Glormph sanctions Colombia. Here's why this is the end of US global hegemony and we are in the endtimes.

Replying here because the two of you are all over the thread

I've seen leftoid try to argue that Diamond is a mega racist but if you read even the prologue of his book it's evident that the man is not that at all.

GGS's main problem is that it's written by an anthropologist trying to do history, linguistics and economics. The way he describes how "the west won" is not quite right. The spaniards didn't single-handedly destroy almighty native empires like the aztecs and incas through "gun, germs and steel". Both aztecs and incas were empire with rivals and internal dissent. Both nations were certainly weakened by "gun, germs and steel" but this wasn't the whole story.

Likewise with China; China has had whole stretches of history where it was separated into multiple competing nations. It so happened that the 19th century Qing dynasty held the entire region and its armies were weakened by the peace dividend, but it wasn't inevitable that the yuros would find the middle kingdom unified and static.

This is the danger of trying to make a grand unified theory of world history; you can get details wrong. Diamond is like Marx in that I think both have some really interesting ideas mixed in with nonsense, mistakes and oversimplifications

It must suck because midwit millenials on Reddit say so? Whatever bro. If that's the way you want to live your life.

BIPOC that book has been shit on in history fields way before reddit smoothbrains got ahold of it.

It's never been considered worth reading and it's never been anything but bad pop history

Well, you could argue that climate was the determining point for the Spanish, the French and Portuguese to settle their sugar cane plantations which evolved into slave economies, but by the 19th century slavery was also widespread in the South.

São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro became top producers of coffee, a commodity which desplaced sugar cane as Brazil's most valuable export in the mid 19th century, slaves worked in the fields to produce it hence why the coffee barons supported importing Italians and later on japs to replace their BIPOCs once it became clear abolition was coming soon (or after the abolition in the case of the nips).

Immigrants didn't have a say of where they would be settled, the Brazilian government determined where the colonies would be and decided for São Paulo and the Brazilian South as they were scarcely populated (the Portuguese were this big exception with them roaming free and migrating massively to the city of Rio de Janeiro). Immigrants tend to be entrepreneurial unlike the old aristocracy, which meant the first industries began to pop in SP in the late 19th century and early 20th century, many of them owned by second Gen Italian Brazilians.

Then you have immigrant groups like the Germans which were specifically selected to develop agriculture, this combined to eugenicists soying for "nordics" meant they got free land from the government as to become small farmers.

!historychads

But why were people immigrating to Argentina? Wasn't it because there was lots of land with a temperate climate and they wanted to make money off it directly or indirectly?

In part yes, but Argentina also had other institutional conditions. The migration wave began in the 1860s, soon after the countries unification. The political system was stable for the next decades while countries like Mexico were suffering from civil wars and dictatorships. The government itself encouraged immigration as a means to increase population.

Chile was not poor let alone very poor.

1970s Chile was nothing like Argentina, it wasn't poor like Bolivia but it had some gnarly conditions back in the day, slums around Santiago were common, peasants didn't have shoes to wear and malnutrition was common, by the mid 1970s over 50% of Chileans were living below the poverty line. Argentina had a large middle class, Chile didn't. Just to give you some anecdotes from 1950s LATAM, while not in Chile here's my take of 2 grandmothers.

My maternal grandmother grew up in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul, which has always been a prosperous Brazilian state, yet during her childhood she didn't have electricity on her house, nor running water and not even shoes to wear. She mentioned she almost got frozebite on her feet walking miles on the snow to get to school (yes, it occasionally snows in some parts of RS). In contrast my paternal grandma grew up on a city, she belonged to a blue collar family with her father being a factory worker, but their lifestyle was similar to the European working class of the day. They lived on a small place but it had electricity and running water, they couldn't afford a car but she and her sisters took the trolley to go to school.

My father grew up "middle class" in the 70s, my grandparents owned a small store, they had a pretty single story house and owned a pickup truck, they had a tv set. Yet their lifestyle was much more frugal from the modern middle class, they couldn't afford vacations (the only time my paternal grandmother went to the beach was a trip to Mar del Plata, first she went to Buenos Aires by bus after the news of her mother dying and her relatives took her for a road trip). Simple stuff like eating out of home and drinking a bottle of Coca Cola was an occasional thing like once a month at most, my dad had like 2 pairs of shoes growing up, one for school/church, the other was a tennis shoes from some second rated brand. Actual poor people back in those days barely had food to eat and suffered from nutritional deficiencies.

I know people still make fun of LATAM but there were indeed some gigantic leaps in the past decades in all of the countries.

No. You're r*ped