Attitudes not latitudes

History gloves on (or perhaps off) for this one. An interesting post Latitudes not Attitudes by historian Ian Morris, whose book I keep meaning to get hold of, about the influence of geography on history.

But while he makes some good points about where complex societies arose, he's wrong about the role of geography in Western expansion, and the clue is in the title. He talks about the vast difference of scale and might between the ships of the Chinese explorer Zheng He and those of, say, da...