re: Sub-Saharan African Civilizations

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Germs, Guns, and Steel is a pretty good book on it.

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awful book

Do not waste your time with this nonsense

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What’s awful about it?

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I'm not a believer in geographic determinism, which is what the book ultimately argues.

You can google plenty of criticisms of the book.

The entire thing feels like a gross oversimplification.

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That the cheapest and most efficient way to move goods and people is over water. Over land takes incredibly long and is significantly less efficient than barges or cargo ships.

Not having navigable rovers leads to pockets of isolated communities, preventing the coalescing of peoples, distribution of labor, and the scale achievable through these two occurrences.

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SoFla Tideroller in the absolute mud

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This does not compute

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There were empires and kingdoms in SSA, though stating this is usually met with ridicule for some reason.

Many people look at a culture and deem it a failure if it didn’t excel at what the viewer deems important. But we need to consider that the folks in that culture may have been perfectly content to live simply on their land and not build ships to venture out to trade with others, build large cities, etc.

For example, the Inuits could move to Toronto and work city jobs and have central heat, but most are fine living in simple homes and doing a lot of fishing and hunting.

It also reminds me of the parable of the Mexican fisherman.

So what's your theory since you seem to think that one is crap?

Songbo's Eredu was pretty impressive, less so however once you realize it was contemporary with medieval Europe.

You'd think they'd have their share of black Magellans then.

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What’s awful about it?


I'm not a believer in geographic determinism, which is what the book ultimately argues.

You can google plenty of criticisms of the book.

The entire thing feels like a gross oversimplification.

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I've read it too. It's an incomplete view, IMO. I think it makes a great companion with Victor Davis Hanson's "Carnage and Culture", which focusses on how some cultures are simply better at technology and thus war than others. The two together are not quite the two sides of the same coin, but they are close and complimentary in many ways.