HISTORY 21B Lecture Notes - Lecture 3: Jared Diamond, Columbian Exchange
Document Summary
Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to new guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own . Diamond"s answer was guns, germs, and steel . Do we assume that cargo is just a neutral term for goods and resources. The interpretation of the columbian exchange is based on the coneption that value is independent of social processes. But these values only exist in a human context. Indigenous conceptions of good may differ profoundly. These conceptions began to shift with the exchanges of the 15th-16th centuries. Opium was an important trading item whose effects we will see. Can the biological transfer be understood independently of social and historical shifts. Did the opening of the world exchange fuel the historical shift, or was it the historical shift in understandings that shaped the world exchange. Not all sources can be easily classified. It depends primarily on the question we are asking.
