So, Hey, Columbus. That Was A Pretty Big Deal When You Think About It.
Not to get all pro-Western in my biases or anything. And not to indicate ignorance of a half-millenium ornamented by all sorts of awful things.
But I think it’s fair to say that European civilization exporting itself to the Americas — as is symbolized in celebrating the day Columbus’ expedition made landfall in the Caribbean 520 years ago today — is pretty much the biggest and most important thing that has ever happened in recorded human history — agricultural cultivation and domestication of animals having occurred before recorded history.
Am I right? Or are you going to flip back through your Civilization V technology advances, and vote for “the Bessemer process” or “Christianity” or “genetics” or something like that?
Burt Likko is the pseudonym of an attorney in Southern California. His interests include Constitutional law with a special interest in law relating to the concept of separation of church and state, cooking, good wine, and bad science fiction movies. Follow his sporadic Tweets at @burtlikko, and his Flipboard at Burt Likko.
I would think a Christian would be obliged to pick the life of Jesus as more important. I might even be tempted to agree.
One might also argue that walking on the moon is more important, but it’s too soon to say on that one.
Anyway, it’s a pretty short list that’s even plausibly ahead of Columbus. No argument there.Report
Are we talking Columbus or the whole exporting of Western Civilization to the Americas? Let’s say Columbus’ boat sinks on voyage one, how big a change in the history of civilization do we see? How long before someone else makes it? Does that different timeline of when/where/who change the world today that dramatically?
I honestly don’t know, but I might lean a lot more heavily to ‘Jesus’ than ‘Columbus’ as a result if it’s just him as opposed to the whole export of Western Civilization thing.
If we’re discussing what historical processes (ie the colonization of North and South America), the only thing that comes close to me is the Industrial Revolution and I might be tempted to pick that first.Report
The 2012 election.
I had thought that the Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica was something that deserves inclusion but, in the same vein as you point out, Leibniz was working on a similar kinda thing so we’d just have different names in the history textbooks instead of different events. There aren’t *THAT* many Mules in history.
I tend to agree that Columbus wasn’t one.Report
Poor Richard’s Almanac.
Or would we rather choose Priestley?Report
There’s an interesting post – who do you think the Mules of history are? A bunch of religious figures are slam dunks. Julius Caesar and Constantine seem easy. I’m sure there are plenty I’m not thinking of.Report
Not Jesus. Plenty of other end-timers around then.
Maybe… maybe… Temujin!
Julius Caesar seems much more likely than Temujin, but that may be my own biases talking…Report
more likely to have happened anyway, despite not having a JuliusReport
I’d strike Caesar from that list. Let’s say Caesar’s family can’t come up with the ransom and the pirates kill him as a young man.
As for Gaul, it might not have been as violent or as quick as it was with Caesar leading a war of conquest there, but the economics were going to eventually pull more and more of Gaul into the Roman world, one way or another.
As for the Republic becoming a military dictatorship, someone was going to pick up the Gracchan banner and make another go of it. Crassus, maybe. Or younger men like Antony or Cassius or Octavian from the generation after Caesar and Pompey and Crassus. The exact notes would have been different without Caesar, but the Republic was spiralling into demagoguery and dictatorship well before Caesar came along (Marius, Sulla, even Cicero briefly and Catalina if you believe Cicero) and would have gone further down that path until someone like Caesar came along. Eventually, one of them was going to win all the marbles.
My choice for a real-life Mule: Mohammed.Report
It’s obvious and a Goodwin violation as well but Hitler strikes me as a particularily Mulish Mule. Though it’s entirely possbile that Asimov may have had ol’ Adolph at least somewhat in mind when he created the Mule (though his was more personable).Report
Demagogues like hitler? dime a dozen. Father Coughlin ring a bell? Half a dozen others in the French Revolution.
Unrest is easy.
Now maybe the next one doesn’t try to exterminate the Jews.
But taking over Sudetenland is tiddlywinks.Report
Napoleon is a Mule, it seems to me.
“Wouldn’t Wellington have to be one?”
No, Wellington wasn’t brilliant, he was just competent. Another competent General would have done as well.
Emperors who go out to conquer the world who are capable of getting their hands on much of it? That’s something else entirely.Report
Ghengis.Report
Qin Shi Huang.Report
I’m thinking more about Ghengis and it occurs to me that he was too early; his conquest obviously wasn’t going to stand.
I think Napoleon gets a bit more credit but not much more, since there’s still no train, plane, automobile, telegraph, telephone -> no small world inventions yet, so any large conquest was going to dissolve back into squabbling nation-states anyway.
They get points for trying, I suppose.
Siddhartha Gautama.Report
Martin Luther was a pretty big deal.Report
The problem with Ghengis is summed up in this quotation of his:
“Conquering the world on horseback is easy; it is dismounting and governing that is hard.”
Qin Shi Huang got off the horse.Report
Temujin reaching the whole way to Poland and beyond is not something that was guaranteed. That was a LONG way to roam and hold everyone together.
He gets way more cred than Napoleon, to me, because … agrarian societies tend towards leaders, in a way that nomads really, really don’t.
Also, Temujin changed things.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1350272/Genghis-Khan-killed-people-forests-grew-carbon-levels-dropped.htmlReport
Temjuin didn’t build up an enduring empire, but he swept away a lot of what had existed before his Golden Horde. What he created was, itself, evanescent, but left behind a world very different than what he had been born into and very different than what would have happened had he not done what he did.
The Golden Horde’s territories strike me as not at all dissimilar to the Mule’s Union of Worlds.Report
Martin Luther, like Caesar, seems to be only the tip of a wave of history. You’ve got Jan Huss and John Wycliffe playing the role of Marius and Sulla. The Reformation was coming, just as the Roman Republic was spiraling towards dictatorship. Not to diminish Luther’s accomplishments, nor Caesar’s; they beat out any potential competitors to be the tip of the wave.
I think Columbus is actually a better example than many, though not because his personal greatness exceeded Caesar or Martin Luther. If Columbus’s first expedition had been lost to some mishap, I suspect most people would have concluded that sailing west from Europe was folly, as indeed many people felt was true before Columbus. And trying to sail straight west from Europe to Asia was folly; luckily for Columbus he found the Americas, which nobody knew were there until he made his crazy voyage.
And, casting off Eurocentrism, all the same considerations would equally apply about sailing east from Asia. If the Chinese hadn’t turned inward, they might have followed the Indonesian archipelago and found Australia, and that may well have changed the course of history. But you still need someone who can somehow convince himself that he could cross what was, as far as anyone knew, a single ocean as large as the Atlantic and Pacific combined.Report
Huh. I was going to post that Ghengis may have had more of an impact on Europeans by his death than by his life, because his armies were at the gates of Vienna and were recalled when Ghengis died–or so I thought. Turns out that Ghengis died some ten years before Vienna and it was the death of his successor, Ogedei, who forced the recall and saved Vienna (and perhaps Europe).
The things you learn…I’ve had a book on the Mongols sitting on the shelf for years. Perhaps I should pick it up sometime, eh?Report
And yet I’d probably say Alexander the Great wasn’t much…
Napoleon pioneered the citizen’s army (well, if you’ll leave the States alone).
His ability to take over France isn’t terribly impressive, but to take over the rest? It was a tough bit, but I think anyone with an eye towards the citizen’s army (not hard coming out of Rev. France) would have managed fine enough.Report
I’d endorse Napolean as another Mule, definitly.Report
Xerxes.
Alexander.Report
Seeing Alexander, I wonder if we shouldn’t put Plato on the list somewhere.Report
Or Aristotle. For one, between Plato and Aristotle you basically get modern (by which I mean post-Scholastic) Christianity, and the university, and more. Plus, Aristotle taught Alexander everything he knew (OK, that might be an exaggeration).
Euclid?
If you read Plato, you’d think that Parmenides and Heraclitus did all of the revolutionizing.Report
I wanted to quote Whitehead but didn’t have the strength.Report
Sometimes it’s all in the footnotes anyway.Report
Wellington and Castlereigh never get enough credit. They WERE brilliant men who outmatched the likes of Bonaparte and Talleyrand to craft the post-war system.
It was Wellington, Castlereigh and Metternich who crafted the post-Waterloo balance of power, as much because a Wellington victory had a different significance than if Bonaparte had fallen to Schwartzer.Report
They were playing defense, though. They certainly weren’t Mules.Report
Maybe, it’s hard to tell.
The impact that Wellington and Nelson had on the psychology of Great Britain in the post-Napoleonic era is actually pretty hard to measure.Report
Definitely Mohammed. It was completely contingent that the Arabs (not the vast swath of people we call “Arabs” today: the residents of the small habitable sections of the arid and unfriendly Arabian peninsula) would conquer so much of the world so quickly. And if the Arabs don’t dominate the Mediterranean and cut the Eastern Roman Empire off from North Africa and the Middle East, it’s quite possible it can regain its lost western provinces, turning a thousand years of medieval plummet and slow rise into a mere single-cenutry blip.Report
I don’t know much about that time, but what really stands out is that the Arabs didn’t seem to be looking for a leader, or an endtimer, or anything…
those were more his ideas than “gestalt”Report
This said, y’all are a bunch of eurocentric bastards!
The Yongle Emperor of the Ming Dynasty is at least as important as any of them, as it was his decision to draw back from the world and isolate China that gave everyone else the ability to move into the void he’d left.Report
You’re absolutely correct Nob. That decision was indescribably significant. We’re Eurocentric primarily, if I may beg your forgiveness, due to our general ignorance of the history of the ancient far east.Report
Hey, I gave props to Temjuin. And Mohammed. IIRC, I at least referred to China’s turn to autarky under the early Mings, too.
If I’m going to write a post about Columbus, who is after all the definitively Eurocentric figure of all of history, and say that he is the symbol of the most important thing that’s ever happened in recorded history, then I think I ought to have some idea of history’s sweep in the rest of the world, too, to see how he stacks up.
That said, Zhu Di blew the call. China had everything it needed to go forth and conquer in the fifteenth century. The best navigation technology. The most wealth. The best trade goods. A surplus of its own people to plant in colonies. The best navy to carry them in. And a fantastic military tradition.Report
Confucianism has as its central tenet, paraphrased, “Don’t Be A Mule”.
How much change did the old man actually *PREVENT*?
He’s, like, an anti-Mule. He’s the original Hari Seldon.Report
Dude.
You just BLEW MY MINDReport
Hey, I mentioned the First Emperor.Report
Depending on you, who has been taught this history, is simply deference to your expertise. 😉 Thank you for it!Report
Leibniz’ physics were crazy. If we’d gone with Leibniz, science would have been set back a while.Report
How much has our current math set things back?Report
I dunno. Has it set things back? My math basically ends at matrix algebra.Report
Subsampling is the bane of my existence. Yes, modeling digital signals after stupid analog stuff is really, really dumb.
*glares at JPEG*
We really need better math for quantum mechanics. Less analog, more digital.Report
That’s not math. That’s arithmetic. Complicated, but still arithmetic.
(/mathsnob)Report
Discrete wavelet transforms are now arithmetic??
I think one moves out of arithmetic when one heads into lossy territory.Report
I have used Columbus as a symbol of European expansion into the Americas. Columbus may have been foolish in his underestimation of the globe’s circumference, and the beneficiary of blind luck that his ships kept enough fresh water to make landfall, but at least he had some admirable qualities. He was brave, had an audacious vision, and was not (initially) of malign intent towards the Americans he encountered.
If you wish a more brutal symbol, you may consider the Battle of Cajamarca instead; it was only 40 years after Columbus’ first voyage. Where Columbus was (at least initially) looking for trading partners, Pizarro had been a vicious sumbitch from the get-go — he practically begged Charles I for a license to plunder, slaughter, enslave, and conquer when he couldn’t get one from the viceroy in Panama.
And yes, it’s fair to say that if Columbus hadn’t returned from contact with the Americas in 1492, it was only a matter of time until some other European did. Competition for trade routes was intense just between the Spanish, Portuguese, Genoese, Venetians, Pisans, French, Dutch, and eventually the English. The only other culture with a strong enough maritime tradition to make a transoceanic voyage were the Chinese, who had adopted a policy of autarky, who had generally unified political control and thus less competitive pressures for exploration, and who had more distance to travel with less favorable wind patterns at their disposal. And while the Turks had strong maritime traditions, too, there seems to have been little economic incentive for them to venture south along Africa’s east coast or east beyond Chinese waters.Report
Well of course not the Turks. After the native americans noone lost out more from discovering the west than the Turks.Report
Not Jesus, Paul. Unless someone acts on the fact that the goyim are a much bigger market than the Jews, Christianity stays a Jewish heresy and eventually dies out.Report
The moon? Of all the things you could suggest, you pick the moon?
Sure, it’s cool, but unlike a vast number of other technological and societal advances, it had no material effect on the lives of anyone besides Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin. If it hadn’t been done, the world of today would be more or less completely the same.Report
velcro, miniturization, and a bunch of other things fell out of that there space race. including ceramics.Report
I don’t get off, ergo it’s a stupid holiday.Report
The Industrial Revolution, the Enlightenment, the Thirty Years War….
That said, the crosspolination of the Americans with Europe is an important event. But it’s best to also remember the huge number of things that flowed back to Europe, among them being maize and potatoes which revolutionized European agriculture.Report
+1. Without the Scientific Revolution, there’d have been nothing to export except gods and iron (and clean iron at that!)Report
The Reformation, the fall of Rome, the rise of Rome, the Christianization of Rome, the French Revolution, World War II (including the dropping of the bomb and the rise of the United States and the Soviet Union as the superpowers), and maybe a few other possibilities.
I see Columbus, like Plinko upthread, as just the first, luckiest dude to get here. It’s highly likely someone else would have gotten here within the 20 years after his first voyage, though they may not have been Spanish (maybe Portuguese?).
I can tell you for whom Columbus’ voyage was the most important in history, though: The Lucayan. Had to be said, right?Report
And Italian cuisine would be utterly unrecognisable without the Columbian Exchange.Report
And syphilis*, not to be a downer.
*Though goodness knows the Europeans, as active smallpox vectors, had it coming.Report
Short answer – no.
Better answer – Columbus himself was a charlatan and one of the luckiest men is recorded history. He’s the poster child for going off on a wild-ass expedition on the basis of faulty intelligence.
But it must be said that 1500 makes a neat division in world history; there is a difference between all that came before and all that would come after with the sudden doubling of size of the known world (to the Europeans).
However, it’s pretty easy to postulate that European contact with the Americas *would* have inevitably happened sometime within a century after Columbus. After all, it had happened before with a lower level of seafaring technology. The difference Columbus (and Isabella) made is that the first mover success of his expedition made it more likely for most of the western hemisphere to speak Spanish. But the complete unpreparedness of the aboriginal populations of the Americas to European (or East Asian) contact was inevitable, and the differences were likely to be more extreme with the passage of time – were the Colombian expedition to fail and delay ‘first’ contact.Report
It would have been a matter of years or decades at most me-thinks. The Dutch were looking out towards Iceland even then. The English knew there was a lot of fish to the west of them. The ship technology was proceeding apace. The Europeans would have been on America’s doorstep in short order, Columbus or no.Report
The switch to broadside canon engagements, and the logic of how to win them, created far larger and more seaworthy ships so the discovery of the Americas was going to happen in short order anyway.Report
Moveable type?Report
This was a pretty big deal, but also pretty inevitable when you think about the fact that the press was already made, it just needed someone lazy enough to come up with that time-saver.Report
How likely was it for the press to come about in the first place?
Are we looking at the wrong thing? Conquerors instead of explorers?Report
It sounds to me like this post gives me a choice, behind door #1, I can argue about Christopher Colombus. Behind door #2, I can load up Civ 5 and finishing conquering the world in my Romans game. Easy decision, methinks.Report
I think the Romans and Aztecs are too easy. Try it as the Indians or the Persians.Report
I’d rather crank up the difficulty than deliberately play with the wrong style for my Civ.Report
or, you could play Civ 4. Civ 5 is mathematically broken.Report
You keep saying that, but not once have you explained what you mean.Report
ya didn’t ask.
one tile a unit creates a scaling/prioritization issue at higher troop numbers. The computer sits around endlessly shuffling…Report
Or simply because Civ 4 is a better game in general. I only play Civ 5 because the hex-based map is pretty and I like gunboat diplomacy.Report
I don’t get to say stuff like this, as I know the guy who got put in charge of fixing Civ 4…Report
The tricky thing about this is that so many things were predicated on things that already happened. How can Columbus setting foot in North American be the biggest and most important thing if it was dependent upon Mr. and Mrs. Columbus birthing him? Etc, etc, etc.
But, leaving this aside, I still think Columbus himself is overblown, for reasons already noted. Someone from Europe was eventually going to put up permanent settlements and colonies in Europe. Other groups beat Columbus to the punch; they just weren’t seeking the same ends as he and his sponsors.Report
But there is an alternative where the Americas were discovered and colonized by the Muslims, probably sailing from Northern or Western Africa. Since there was so little formal contact during that period, the colonization would’ve likely occured long before Europeans knew about it and got in the game.
If the Americas, and by extension the Pacific and Australia, had been added to various caliphates and denied to the European powers, the modern world would be entirely different. The age of European expansion would never have taken place, England would’ve never grown beyond an island nation.
So which Europeans found America is not very important, but it is important that they found it and settled it first.Report
I’m a big fan of replacing Columbus Day with Exploration Day, per Boing Boing. At the least, Columbus and Europe’s advance into the Americas had a…complicated legacy.Report
What Makes a Mule?
Is it one discovery that revolutionizes everything?
Or is it a thousand knifepoints successfully crossed,
any one of which would have doomed a lesser man?Report
oi! Oi! It seems like you’re looking for the unlikeliest times for something meritorious to swing someone to power.
Feudalism, specifically — rotten feudalism even more specifically.
Joan of Arc
BismarkReport
I’d suggest a Mule isn’t someone like Columbus or even Newton. A mule, it seems to me, is an aberration, a person so personally gifted typically in matters of swaying people* that he or she diverts history in a unique and arguably unlikely to be replicated way.
So based on my own criteria I’d say that Jesus or Julius Cesar (or maybe his nephew Augustus) and definitely Hitler would represent Mules (which is not to say I consider them morally equal, I’d think Mules can make things better or make things worse).
*emphasis on non-scientific, scientists race for discoveries; knock one scientist out of history and another one is likely to pick up the discovery after a relatively short amount of time.Report
Swaying people is easier than you’d think.
Clinton, Franklin, Bowie (and there’s one in the 3kingdoms, at least!)
— I think the kitsune type rather specializes in it.
They aren’t all geniuses, but the ones that are? holy shit, watch your footing.Report
S’not just swaying people. It’s sortof a combination of swaying people in the right time and place etc…Report
Yup! but right time and place is the opposite of a mule.
Mules kick history in the arse, and take it off in a different direction than it was going before ’em.
Admiral Perry works, in some way, as a Mule for Japan. [not that he was an actual mule, someone would have sailed up sooner or later, and i’m betting 20 years max. But for Japan? Their whole outlook changes, their whole perspective on life, shattered and reformed.]Report
I dunno, I don’t see Germany going the way it went without Hitler. A war over her final borders? Sure, but the sweeping ambition? The insane invasion of Russia? The industrial genocide of the Jews? I don’t see that coming from someone else.Report
With anyone else, Russia would have been easier. dont’ fight two wars, and go slowly.Report
Precisely, thus: Mule.Report
Say what you will about Hitler, at least he killed Hitler.
Though he also killed Hitler’s killer, so maybe that’s a wash.Report
Mules are not mules because of their failures, they’re mules because of their successes. Elsewise call Harding a mule.Report
Constantine?Report
I keep gravitating to Constantine as well, but my history isn’t nearly as strong as it should be.Report
Christianity had become pretty popular by his day; I would say that legitmization of that religion was going to happen and probably even the Christianizing of an emperor. What was not inevitable was the imposition of Christianity on everyone, and for that we go to Diocletian, not Constantine. Constantine didn’t need to inject himself so deeply in theological matters, either; he just needed the support of enough of the right bishops to get the Christians in line and keep the Mithraists in the legions at bay and the pagans back in Rome on their heels.
Constantine might be a candidate also for moving the capital to Byzantium, another individualistic and conscious decision. Granted that the majority of wealth, power, and military need was in that part of the world rather than Italy at that point regardless of who was Emperor, so it seems a logical enough decision in retrospect. At minimum, though, Constantine gets leadership credit for seeing it and realizing that things had to change if they were going to improve. And the precise site of the new capital was brilliantly chosen. Better that it be done Constantine’s way than that some Asia Minor-based general lead a revolution and take things over at swordpoint.Report
Charlemagne, then?Report
Interesting trivia about Charlemange: he was illiterate. As much proof as you’ll ever need that “illiterate” is not the same thing as “dumb.” The man didn’t need to read or write, he had people for that sort of thing.Report
He was illiterate because that was almost universal when he was born, but he was far from ignorant. He learned to speak some Latin and Greek, and worked hard at reading and writing, though he never mastered them. Famously, he chose counselors and advisers who were educated men. And he founded many schools to create more of them. Charlemagne is a big part of the transition from the Dark Ages to the Middle Ages, the start of the long, slow climb back up to Roman levels of education and prosperity.Report
I don’t know that Jesus had half of the gifts that Paul did.
Mohammed, as has been pointed out, changed everything.Report
I don’t think their particular gifts matter much at all. What matters is that they push events in a different direction than socio-political momentum should lead. That’s why religious figures are easy enough to put on – the idiosyncrasies of whatever they espouse matter a lot. Meanwhile the conquerors are largely those that correctly ride the political and economic waves to victory where it’s easy to ask if any competent person in that same time and place would have/could fought and won more or less the same wars.Report
How about Lenin? Revolution in Russia was probably inevitable without him. But that the revolution be won by the Bolsheviks was not — nor was the top-down recrafting of Russian society that came in its wake.
How about Lincoln? It was far from inevitable that the Union be maintained, if you ask me. Yes, the North had sufficient power that we can safely surmise its inevitable victory, but we cannot safely surmise that without Lincoln’s tremendous effort of political will, pro-peace factions would not have won in 1862 or 1864 and reached a treaty with the CSA to end the bloodshed even at the expense of letting the South go its own way.Report
I like the examples, but Stalin I think is more important than Lenin both in the near term trajectory of the Revolution and the long term trajectory of (greater) Russia.
I agree that Washington and Lincoln are the two indispensable men in American history, things looks a lot different (for the worse) without them.Report
Without Lenin, Stalin would not have been possible.Report
And without Czar Nicky Deuce, Lenin would not have been possible.Report
You’re missing Franquelin, without whose wise guidance the illtempered French King fails to create an alliance.Report
and then the south would have been pulled back piecemeal. no, Lincoln did many things,b ut save the Union was NOT one of them.
Lincoln gave us Jim Crow and the Southern Strategy — and possibly, just possibly, the loss of the American Empire.Report
It is far more likely for more spin-offs from the union (e.g. Northern New England, the Pac Norwest), then for the South to be brought back into the fold piecemeal.Report
Cite yer damn sources. I’ve got a fine friend who ran the numbers, and can point to the Southern army starving while the food rotted in warehouses.
We all know that the South wasn’t unified, that they were a buncha squabbling nobility. Hell, if the South Carolinans hadn’t been so crazy as to start the trouble, there WOULDN’T have been trouble. Because most people didn’t want it, at least not then.
Maryland gets in some trouble, but Virginia doesn’t have the money or will to defend it. Absorbed (probably a wrong example, more likely to be someplace else).
Nobody else wanted to leave, not truly, and particularly not with the south gone.Report
There were New England secession movements once the Jeffersonians took over – Thomas Pickering led one. There were similar regional antgonisms between North and South (with the West serving as the tiebreaker) in the run up to the War of 1812.
and can point to the Southern army starving while the food rotted in warehouses.
all this points to is the likelyhood of the South losing. The hypothetical is for the South to win, which takes a lot of counterfactuals.Report
… yeah, the hypothetical for the South to win involves Meade leading a different populace (one that would have stood for a defensive war).
The New England secessionists weren’t serious, they were merely throwing weight around… Big cheese don’t actually secede, as everyone gives them their way rather than seeing them secede.
False equivalence.Report
… Different hypothetical: the North does not fight, and allows the south to reasonably peaceably secede. Much more likely.Report
Hell, if the South Carolinans hadn’t been so crazy as to start the trouble, there WOULDN’T have been trouble. Because most people didn’t want it, at least not then.
Are you sure about that – that there was a determinate event that caused a tipping point such that if that event didn’t occur then there would have been no war? I’m curious, because it seems to me that the causes of the civil war overdetermined it’s happening. Recall the rhetoric around the Missouri COmpromise and the Kansas-Nebraska Act. Southerners were correct (I think!) to view the natural progression of events as being opposed to the preservation of slavery as an institution. They rightly viewed Lincoln’s victory in 1860 as the beginning of an inexorable slide towards that institutions dissolution.
Recall also the South, because of its marriage to slavery and agrarianism, was increasingly the economic loser relative to the North. I can’t remember the number off hand, but the North was experiencing substantial economic gains during the 1800s while the South was more or less languishing (at least, on a relative measure).
They fought to preserve a dying institution. And if they succeeded in seceding, they’re culture wouldn’t have been able to sustain itself in any event. Or, well, they could have, I suppose.Report
That was a political push. If Israel invades Iran, and forces america, who doesn’t want to invade iran, to come in because of treaties and alliances — it’s the same deal.
The South Carolinans were hotheads, and a good part of the South weren’t so hot on seceeding.
They took a brief opportunity (before opposition was organized) and ran with it.
I’m relatively less certain that the opposition would have prevailed.
Many things look inevitable that really weren’t. Reagan could have blown us up five ways to sunday. We could be under martial law right now (Thanks Bush!). Kennedy might not have been assassinated.Report
1) We were not on the verge of martial law under Bush. Bush did some very questionable things, but that wasn’t ever in the cards.
2) Kennedy would have dug in just as deep in Vietnam as Johnson did. He didn’t have any good answers either. (Come to think of it, neither did Nixon or Goldwater.)
3) Reagan was not going to blow us up, or more precisely, get us blowed up. The rules of proxy engagement were well-understood and so was MAD. The Soviets had nothing up their sleeves and half their ICBM silos were filled with water.
4) It wasn’t just South Carolina that wanted to secede, thought self-determination about slavery was worth fighting for, and found Lincoln’s election intolerable. They just did it first.
5) Israel isn’t really all that keen about war with Iran, either. It’s not like they want to blow up an Iranian nuke — they need to be convinced that they don’t have to. Still much hope that they can, either because a) Iran doesn’t get a nuke in the first place, or b) it becomes evident that the nuke is intended for the first city within Iran that declares against the mullahs, not at the midpoint between Tel Aviv and Jerusalem.Report
1) Your sources are what, exactly? If plastic (credit cards) stop working, how exactly do you figure out who deserves to get fed and who doesn’t? Remember manhattan has about one day’s food on it. JIT means taht most places don’t have much more than that. I’ve got a source that shows one of the big banks printing out signs in case of bank run. And it’s not like I’m being alarmist here — I can point you to plenty of shmart guys who were planning for worst case.
2) Wasn’t talking about vietnam. mentioned kennedy’s assassination, which doesn’t have much to do with vietnam (bears more resemblance to McKinley’s assassination, for that matter).
3) Heads I win, tails we all die is NOT a fun game to be playing. (see first point).
4) yeah, I’m not trying to say there weren’t people other places who thought the same way. Just that there was a considerable amount of people (even higher ups) who thought it was a plumb stupid idea — and if you put it to a vote, I don’t think they’d have won.
5)hypothetical example. Israel wants to tear bibi apart right now — I’m pretty sure he’s toast when obama gets reelected. Bibi is not my friend.Report
4) yeah, I’m not trying to say there weren’t people other places who thought the same way. Just that there was a considerable amount of people (even higher ups) who thought it was a plumb stupid idea — and if you put it to a vote, I don’t think they’d have won.
Well, they did vote, didn’t they? They voted to secede. I think you’re overvaluing the actions of the one state here, and not considering the larger context. It seems to me that even a rudimentary understanding of the 1850s is enough to show that either secession or secession-then-war was inevitable. I just don’t see a plausible counterfactual scenario in which one of those two outcomes isn’t more-or-less logically entailed by the context.Report
I’ll echo Blaise elsewhere on points 1 and 3. I’m missing your steps B through Y on food logistics leading to Bush-era martial law that was never declared or an accusation of brinksmanship in the 1980’s that for the life of me I can’t recall living through.Report
Stillwater,
I think cooler heads would have prevailed. Not that something wouldn’t have gone down, perhaps, but the South chose a pretty poor time to do it.
Burt,
my apologies. it would appear that I have mislead you unintentionally. did not mean to conflate and then causate all of that together into one spaghetti mess.
Maybe I’ll get into brinksmanship some other time.Report
“Lincoln gave us Jim Crow…”
Kim – you’ve got to explain that one. If any President was repsonsible for Jim Crow it was Hayes, but more accurately it was the Democrats that forced the removal of federal troops in return for his electoral votes.Report
Lincoln and Sherman went soft on the South. They could have completely obliterated them, shamed them to the point where what had come before was embarrassing — and potentially illegal (see: Germany).
It’s a rare place in history where the losing side still rallies the flag around their “states rights” going on 200 years later.
The people whose daddies and granddaddies died in the Sino-Japanese war have quite forgotten it.
Even the scotch irish aren’t so stubborn that they can’t see when to quit. If it’s ground into their faces enough, at any rate.
Lincoln could have crushed the south — good and hard. He might have been able to build it back up again (and if not him, one of the reformers at the turn of the century could have done it).Report
Kim,
I would disagree. If Lincoln had been harder on them, resentment would have built as the South needed someone to blame for their woes. I’m stealing the concept from Harry Turtledove here, but look at Germany post-WWII. They were treated terribly at Versailles and Hitler turned that into the Holocaust.
Jim Crow would have been open slaughter if the South had been coming out of 20 years of harsh oppression when the federal troops left. Instead it was bad, but not genocide. That is, IMO, the best we could have hoped for given the cultural baggage the South had to work through.Report
Versailles and Germany was another instance of too soft. Germany didn’t even have a foreign soldier in it by the end of the war.
How in HELL was that “treated terribly”??
With a stronger effort to crush the south, the south doesn’t get the troops off it’s neck until they’re less unruly, and more indebted to the North.Report
Kim,
Check your facts on occupation:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Occupation_of_the_Rhineland
Also, for the general crappiness of the treaty here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles#Content
Assigning responsibility for the entire war, reparations, etc. There’s a reason why Hitler used the same railroad car to accept surrenders during WWII. Germany was still pissed about WWI. A harsh Reconstruction would have been similar (and, again, is the basis for an entire Turtledove series).Report
*nods* okay. you win. thanks for the check.
Still not seeing anything near salted ground.
My friend who did the research would simply say
Turtledove is wrong. But I doubt he’s had time to
write a book about it…(try looking up the discussions around the civil war anniversary, might find some interesting reading…)Report
Lincoln gave us Jim Crow and the Southern Strategy — and possibly, just possibly, the loss of the American Empire.
This is so wrong, and so embarrassing, and so disgraceful that just I’d give up on writing if I were you.
Lincoln gave us the Freedmen’s Bureau and Reconstruction, which — in just a few short years after his death — would also gave us the first black representative, the first black senator, and the first black governor. Under Reconstruction, which was Lincoln’s project and done essentially by his design, blacks all across the South were brought into the American political process.
It was the disputed election of 1876 that caused the Republicans to give up on Reconstruction, which in turn allowed Jim Crow to take hold. Prior to that, they fought it with great determination and much success.
As to the “Southern Strategy,” that would be Nixon and Goldwater.
And as to the loss of American empire, we didn’t have one in Lincoln’s day. It wouldn’t be until after the American Civil War that we acquired significant extraterritorial possessions. (Unless you count Alaska, which Lincoln acquired rather than losing.)
Good lord that’s a lot of bullshit, even by your standards.Report
I didn’t say he meant to.
I’d guess it takes a certain mindset to be able to find the turning points in history.
I outlined one, and I consider it to be fairly significant, if not precisely worldshattering.
Mike disagrees with my point, in substance.
You look at a counterintuitive point, and rather than asking, “how could this possibly be right?” instead advise the other person to stop talking.
It rankles so because I see much of myself reflected in you. Unlike Blaise, I do not have the perspective of long years and hard-earned wisdom, to allow me to pronounce from lofty heights.Report
No, I’m just looking at someone who is so fast and loose with her facts that she doesn’t know when she’s stopped relying on them entirely.
One might (just barely) blame Lincoln for fatally poisoning Reconstruction from the getgo. It’s a hypothesis I’ve heard before, even if it is rather rich to blame him for something that happened 12 years after his death, and to deny in the process 12 years of very meaningful civil rights progress. (Which, I’d add, is just what the southern nationalists would like you to do!)
Anyway. That’s just barely within the realm of plausibility. But to blame Lincoln for losing an empire we didn’t have yet is loony. And to blame him for the Southern Strategy — which happened roughly 100 years after his death — is to verge out of history, out of speculative fiction, and straight into word salad.Report
In this thread we talked about the Yongle Emperor, did we not? His turning away from the world is something that had extraordinary ramifications, and for many years.
I can make a decent argument that the Meiji Restoration led to the Japanese embassy serving corn-on-the-cob. (and I doubt Nob would have any problem with it).
It’s not terribly unusual for big events to have consequences.
There’s money still around from that time, paying for Lee’s legacy and Longstreet’s disrepute. Given that, is it really such a stretch to say that Lincoln could have ended the whole “worship the Old South” by being a bit harsher to the South?
Life is an endless stream of choices, some are large, some are small. I do not blame Lincoln, so much as see his choices there as looming large.Report
Wrong, wrong, wrong.
The United States did not begin to acquire an empire until after (or at best, during) Lincoln’s administration. There was no “turning away” from the world, ever, after that. Alaska. Hawaii. The Philippines. Cuba. The whole history of the second half of the nineteenth century for the United States was one of assembling an empire.
The U.S. Civil War debt was substantially retired by the 1890s. The Confederate debt was repudiated in the postwar amendments.
I’ve already said it’s reasonable to second-guess Lincoln’s choices, in some places. But to deny that there was some immediate civil rights progress is dishonest, and to blame Lincoln for the “Southern Strategy” is just goofy. Might as well blame him for the sinking of the Titanic. At least it’s closer in time.Report
Now it seems as if you are deliberately misreading me (that’s probably my mistake! I’m far too often unclear).
His meant the Yongle Emperor, not Lincoln.
I was not speaking of public funds.
I did not deny that there was immediate civil rights progress.
If you’ll reread, you might understand me writing in a rather melancholy humor.Report
You said “Lincoln gave us Jim Crow and the Southern Strategy — and possibly, just possibly, the loss of the American Empire.”
No mention of the Yongle Emperor in that quote. And so on and so forth. Not difficult for anyone to figure out what’s going on here.
I’m done with you. It’s not my misreading. It’s your making up facts. I’ve refuted all of them. As if it were either my responsibility to do so, or somehow otherwise worth my time. (Hey, it’s a slow day today…)Report
Lincoln visited Richmond on the 4th of April, 1865 after it had fallen to the Federals. On April 9, Lincoln was asked how the Union Army should treat the conquered South. Lincoln replied “If I were you, I would let them up easy.”
Lincoln’s Second Inaugural “with malice toward none..”
We don’t know how Reconstruction might have gone had Lincoln lived. We do know it was horribly managed. An entire economic system based on slavery had crashed into the brick wall of history. Even if everything had gone as well as could be managed, it would have been a wrench. But to attribute the Southern Strategy to Lincoln is a howler.Report
Pick a point and defend it, Blaise.
All right to say you don’t like mine.
Just step up to the line and shoot.
What caused the Southern Strategy, then?
Pointing to an ultimate cause?
{or not, you might make the case that it’s just racism and that racism is inherent in the human condition. I’ve got precious little to defend against that.}Report
Kim, I find facts don’t take sides. Lincoln didn’t give us Jim Crow. Jim Crow doesn’t appear until the 1890s.Report
Blaise,
Ahh! I see the problem. I say that Lincoln’s decisions led to the formation of Jim Crow, in that he was way too soft on the South. I’m not so ignorant of history as to say that he engineered something forty years after his death!!
“Abraham lincoln may walk at midnight” but that’s a bit much for a ghost!Report
Keep on digging, Kim. The Civil War wasn’t even over when Lincoln was assassinated on April 14, 1865. The last battle of the Civil War was fought on May 12, 1865.
So how did Lincoln go easy on the South? He hadn’t gone easy on New Orleans, which the Union had occupied under Butler since April of 1862, a occupation so tactless and ferocious he looted even the silverware from the kitchens, leading to his nickname of “Spoons” Butler. The very goddamn idea that the Union had treated the occupied with any sort of Softness is just nonsense.Report
I cited Sherman upthread, Blaise. I know very little about the occupation of new orleans, I’m afraid.Report
Your problem, Kim, and I mean this as kindly as I can possibly phrase it, is this: when you make a claim of this sort, you might want to go from A to Z via B and C and the rest of that sequence.
That’s always more interesting, anyway.Report
Alexander the Great.
His conquest of the Persian Empire and the eastward expansion of Hellenic culture had enormous implications for European and Central Asian culture. Zoroastrianism and Roman Pantheonism would have been substantially different basises for civilizations if the Greeks hadn’t expanded from Iberia to Bactria.Report
I dunno, if Alexander is never born, does someone else pick up where Philip left off and more or less conquer the same area? I’ve never studied that late a period in Greek history so I honestly don’t know, but that’s kinda what I keep thinking about with the discussion of Mules.Report
Alexander’s vision and grandeur were quite unique. It was Aristotle serving as his tutor and his own sense of fusing Hellenic culture with Persian Imperial rule that was so extraordinary. Given the fact that the Diadochi weren’t able to actively maintain the conquests, and worse, eventually succumbed to the Latins, I think it’s pretty hard to argue there was anyone capable of replicating Alexander’s exploits was actually in the wings.Report
I agree with this. Alexander brought a unique suite of talents to the table and it was far from inevitable that the Macedonians would do more than dominate Achaea, much less conquer everything from Siwa to Sagala.Report
Substantive contact between the Americas and Europe was a big deal (although I’m quite interested in the theory that the Chinese actually got to the Americas first).
Columbus himself wasn’t. If it wasn’t him, it would have been someone else within a similar time frame. Contact occurring a few decades later wouldn’t have had a major impact on history. So, Columbus himself: not important.Report
I would nominate the following as “the biggest and most important things that have ever happened in recorded human history:
Writing itself
Printing
The evolved institution of free markets
The scientific method, and
The discovery of three plus continents for western colonization
Note that four of these flourished in a very specific era in Western History which coincided with the advent of modernity.
We have ten thousand years and ten thousand societies all leading to exactly the same result. The median person lived thirty or forty years of illiteracy making an average of $2 or $3 per day. In other words we always and everywhere lived on the edge of subsistence. Then we started decentralized printing, discovered the Americas, and perfected the scientific method and the institutions of free enterprise. Now we can sustain 10 times as many people at living standards ten or twenty times as high. We got the breakthrough to the modern world.Report
This presumes that the Enlightenment (i.e. ‘the scientific method’) is a necessary condition to gain the ability to harness steam power for useful work. That’s how it happened,( and I’ve seen a lot of related stuff lately that makes the Industrial Revolution a uniquely British enterprise), but I’m not entirely convinced this is the case.
We completely stumbled into free markets, and only recently – very recently – have realized anything close to their ideal. (or rather, even thought about moving things toward that ideal). Most of the history of Industrial revolution (and American history) would not be at all what we today would consider ‘free markets’
(tldr: I’m a big fan of both, but we can do without free markets, we can’t do without steam)Report
Without the scientific method we don’t get synthetic urea, which means we don’t get nitrate fertiliser. Without that the world’s population would be a fraction of what it is today.
Steam got us some of the way to modernity, but the Enlightenment was necessary for modernity.Report
Yeah, without free enterprise and science we have about four billion less humans including none of us, most likely. These built up fom the printing press and due to the potential for new startup colonies and the freedom to move west for 500 years.Report
But as said elsewhere in the thread, the Chinese had the same stuff in 1500. There’s a lot of space and potential detours between the printing press, the Enlightenment, and McDonald’s. I just think we’re being a tad too Whiggish here (a tendency I fall into myself, truth be told)Report
There was no inevitable historic tendency toward liberalism or progress. Just the possibility. That said, the modern breakthrough from the way all prior societies were to the way they are now, led through a particular place and era. That was Western Europe.
The roots of science and free markets go back into pre history. The technology of printing came out of China. And the Americas and Australia were just sitting there waiting to be discovered by anyone in Eurasia.
However, the Chinese gave up exploration just as the Europeans dove in. They were able to give it up in total because they were a centralized empire where top down decisions applied to all. Some states in Europe sought to explore and some didn’t. They were decentralized and states both competed and cooperated with each other. This ended up driving an arms race of discovery.
The Chinese invented printing. What they did not have is hundreds of independent states and cities where people were free to escape the inevitable tendency to control the process. In Europe, printing became a decentralized process innately woven into markets that improved the flow, efficiency and the preservation of knowledge. Printing in Europe became a totally different beat than printing in the centralized empires of the East.
The Chinese had limited degrees of free trade, as did most states since the advent of history, including socialist states. What they did not have is hundreds of states competing and cooperating with each other thus leading to institutions of private property, rule of law, and the cultural concept written in 1776 about how division of labor and exchange can lead to prosperity when allowed to.
The Chinese attempted to explain natural phenomena just as our ancestors did back in the Paleolithic. What they were missing was a system which rewarded the publishing of natural knowledge via a system of reputation. Where scientists competed and cooperated in a constructive way to be the first to transmit knowledge to others rather than horde it for personal gain. This creates a system or algorithm to gain reputation by gathering data, explaining phenomena, finding holes in explanations and so forth. Before the Academie Royale and the Royal Society of the 17th century, nobody really had the full algorithm for the scientific method.Report
This is one of those points that I feel cannot be made enough.
Our great-grand-children will see us as backwards as we see our great-grand-parents. If we are lucky, we will have whatever they will see as morally abhorrent as something to blame on the Conservatives rather than on enlightened people like us but they’ll ask questions like “how could they not have known that eating animals is wrong?” or “did they really think it was a good idea to throw people in jail for years at a time for smoking a plant that provided a mild euphoria? Did they learn nothing from alcohol prohibition?”
There is some comfort provided by the fact that their great-grand-children will look at them the exact same way and ask questions about their backwards ancestors that I don’t have the context to wrap my head around.Report
In general people are also getting smarter. There was an article recently in the WSJ about the subject.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390444032404578006612858486012.htmlReport
Counters:
1) the rise of autism
2) IQ is largely predictable by long-term social class (this is why certain ethnicities have predictably different IQs from “normal”)
3) Lower class people are having more babies.
Cross-Counters:
Alpha males are in general having fewer children.Report
(1) Autism =!=lower intelligence
Quite a number of people with Aspergers syndrome are very intelligent, often well above average intelligence.
(2/3) IQ is a poor test of intelligence in that so many of the questions are heavily biased by cultural/social conditioning. Children rescued from the Holocaust were thought to be mentally deficient due to starvation because their IQ scores were so low – until a psychologist realized that their experience meant that they simply had no context for answering many of the questions. A more tailored approach showed many of those children to be exceptionally bright, and indeed, a number of them went on to be doctors, scientists, etc.Report
book,
Autism as opposed to “The asparagus disease” is perhaps potentially brought on by modernity. At least that’s why we diagnose it as an illness. Darl didn’t get diagnosed with Autism, after all. Nor would an especially quiet, systematic farmer in general.
Yeah, I decided not to go there, but you’re absolutely right. I know someone who got less than 25 on an IQ test. He’s the brightest man I know.Report
“perfected the scientific method and the institutions of free enterprise. ”
I’m not about either one of those. The first thrives by not being perfectable, and the second has no example, living or dead.Report
No perfect circles either. Perhaps there is no such thing as a circle either.
The reason free enterprise and science are so important — as ideals– is that they are constantly striving to solve problems in their domains. In science there is a constructive, competitive cooperative arms race to explain natural phenomenon. Free enterprise is a constructive, competitive cooperative system than solves consumer problems. They are meta solutions that evolved culturally and which once making their appearance lead to infinite strings of problem solving.Report
“Pi is a lie.”Report
Tau is the new Pi.Report
The Cake is a lie.Report
“[Free enterprise] has no example, living or dead.”
If you would require a perfect, peaceful anarchy to call something free, then yes. But that’s a level of purism that even most libertarians don’t embrace. I wonder, and have never been able to understand, why you find that point so telling that you feel you must repeat it over and over.Report
I was actually referring to the idea of a “perfected free enterprise” which I think could not exist, even in theory.
But don’t I keep hearing variations of this argument, right here in this blog?
“If we only had a Free Market, shorn of all these bastardizing distortions in [health care/schools/energy/barbering/taxis] then things would be ever so much better.”
If you want to define Free Enterprise as what we have now, fine. Then Free Enterprise can coexist with subsidies, tariffs, taxes, regulation, interventions, the individual mandate and all the rest.
If you want Free Enterprise to mean something else, define it. Then either show us where it exists, or lets all agree it doesn’t.Report
Liberty,
An economy is not a single thing, it is made up of billions of decentralized interactions — of individual acts of buying and selling, employment and investment. I think you would be the first person to argue that there are shades of grey in how free each of these interactions are. Some are pretty much overwhelmingly free, and some are extremely coercive or limited, and some are in between.
By free enterprise, we are not suggesting every one of those billions of daily interactions was 100% free and unconstrained. Free markets are an ideal, with similar shades of grey. No market is totally free, but it is possible to compare markets based upon their variances to the ideal.
And yes, economics implies that the more variance from the ideal, the more human prosperity is damaged or suppressed.Report
So, I guess now we ought to talk about economies of scale, and where we strike the balance between “monopolies” and free markets.
After all, there are five companies that make capacitors that are in common use. Five. And there are TONS of different uses for ’em, enough that each company can have its own niche…Report
Overall, my list of ‘mules’ is necessarily overwhelmed by ‘conquerors’ – Muhammad, Alexander, Charlemagne, etc Particularly with the first two, redrawing the cultural-linguistic map single-handedly in way that would last for centuries.
I just think all discoveries and inventions are inevitable – is that wrong? *When* they happened is indeed important to the story, but it’s hard to imagine just about any of them happening at vastly different point in time (“shoulders of giants”, and all that)Report
I disagree. Inventions, like everything else that has actually happened, only seem inevitable with hindsight.
History is messy and contingent. The problem is that we can go back and say, yes, these conditions were necessary for such and such development, but it gets confusing when you try to say it happened now, and not earlier.
It is like explaining why the Enlightenment began in Europe. Any list of causes is usually a list of symptoms.Report
George Washington. No George, no USA. No USA, the Americas are at best boring like Canada and Costa Rica or irrelevant banana republics like Hugoland where constitutions are as toilet paper.
I’ll also go with MikeS’ nomination of Paul of Tarsus if I’m wearing my historian’s hat. Mohammad too, although his progeny were and are pretty irrelevant after the Golden Age ended in the early Second Millennium CE.
As for Constantine, Christianity’s victory was a parade he stood in front of—his nephew Emperor Julian the Apostate [361-363] tried and failed to restore the pagan ways, and that was the last gasp for that.
“These impious Galileans not only feed their own, but ours also; welcoming them with their agape, they attract them, as children are attracted with cakes… Whilst the pagan priests neglect the poor, the hated Galileans devote themselves to works of charity, and by a display of false compassion have established and given effect to their pernicious errors. Such practice is common among them, and causes contempt for our gods…”
‘Twas not Christian politics but Christian charity what changed the world. For that you have to credit that Jesus fellow.Report
It wasn’t just Christian charity. It was also Christian brutality, Christian ruthlessness, the Christian sense of entitlement and superiority, and the Christian ability to concentrate power in a way that, for a very long time, mirrored the King/Emperor worship of ancient Egypt or Rome. Christianity dominated Europe and the Americas through just about everything but charity. It may be that, later, charity played a role in the formation of Enlightenment ideals, but for most of its history, Christianity got where it got by force, political, military, and economic.Report
Those first hundred or so years, however, were the boy that became the man, if you will.Report
Yeah, I find the early years of Christianity fascinating, and I wish I knew more about it. Do you (or anyone here) know of a good book on historical research on Paul specifically?Report
A good book… Jeez. Most of the stuff we used were the letters of the early martyrs and other church fathers.
I’ll see what I can dig up.Report
Hendriksen and Kistemaker’s commentaries on the New Testament aka Baker’s New Testament. The ne plus ultra of New Testament scholarship.Report
Christianity spent its first century and a half being persecuted and the next millenium and a half being the persecutors, and thinks it still has moral capital left over from the former.Report
Sadly, Rome conquered the church more than the other way around.Report
Without presuming to say you’re wrong, the story’s a little more complex than Rome conquering the church. In many ways, Constantine created the church. When he first encountered Christianity, it was by no means a single thing. There were all sorts of internecine squabbles going on at the time and Constantine was constantly having to deal with their bickering, especially over the Arian Heresy.
To make matters even more complicated, it seems clear enough Constantine wasn’t exclusively Christian. He was also fairly antisemitic and set in motion much that would follow along those lines.Report
The advent of the printing press. For the first time, mass media was possible, with everything that implies about the distribution of ideas to a continental and beyond audience.Report
True, without the printing press you probably don’t get Protestantism and with out the Wars of Religion, Europe would be unrecognisable.Report
Everyone has suggested some good alternatives but I am going to agree with Burt. Of course, Columbus represents something much larger i.e. European conquest of the Americas but he is important as the one that began the process. We saw conquest before and after on various scales and in various geographic locales. All were important in their own right. The conquest of the Americas was different in several ways:
1) It was sustained. Roughly 400 years of forward movement with only very brief periods of inactivity.
2) It was complete. There isn’t a single corner of North America that escaped conquest and there are only a few pockets of South America that did.
3) It was a grass roots movement. While various governments (first European and later European American) did support European conquest, in almost every case the civillians went first. They were the tip of the spear. That is much different than other conquests.
These things all make this much different than what happened with the Romans or any other empire. Keep in mind this is also the conquest of two continents. That dwarfs anything Alexander or anyone else accomplished.Report
I’d be curious to hear what Murali or Nob, folks from the other side of the globe, think. And my apologies in advance if they’ve weighed in and I missed them.Report
I’m not a fan of Columbus, and think the myth making involved is all a bunch of bullshit…
..that said, the European contact with the Americas was a vital development in the world and helped shift the balance of power decisively from Asia (including Central Asia/Anatolia) to Europe by giving resources and some important crops (such as maize and potatoes) to the European powers.Report
All well and good, but if Eckels hadn’t stepped off the levitating path and crushed that butterfly, none of this would matter.Report
You kid, but I honestly believe that if we knew what event has shaped the world the most, it would probably seem wholly mundane up close. For want of a nail, and all that. History is opaque to our puny human minds.
Chaos theory for life.Report
I agree, strongly.Report
The biggest game-changer in history: the Canada’s Anti-Combines Law of 1889. It made possible half of my (alas, still in progress) dissertation, which itself is the greatest cure for insomnia the western world has ever seen.Report
Is this why the CFL is a second rate league?Report
Dude, there’s so many reasons.Report