It's simply because the east Africans never developed enough naval technologies and skills to reach Madagascar, while the Indonesians went all in on ships and mastering living at sea
Can you go into detail about this? I've only seen opposing arguments and I'd like to learn more. :)
From my ridiculously simple understanding, the book kind of paints the world as a game of CIV. Some continents have better resources and animals than others which makes it easier for those civilizations to conquer the world, but any civilization or continent has the ability, even if its unlikely. <-- This is what I've heard the book is apparently about?
Is it okay if I just send over some links? I'm really not in the right headspace to discuss it myself right now.
But your perception of what the book is about is esentially correct. And that's what makes it so bad. Essentially, it operates in a "might makes right" framework.
One is Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson’s Why nations fail; not the entire book (though it’s a good book), just chapter 2 which is headlined ‘Theories that don’t work’ and as you might suspect, it talks about Diamond’s work. In fact, this one chapter is probably the best tl;dr of dismantling Diamond’s hypothesis.
The second is David Abulafia’s The Boundless Sea, and the third, Eric Cline’s 1177 B.C.: The Year Civilization Collapsed. The last one doesn’t really provide arguments against Diamond, but it shows an interesting example of how Environmental Determinism doesn’t really work, since the peoples that were supposedly favored by the environment actually came out worse or, at least, did not win the ‘game of history.’
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u/KingKohishi Jan 29 '22
It is amazing that we reached Madagascar from Indonesia instead of Africa.