The geographical explanations really only make sense at really long time ranges as societies collapse, die, move, etc. and when there's a hard limit on some development, like not having draft animals.
This fucking chart just shows where they threw black people a few hundred years ago. No shit.
but they threw the black people there to do forced labor because those zones had high fertility soil.
That's true, but why slaves and not, say, shipping out some peasants made homeless from the clearances.
because they'd have to pay peasants, but not Black people
Sure, but it's more complex than that.
You have to get slaves (who are usually not too keen on the idea), you have to ship them (once you've genocided the locals), distribute them, house and feed slaves, and you need to make sure that you put them on viable land rather than just selling or leasing it to some poor farmer who is paying you back for the transit with half his profits for 14 years and seeing if he dies or not. Slaves are more profitable in the long (well medium-long, since tenant farmers tend to improve the land on their own dime.) run, but the initial capital costs are way higher.
In fact a pattern you see a lot is, run off the First Nations, occupy with tenant farmers, press them until they go out of business, and then buy the successful plots, turn into slave plantations. Happened in the US, Happened in Australia too.
Okay. And that's exactly how it happened.
Not sure what we're arguing about tbh
I mean, the fourth map shows slave distribution. But I think people are just being overly critical of this meme, like it's supposed to contain all the nuance of a history textbook.
The planters who settled Alabama in the early 1800s already had black slaves, plus they probably didn't trust Highlanders to work in the heat. Imagine taking someone who's never seen a day over 70 degrees F and trying to work them to the bone in a Southern summer.
Plus, most slaves in places like Alabama came from plantations further in Virginia, North Carolina, etc., not all the way from Africa. Trying to get Highland peasants to come over would already be less efficient.
Yeah but the development of chattel slavery has a lot more to do with than just geography. It wasn't high latitude short photoperiods that made Europe develop into genocidal colonialists.
Well like, if I decide to throw you into a lake, technically geography explains where you end up, but not really in the Jared Diamond way
but it also leaves out the rest of historical materialism.
such as? What does this type of thinking leave out?
Thinking that physical geography dictates everything in human society completely erases the - well - human aspect of it. Humans have agency and desires, and those aren't dictated by the geographical conditions surrounding them necessarily.
Material conditions not only includes the conditions of the physical geography, but also the conditions of the people and the society inhabiting it.
The type of soil on this map didn't dictate whether or not slaves would work these specific fields - people did. It was not inevitable nor was it the only economical way to work productively. That's what it leaves out.
The type of soil on this map didn’t dictate whether or not slaves would work these specific fields - people did.
True, but slaves would inevitably be brought in to work fields of at least SOME fertile geological soil deposits. It's a trivial point which ones happened to be chosen, but some of them would be, and this one ended up being one of them.
If history turned out slightly differently then the Alabama soil would be settled by whites, and some other mineral deposit would have been farmed by Black enslaved people instead.
That's precisely the point. The material conditions of the Atlantic Empires enabled slavery as a means to extract value from their colonies - conditions that extend far beyond the composition of the soil. That's what I think /u/thefunkycomitatus meant by material conditions extending beyond simple geography.
Ultimately everything comes down to geography, it's just that there's no way to encompass all the multivariate and never-ending downstream effects of every seismic shift change that happened 23409825098 years ago, so we just call certain things "cultural"
Atlantic empires did that stuff because they found two continents of easily stealable land, so they had more land than they knew what to do with
Non-determinists fall into the fallacy of "but you're saying people's actions don't matter if it's all preordained", but really their reactions are PART of what is ordained, and are necessary for the future. Preordained geological determinism doesn't mean that people's actions are meaningless, quite the opposite
Look, I don't really want to get into arguments about whether or not our universe is conducted by a pre-determined series of events.
Fact of the matter that even if that is the case, geography alone is not enough to pre-ordain a sequence of events. Entropy is an important aspect of the universe.
That's getting a bit too out there for me though. I'm a communist because I believe in the ability for us as humans to be able to improve things, and believing that everything has already been determined is counter-productive to that.
The start of our conversation was about material conditions not being the same thing as physical geography, which is true - unless you think that the universe has been pre-ordained. If that's what you want to believe then good on you, and I won't stop you, but it's not really a productive stance to take in my opinion, especially when it puts you in the historical analysis camp of Jared Diamond.
Entropy is an important aspect of the universe.
life is anti-entropic
but yea
and believing that everything has already been determined is counter-productive to that.
it isn't tho
life is anti-entropic
Plants and algae get their energy from the sun and feed all other life on earth. When the sun goes out, so does life. There's no stopping entropy.
nit picking
Except chemosynthetic life which gets its energy from geothermic vents, which are powered indirectly by the earth's radioactive core, which will also one day go out.
I'm not a student of theoretical physics, nor am I a Calvinist, and I am certainly not nearly high enough to begin digging into the meat of predeterminism with you.
The point of me commenting was to say that there is more to historical materialism than analyzing physical geography, and I will leave it at that.
This is an incredibly semantic argument now. Ultimately if a system's outcomes can't be predicted from its starting points, for all intents and purposes, the system is not deterministic because its state changes cannot be predicted by observing its current iteration.
physical geography dictates everything in human society
Literally no one has said this. The image's title uses the word "influence" which is a far cry from what you're talking about.
The person I was discussing this with went on to say,
Ultimately everything comes down to geography
Also that's the crux or Jared Diamond's book that the start of this thread was complaining about, and that person is complaining about it because it is so prevalent in some circles.
That's crazy, they should analyze what's in the water there that makes people vote Democrat.
oh, can you do South Africa next ?!?!
I'll give you a push:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witwatersrand#Witwatersrand_Basin
And Go!
That's nothing, there's a whole 2/3 of the planet that doesn't vote for either party that closely coincides with the coastal divide 0MY ago!
