into one of "Noble Savages" averting the predestined collapse of their society by adapting European schools of thought and technology in real time to fight off the "Barbarous Colonisers" using their own methods against them. In effect, it minimises not only the real history at play by giving the player an out from the real consequences of colonialism for the sake of gameplay, but it minimises the expected reality of colonialisation, whatever that may be for the player. This was represented extremely well by the original launch of the native rework with the Leviathan DLC (cue dramatic organ music), which gave the Native Americans more of a chance at resisting the European settlers, and was promptly met with outrage by the community for doing so, for the simple reason of making colonialism too difficult for the Europeans and shattering the existing Great Divergence basis on which most of the game was modeled.
Disregarding the not-insignificant consequences of making colonialism "fun and not really that disrupting to the existing population", Project Ceasar does have a much better starting point from tackling pretty much all of the problems that simulating the natives entails. But what they can't then do is claim that not all natives are important enough to model and gray out the regions they consider "uncolonised", a problem to be eliminated with the press of a button, be it "Convert Culture", "Settle Province" or "Attack Natives." You can't have gameplay for historically significant indigenous people and disregard the rest as "not relevant enough" and relegate them to being left as a lingering population of colonisation of old world regions. Again, a good example on how to not do this comes from EU4's Leviathan DLC in the form of the Australian Aboriginal "states" and how they added more gameplay than could historically be justified for a corner of the world that, by most estimates, has relevance in the scope of EU4.
The simple fact is that there can be no universal system of gameplay for countries fighting off colonialism, which is why EU4 still has six different ways of representing the non-centralised states of the pre-modern world, none of which overlap in anything but being victims of modern institutions and the states wielding them. How many systems Project Ceasar will come up with by the end of its development cycle is something PDX should focus on before they end up having to deal with the same issues that plagued Leviathan's systems.
The reason it is grayed out is because we have no historical data about them. What did we know of, say North America in the year 1380? Not much, same as we did not know much about Australia 100 years later too.
You can't cherry pick academia to only the last few decades. The race argument was very much used in European academia in the 16 and 17th centuries.
These comments are too debate brained. My understanding isn't that he isn't saying environmental determinism is completely wrong, but it's more complex. The raising of cultural lens isn't a parallel to environmental determinism, that the Europeans were more culturally advanced, but another point about complexity. Europeans werent just geographically stronger and therefore dominant, they had ideological ideas of superiority and righteous conquest/genocide. I think a separate point is that determinist arguments can seem to excuse colonialism and genocide, environmental determinism especially, like how disease was exacerbated by colonial conflict, it wasn't just an accident, it was furthered because colonialism. Like it's really not that hard to follow friends. He isn't saying only Europeans were the only people culturally inclined to dominance, or that their geography had no causal relationship to colonialism, but that those ideas can inadvertently become colonial apologia especially for pop history audiences, and there is even more complexity to the actual history than the simplistic arguments lead you to believe.
12:31 maybe he’s talking about aardwolves, which really ARE hyena-like animals. in which case it’s an editor’s job to notice this and fix it
but also the fact that “Guns, Germs, and Steel” is really map-gamey might be why I loved it so much in middle school
My thinking of how theyll handle the 'american apocalypse' as i refer to it, is that every province will be occupied by some historical or speculative tribe or nation. Then when contact is made with the West(or East, colonial Korea anyone?) There will be probably a 3-5 year period where nothing will happen to give players a time to prepare. Then there will be a cascading domino effect of nations being wiped out entirely, or losing massive swathes of population radiating out from the points of contact. This will allow migration for the remaining nations, and leave 'empty' land to be colonized by outsiders.