Jared Diamond Quotes
In the latter case it is often government that organizes the conquest, and religion that justifies it.
Diamond, Jared. Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies. W. W. Norton & Company, 1997, p. 278.
When the British first colonized South Africa, the area they used was not inhabited or very sparcely so. However, some Black tribes (including the Zulus) were moving from the north and themselves were colonizing or annexing the sparcely populated areas to their kingdom. The British were most interested in Trading so did not have large land asperations. The Dutch white Boer Africanners, in contrast, wanted to farm the lands and use the range for their cattle. They wanted the land. The English policy was that there would be friendly relations with the Black tribes surrounding their Cape Colony and no one should take their land. However the Boers started attacking the Black areas and seizing their farms and villages. At first, the English assumed that the Blacks would easily be able to ward off the invasion as the Afrikanners had no professional troops like the British. However, the neighboring native tribes were not very warlike or good fighters. They were being overrun by the Zulus coming from the North and the Boers from the South. The British Government had a real problem in that they would have to have British soldiers fight the white Afrikanners if they wanted to stop the illegal white invasions. This was the root of the Boer War where the British would be fully at war with the Africanners.
Jefferson was not the only one who thought that taking Canada and driving the English out would be relatively easy as Canada was vast and the English troops were spread very thin. However, although the English had great strategic weakness, the American officers who led the Canadian effort were not very competent and made a series of terrible tactical decisions and the Canadian operation failed in a terrible fiasco.
Xerxes was as the Texans say, “All hat and no cattle.” He had delusions of grandeur and was quite unsuccessful as a conqueror.
Jared Mason Diamond is an American geographer, historian, anthropologist, ornithologist, and author best known for his popular science books The Third Chimpanzee (1991); Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997, awarded a Pulitzer Prize); Collapse (2005), The World Until Yesterday (2012), and Upheaval (2019). Originally trained in biochemistry and physiology, Diamond is known for drawing from a variety of fields, including anthropology, ecology, geography, and evolutionary biology. He is a professor of geography at UCLA.
