Guns, Germs and Steel

Jared Diamond: Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond has some interesting ideas and supports them with lots of evidence. Some examples: (1) You'd think that since people often consider their family more important than their country, it is easier for tribes to get their members fight fanatically than it is for kingdoms/countries. Wrong. Only a centralised goverment can create propaganda strong enough to make people sacrifice themselves for something. (2) So, big units with centralised govenments are terrible war machines and life is peaceful in small tribes and chiefdoms? Wrong again. Diamond mentions that violence is quite common in tribal societies and intra-tribal relations. Bigger units can impose codes of law and reinforce them and that seems to drastically cut down fights.

An interesting issue about Spaniards and South American civilisations: the Spaniards indeed had ocean-going ships, guns, horses and writing. In the case of a conflict between the civilisations, the Spaniards would have won even though Spain was far away. However, suppose the first would-be conquistator were not Pizarro. Maybe he would have settled for less and the Aztec civilisation would have been spared.