We are reading one chapter a week of Guns Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond. This book is an attempt to find out why the Eurasians have all the stuff, and the Africans, native Americans, native Australians and c. have so little.
I encourage this to be slow blogging. Post a comment any time during the week.
The next book will be Ideas: A History of Thought and Invention from Fire to Freud, by Peter Watson
This chapter is a bit problematic - not for content reasons, but for logistical ones. I would guess that most readers of this book are at least somewhat familiar with European expansion into the Americas, Africa, and Australia. But I would also guess that most readers (like me) know virtually nothing of the history of Polynesia. Even the geography of the place is fairly unfamiliar - partly because it is not prominent in world affairs these days, and partly because it is composed of many many islands. OK - New Zealand is the big islands SE of Australia, and New Guinea is the big islands N of Australia. We probably have a good idea where Hawaii is. But which are the Chathams? Pitcairn? The Marquesas?
The names of the groups of people are also unfamiliar, as are their characteristics - again, most readers probably have the idea that Scandinavians tend to be pale, blond, etc., while Italians tend to be darker ... but I have no good sense of what highland and lowland New Guineans look like, and not that much sense of the differences between southeastern Asians and Chinese, and so on.
So this chapter is too short .... but to do it right would require a book.
Nevertheless, I will attempt something even shorter in this diary :-).
Polynesian culture, marked by certain language groups and certain styles of pottery, spread from the mainland to cover a vast area of ocean ... from Hawaii to New Zealand to Sumatra and even to Madagascar; prior to the European expansion, the Austronesian language group was spoken over a larger area of the globe than any other.
The Polynesian culture surrounds New Guinea and Australia, but made only tiny inroads into New Guinea, and none into Australia. Why did it spread everywhere but those particular places? And why didn't it spread much in the mainland?
The answers will be familiar by now - Except for New Guinea, all of the small and medium sized islands were either uninhabitd or inhabited only by hunter gatherers living in very small groups. The Polynesians were food producers, came from places with denser populations, had more resistance to disease, and had better technology. Goodbye natives. In fact, the natives here have left even less trace than those in other parts of the world - while Australians and American natives were hugely reduced in their encounter with Eurasians, there are some people left in those groups. There are none of the natives of these islands. Nor is there any trace of their languages or culture.
In New Guinea, the situation was very different. There, the two groups (Polynesians and New Guineans) were more equally matched, and the advantage went to New Guineans, who were already established. As for Australia, as outlined last week, it poses unique challenges in its climate.
A short diary today - much more detail in the chapter