Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

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It's a mangled version of Marvin Harris and Fernand Braudel. I tried to read _Guns, Germs, and Steel_, and gave up in disgust; Jared Diamond is a Green with an axe to grind. In the case of the American Indians, geography and disease did ruin them (or rather, it ruined the North Americans and the Amazonians; Mesoamerica and the old Inca Empire are predominantly Indian to this very day, and the most recent Maya revolt against the Spanish colonists was in 1911); but most of the time -- more or less all of the time, in the Old World -- ecological factors are secondary to cultural ones. Look at the history of rice: it was adopted as the basic grain of Persia before it was adopted as the basic grain of China (and long before Japan), because good Zoroastrian piety inspired the Sassanids (IIRC) to import this miracle grain and thereby ensure the …