GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL - Cloverport Independent Schools

HEMISPHERES COLLIDING • 3 5 9
manufacturing purposes, including crushing sugar, driving blast furnace
bellows, grinding ores, making paper, polishing stone, pressing oil, producing
salt, producing textiles, and sawing wood. It is conventional to
define the Industrial Revolution arbitrarily as beginning with the harnessing
of steam power in 18th-century England, but in fact an industrial
revolution based on water and wind power had begun already in medieval
times in many parts of Europe. As of 1492, all of those operations to
which animal, water, and wind power were being applied in Eurasia were
still being carried out by human muscle power in the Americas.
Long before the wheel began to be used in power conversion in Eurasia,
it had become the basis of most Eurasian land transport—not only for
animal-drawn vehicles but also for human-powered wheelbarrows, which
enabled one or more people, still using just human muscle power, to transport
much greater weights than they could have otherwise. Wheels were
also adopted in Eurasian pottery making and in clocks. None of those uses
of the wheel was adopted in the Americas, where wheels are attested only
in Mexican ceramic toys.
The remaining area of technology to be mentioned is sea transport.
Many Eurasian societies developed large sailing ships, some of them capable
of sailing against the wind and crossing the ocean, equipped with sextants,
magnetic compasses, sternpost rudders, and cannons. In capacity,
speed, maneuverability, and seaworthiness, those Eurasian ships were far
superior to the rafts that carried out trade between the New World's most
advanced societies, those of the Andes and Mesoamerica. Those rafts
sailed with the wind along the Pacific coast. Pizarro's ship easily ran down
and captured such a raft on his first voyage toward Peru.
IN ADDITION TO their germs and technology, Eurasian and Native
American societies differed in their political organization. By late medieval
or Renaissance times, most of Eurasia had come under the rule of organized
states. Among these, the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Chinese states,
the Mogul state of India, and the Mongol state at its peak in the 13th
century started out as large polyglot amalgamations formed by the conquest
of other states. For that reason they are generally referred to as
empires. Many Eurasian states and empires had official religions that contributed
to state cohesion, being invoked to legitimize the political leadership
and to sanction wars against other peoples. Tribal and band societies