Guns, Germs, and Steel PBS miniseries discussion thread.

[notyoueither]

It got cold.

[Mr. Harley]

Re the Vikings and their colonization in North America, the primary factors for their failure were the Little Ice Age, and possible hostile natives. The Little Ice Age made their toehold in Greenland untenable, which would have disrupted any North American settlement's connection to Scandanavia.

I just double checked on Google, the name of the site was L'Anse aux Meadows. There are no indications of any kind of extensive interaction with the Native Americans, so we have no way of knowing if the technological advantage of the Vikings was sufficient to offset the numbers of Native Americans, or if indeed the relationship, if any, was warlike. We know the bad weather eventually caused the abandonment/failure of the Greenland venture, we don't have enough data to determine everything involved with the Newfoundland settlement. We do know that it looked to have been much more temporary, surmised from the lack of burial remains, etc.

[molly bloom]

Originally posted by GePap
Sorry molly, but this is still all falling flat.

Hell, the Inca's colonized the whole of the Andes (certainly more space than what the Normans did) and they built roads, towns, and even carried out mass movements of populations.

Last time I looked the Arabs by your definition "colonized" a vast area outside the Arabian penninsula. Just look at their works in Spain. And then the Han Chinese, who colonized all of southern China and Taiwan.

The notion that territorial expansion is something that can be culturally linked to "Europeans" seems stange when so many clearly non-European people's have done it, around the world (like the Bantu colonizing all of Southern Africa).

So what exactly is you point? That Viking and NBOrman lords liked to take over new lands!? Wow, what a shocking cultural revelation, cause no non-European group of human beings have EVER done that...come on.

And as for thos Vikings, given that you are so bent on their "colonizing urge" Why did they stop, huh? Why weren;t they all over the Americas when they got so close? Did their "colonizing drive" have some sort of maximum distance from home or something?

How BIZARRE.

You keep implying I've made some point about colonization being a distinctly European trait. I haven't.

I have pointed out that there is a difference between simply conquering, and conquering to colonize, or conquering and then colonizing- the Mongols 'conquered' Korean kingdoms, turning them into vassal states, and conquered the forces of East European aristocracy at Liegnitz, and yet didn't establish Mongol colonies in Poland, Hungary or Korea.

Similarly, the Incas subjugated existing peoples, such as the remnant Chimu of Chanchan, the Chanka, - exerting power over and exacting tribute from is not necessarily colonizing either.

" If a newly conquered area was already characterized by centralized authority, the Incas simply co-opted the local leadership into the imperial government and maintained the existing political organization."

from: 'The Incas' by Geoffrey W. Conrad

If you bother to read about the Vikings' various waves of migration and colonization, you'll see they managed to colonize an area from Kiev in Russia to Brattahlid in Greenland, with that short-lived site in Newfoundland too.

Given the climatic conditions in the Arctic and the North Atlantic, I'd say that colonizing where and when they did (especially given their limited resources and technology), is really quite remarkable- for anyone, not just Europeans.