Oba said:
Well, about the tropics: Civilization arose in the Mesoamerican tropics and probably in the Amazonian tropics. The Africans had strategies for dealing with tropical diseases, such as living on high ground. Even when there was no high ground, civilizations arose even in the Congo basin, such as the Luba, Lunda and Kongo Empires, not to mention the West African Empires of Benin and Oyo. The Ejagham even
invented writing.
That was the reason I put the term
large scale in there. I'm well aware that civilisations have arisen in tropical areas (and some pretty damned impressive ones, too), but I don't think we could really consider any of them
empires in the sense that the OP is looking for. Civilisation is one thing: an Africa-wide, continent-spanning polity is something else again, particularly for the people in the tropical zone who are hemmed in on all sides by stifling, inhospitable rainforest.
Oba said:
IMHO, I frankly think Jared Diamond is a pretty bad anthropologist, historian or other social scientist. That whole "East-West Axis vs. North-South Axis" seems to be pretty much meaningless. He also barely talks about any other Eurasian civilization in great depth other than the occident; China has a short chapter in Guns, Germs and Steel and India is has less than a paragraph. BTW, I have read Guns, Germs and Steel, The Third Chimpanzee and Collapse and have seen the PBS series on GG&S. He was trained as an ornithologist, not as a social scientist, and his works seem, IMHO, a moderately well veiled cover for his own Eurocentricism.
Well, whatever your opinions on Mr Diamond, it certainly makes sense that a pre-modern civilisation with a particular skill/crop set is going to find it difficult to adapt to a radically different climate, with a whole new set of diseases, foods and agricultural conditions to get used to.
Indeed, I don't think it's fair to accuse him of Eurocentrism: he goes out of his way to provide reasonings as to why other peoples didn't have answers to European development. I'm hard pressed to find any veil of European triumphalism in Guns, Germs and Steel.
That aside, even a stopped clock is right twice a day: the 'axis hypothesis' basically makes sense when you consider the advancement of continent-wide civilisations.
Rasul_Appollo said:
I'm not sure why this is a point: the United States has all of these, plus tundra. Geography is not a reason for disunification.
The United States was settled by people with industrial age technology at their disposal, a burgeoning population base the like of which the world had never seen before, and an ideology which promoted expansion.
None of these things (save the last, conceivably) could convincingly be applied to a pre-modern African polity.