ktsn’s review of Fifth Sun: A New History of the Aztecs > Likes and Comments

Yiiiiikes.

Wow … You didn’t get this book at all .. read it again much more slowly … for what you have quoted read Guns, Germs, and Steel … you are so pretentious … this woman studied the subject for years … I don’t think you have the knowledge to understand it actually .. also check out a podcast on the same theme called the rest is
History … hopefully you ll realise how wrong you are … good luck

Solor wrote: "Wow … You didn’t get this book at all .. read it again much more slowly … for what you have quoted read Guns, Germs, and Steel … you are so pretentious … this woman studied the subject for years … ..."

If you even still relied on Guns, Germs, and Steel to support the "superiority of agricultural society" idea, you definitely need an update. Graeber and Wengrow's The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity could be a good start, if James C. Scott books were too academic for you.

It's an irony how Jared Diamond's west supremacy and geographical determinism (both has been blamed as second-rate scholarship in anthropology circle for a long time, just google it, there were even jointly-signed academic papers criticizing errors in his "bestsellers") are used to "support" a book whose author claimed to give a voice to colonized people.

Technology made a bunch of Spaniards who were not even professional soldiers conquer an empire of million of people in such a short time: their steel swords, the huge ships, navigational knowledge , etc.. . it is not about intelligence or creativity. And superior technology made USA the dominant power in WW2 (the nuke). This is what you are missing.

Solor wrote: "Technology made a bunch of Spaniards who were not even professional soldiers conquer an empire of million of people in such a short time: their steel swords, the huge ships, navigational knowledge ..."

Oh no, the situation is worse than I thought. First, before getting emotional, I suggest you reading this review article from a Harvard scholar who is also an expert in mesoamerican studies:

bit.ly + 3GsRjc4
(article title: "Romancing the Scribe", since direct links are not allowed in comments)

Hopefully that would make some of the largest problems of the book even clearer. The author not only neglected a huge amount of other people's research, she frequently filled the gap remained by her own fantasies. At personal level it may be just arrogance, but if she wrote a book to disseminate these loose ideas, it became egregiously misleading.

"Technology myth" is just one such example. I'll quote from AHA website:

"...weaponry alone clearly would not enable Cortés’s tiny force to overcome a large, densely populated society of about twenty-one million. Quite apart from military technology, Cortés ’s expedition benefited from divisions among the indigenous peoples of Mexico. With the aid of Doña Marina, the conquistadors forged alliances with peoples who resented domination by the Mexicas, the leaders of the Aztec empire, and who reinforced the small Spanish army with thousands of veteran warriors. Native allies also provided Spanish forces with logistical support and secure bases in friendly territory."

I think WWII is actually a great analogy. Tell any professional historians that "US beat Japan because of the nuke", and see how many of them can keep not rolling eyes back into heads. It's of the same level of oversimplification and out-of-context.

@solor Guns, Germs, and Steel is the worst thing to happen to “pop history” books because of how wrong it is & appeals to materialistic sensibilities.

@ktsn great review I intend to avoid this book now. Cheers

I think the argument in "the Dawn of Everything" is more that the environment does not dictate how people produce their food and how people produce their food does not dictate how they organise their society. Farming does not necessarily lead to a stratified society and what we call a state.
They don't really contradict Diamond that Europeans had great military technology because they had farming for a long time and access to technological developments in the rest of Eurasia and Africa. The same is true for the argument about germs.
Townsend also does not argue, that the Spaniards defeated the Maxica only because of better weaponry but she explains how their better weaponry helped them to convince local people to ally with them, having described earlier the rivalry of the different cities and the fragility of the Maxica rule.
How I understand it, much of these assumptions are based on her sources.

I don't see how that is supposed to be an oversimplification.

i know this was written 4 years ago and i have not read this book in the slightest, but i do wanna point out that she clearly writes "supposedly" before "peaceful and self-contained Chinese". she definitely means she does not agree with the stereotype - she is just letting you know the stereotype is there.
you also complain that she doesn't do things "like most normal history books do". im asking you consider why you think the project of this book is to be like all the other normal history books you've read before. again, i havent read the book, i just think you should consider that you are criticizing an author for not conforming to the project you wanted her to have, instead of criticizing her for failing to do what she set out to do.
maybe your critiques are valid, i have no idea, but they seem kind of in bad faith from my outside pov

Yeah, agree with Lila. Townsend is quite clearly indicating that the stereotype of 'peaceful and self-contained Chinese' is violated by the fact that gunpowder was a Chinese invention. The reviewer has misunderstood the sentence. The reviewer has also added [sic] to the quoted word "peoples", which should not be there..

I think that the arguments around farming techniques hold a great deal of water when you consider also the fact that the main killer of Aztec and other meso-American peoples was disease. The Europeans had been exposed to many more types of disease than the meso-Americans exactly because of their farming techniques, living in close proximity to their animals.

A pretty harsh review in my opinion.

"peoples" is not a mistake btw, not sure why you [sic]'d it