Collapsable History

'Collapse': How the World Ends

There's something about combining biological determinism and history that bothers me. This cat, Jared Diamond, claims that enviromental factors can explain the whys and hows of world history. The historians of the Annales school went down this route in the 1960s and even then geographic and enviromental effects were only included as another element in historical interpretation. To reduce the history of humanity to one cause ignores both humanity and history. Diamond's argument strikes me as a touch too teleological. It's one thing to claim that certain environmental conditions allowed for humans to exist and florish. It's quite another to claim that those conditions entirely determined how humanity would progress. There's a reason why the word 'inevitable' is anathema to historians.