Rating: 
Summary: Triumphant panorama of conquests of culture
Review: This is a remarkably thorough, well-researched work on major regions and civilizations around the world -- African, Aztec, Inca, Slav, (bative) American Indian. Sowell documents the case of how geography (harbors, arable land, navigable rivers, freedom from monsoons and tropical disease) and ideas (fundamental beliefs and principles widely shared or disseminated) combine to make the world what it is today."Culture" triumphs if it is sustainable and based on a credible concept that can be embraced by others. Other "cultures" fail or disappear when they are conquered by more dominant cultures or collapse from within due to a fundamental weakness or failure to transmit the culture across people and generations. Much like David Landes' "Wealth and poverty of nations", Sowell shows that societies or cultures that can produce things of value, that educate their young, that innovate, and that encourage personal freedom, initiative, private ownership and advancement based on merit, these cultures are more likely to survive. Sowell dispels myths about racism, diversity and the equality of all cultures. His research is encyclopedic and well-documented. An excellent book for a university course on culture, diversity and global development.
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Summary: A geogreaphic history of mankind.
Review: This is a showpiece blending of geography and history. The author takes the reader to different places on earth at various periods in time and shows how the intermingling of cultures influences the future of mankind. We are shown the tribal conditions existing in Britain during the time of the Romans. Once on the isle we see that the geographic proximity of coal and ore will make Britain a leading economic force. Traveling to Russia, the importance of the location of natural resources is reinforced. Russia's resources are great distances apart and in difficult to reach areas. This requires additional shipping for final refining. Further, in-spite of its size, Russia lacks adequate access to international shipping areas. This shipping disadvantage exists for a country so massive that 25 percent of it accounts for more than half of Europe. One of the most absorbing chapters deals with the continent of Africa. Here the reader is taken to the height of the central part of the continent which is about 5,000 feet above sea level, and follows the untapped majesty of the Zaire River. We find that the Zaire has a volume of water second only to the Amazon, however its rapids and waterfalls are unique. The river is 2,900 miles long and drops 1,000 feet in its last 250 miles, while the Amazon falls only 20 feet in its last 500 miles. One question not brought forward by the author is the potential energy which the people of Africa could receive from tapping into the power of the Zaire. Possibly the current ethnic conditions on the continent prohibit using the power of the river for the benefit of the African people. Regardless of its majestic beauty, Africa was a financial drain on the people of Europe. This is one reason why it was colonized after North America and why it remained under European rule for such a short period of time. Also, the inability of Europeans to contend with African diseases hastened their abandonment of the continent. In a similar manner, the Europeans brought ! diseases to the New World which threatened the existence of the native American Indians. As we set foot with the first Europeans on the eastern shore of North America, we see that the natives have no pack animals and, therefore, are unable to communicate beyond neighboring settlements. They actually have no knowledge of the other inhabitants of this continent. Also, unlike Eurasia, with its continuous east/west settlements of people, the American continents are arranged in a north/south pattern. This means that herding and cultivation innovations are limited in their movement by the climate zones. By taking items from the New World back to Europe and exchanging them with other Eurasian countries, trade will move faster through China and across the Pacific than it will across the length of this rugged continent. One wonders what the thought were of the American Indians when word spread about the "new people" coming from the water. If one were alive as an Indian at that time, one could only believe that the "world" was being invaded. The book is filled with extensive factual pieces of information and does detailed analyses of how these facts affect mankind. However, we will leave the rest of the traveling and exciting details for the reader to discover.
Rating: 
Summary: absolutely wrong: the alternative viewpoint
Review: This is to counteract the misguided views of Mr. Sowell and some readers on 'Conquests and Culture'. Mr. Sowell's use of economics, race, geography, etc is factually incorrect. All historical events are motivated by religion and in particular by the desire of the 'priesthood' to destroy the true religion. Economics is secondary to the prime objective. Any nation or empire that has prowess is because the priesthood ORGANISES it in a manner that enables the exploitation of the advantages given by geography, culture, race, religion, etc for the subjugation of those that follow the true religion. Prior to secularism, religion played a dominant role in ALL civilisations : Ancient Egyptians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Indians, etc. Even today, though the masses don't realise it. The concept of secularism is approximately 200 years old so it is far more appropriate to interpret historical events using the religious reference frame, and not the secular or economic reference frame. If economics motivated imperial empires then how does one explain the following: Only by the Second World War, when the British Empire was in terminal decline, did trade between Britain and its colonies reach a peak of 35% of all British trade. So much for imperialism being the handmaid of mercantilist capitalism. [98]. Then three-quarters of a million Irish people died in the potato famine of the 1860s during the Great Victorian Age when: the Empire was at its height; and nearly one hundred years after the Industrial Revolution (Industrial Slavery) which had allegedly transformed Britain into the workshop of the World. Yet the Empire could not even feed its indigenous population! In The Colonial Empires by D.K. Fieldhouse (1966), the extent of investment by imperial nations in their colonies is exposed. For instance, Britain invested far more in America than in any new colony and the French were more likely to invest in Russia than in their African or Asian colonies [pg. 189, 164]. Even as late as 1914, French industry derived ten times as much of its raw materials from non-colonial as from colonial sources [pg. 143, 164]. So other factors other than economics must have motivated imperialism. RELIGION! Consider for a moment the religion of the colonised. Overview In 638 Palestine fell to the Muslims from Arabia. A whopping four and a half centuries later, in 1095 C.E., the Vatican organised the First Crusade in which combined armies of the Roman (Catholic) Empire sought to capture the Holy Land from Muslims. After numerous Western Crusades and one Eastern Crusade (Mongol sacking of Baghdad in 1258 C.E.), the Roman (Catholic) Empire had failed to secure a sustainable foothold in Palestine. A new strategy was then ORGANISED, based on the de-centralisation of the Roman Empire (nationalism) whereby competing nation-states of the Roman Empire would use oceanic routes (Naval Crusade) to contain the spread of Islam; attack Muslims from the rear; colonise their lands; destroy their states, and eventually capture Palestine. In 1441, a Portuguese ship brought back black men, who were described as prisoners of war and taken to be MUSLIMS. Three years later, the first sale of slaves in Portugal took place. The West African slave trade had begun and justified in the name of Christianity [pg. 181-184, 41]. In 1455 the Pope put out an announcement called the `papal bull': authorising Roman Catholics to reduce to servitude all infidel people. [2&3]. In 1456, another bull granted a religious and military society called the Order of Christ, jurisdiction to go all the way to India to enter into a relationship with those Indians who worshipped Christ, and to incite them to aid Christians against the Saracens and other enemies of the faith [pg. 118, 141]. In 1457, the Council of Cardinals met in Holland where they sanctioned, as a righteous and progressive idea, the enslavement of Africans for the purpose of their conversion to Christianity and exploitation in the labour market as chattel property. This satanic scheme speedily gained the sanctimonious blessing of the Pope and became a standard policy of the Vatican, and later of Protestant churches. [3]. In Protestant Britain - once the largest slave dealing nation in the world, slavery attained validity in the legal process with the Butts versus Penny judgement of 1677, which ruled that Negroes as infidels could be purchased and sold [pg. 40, 166]. A bull of Pope Nicholas 5th instructed his followers to `attack, subject, and reduce to perpetual slavery the Saracens, Pagans and other enemies of Christ, southward from Cape Bojador (opposite the Canary Islands) and including all the coast of Guinea' [pg. 31, 56]. The Pope sanctioned Henry to struggle against the Moors and anyone who died on Henry's voyages to Africa would be regarded as having died on a Crusade [pg. 181, 41]. From 1419 until his death in 1460, Henry sent expedition after expedition down the west coast of Africa to outflank the Muslim hold on trade routes and to establish colonies. Indeed the early Portuguese were not traders or private adventurers, but admirals with a royal commission to conquer territory and promote the spread of Christianity [pg. 404, 25]. WHY? African Crusade: Africa's Golden Age On his way to Mecca in the 1320s, Mansa Musa of Mali in West Africa stated that his brother, Abu Bukhari, had sent two expeditions, one of four hundred ships and the other of two thousand, across the Atlantic Ocean [Pg. 205, 24]. This is not surprising because following the destruction of Baghdad in 1258 by Christian-backed Mongols (Eastern Crusades), the remaining intellectual Islamic states were in Africa. Africa was home to several Islamic universities, namely Fez, Timbuktu, Jenne and Al-Azhar, with many Faculties including Law, Medicine, Grammar, Building, Crafts, Manufacturing and Geography, and they attracted scholars from all over the Muslim world [pg. 134, 17]. Even though two-thirds of the world's supply of gold came from West Africa during the Middle Ages, more profit was made from the sale of books [pg. 73, 24]. In West Africa, Arabic was not only the language of religion and learning, but it was also the language of trade [Pg. 220, 40]. Naval Crusade In 1492, Christopher Columbus sailed from Spain to the West, eight months after the last Muslim stronghold (Granada) in Spain fell to Christian armies, to go to 'India' to gain enough wealth for Christendom to fight Muslims and capture Jerusalem [12]. Columbus was convinced that he had been chosen by God to recover Jerusalem [pg. 366, 132]. The conquest of Jerusalem was also the aim of Ferdinand and Isabella, who styled themselves as King and Queen of Jerusalem [pg. 65, 34]. In later voyages Columbus tried to convince his crew of circumnavigating the whole world and return home to Spain via Jerusalem [pg. 129, 34]. Columbus failed and was brought back in chains naked. In 1497, Vasco da Gama sailed from Portugal to the East around Africa and made his way to India in search of Christians and Spices. He failed - he was killed on his third voyage in Cochin, India after burning alive 700 Muslim pilgrims returning from Mecca. [Read 'Empires of the Monsoon' by Richard Hall]. Other Catholics like Ferdinand Magellan hardly fared better - somehow he managed to sail past South America having survived several attempted mutinies and a diet of putrid yellow water, leather from ship sails and rats! Magellan was killed by Muslims versed in martial arts skills in the Philippines. The Portuguese set out with the intention of uniting the Christian forces of Europe with those of Africa, namely Ethiopia in an all out war against the Muslims and make their statelet into a vast African-Indian empire, stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Indian Ocean and bigger than the continent of Europe. To achieve this the Church had given the Portuguese organisational skills and uninhibited unagressivness to go forth to conquer and dominate. [40]. The early Portuguese were not traders or private adventurers, but admirals with a royal commission to conquer territory and promote the spread of Christianity. [Pg. 404, 25]. In 1502 the king of Portugal obtained from Pharaoh (Pope) Alexander 6th, a bull constituting him `lord of navigation, conquest, and trade of Ethiopia, Arabia, Persia and India'. Protestant Revolution Anyway, once Spain and Portugal had been used to establish strategic bases and ports in the Americas, Africa, India and South East Asia to contain the spread of Islam, 'TRAINED' Roman slaves were needed to hold and expand the frontiers of newly acquired territories and `administer' the resources in these lands, on a scale never seen in history, to ensure economic, political, technological, military and spiritual domination of the world. So a religious reformation, a scientific revolution and an economic revolution simultaneously took place, namely Protestantism, modern science and capitalism, respectively. Scientifically speaking, the sixteenth century saw the publication of many pieces of astronomical works by Protestants / Lutherans. The Church responded with the Opening of t
Rating:
Summary: great historical referance
Review: Thomas has written several great books on ethnic groups and histroy like ethnic america and race and culture. Conquest and culture fallows this trend. It looks at several different cultures and looked at how they changed through time. The cultures he looks at are the English, Native Americans, Africans, and Slavs. All of these groups have important histories that need to be told. Conquest is definetely something you should read if you're interested in learning about how cultures change through time and are affected by different cultures.
Rating: 
Summary: A book which does not live up to its potential
Review: While this history is well written and interesting, it isn't all that illuminating. Sowell is hardly the first writer to express the ideas that geography and indigenous resources (both natural and intellectual) have had a direct and far ranging impact on various cultures we now observe. This book was partly billed as being an "expose" on how the modern, politically correct and revisionist ideas of culture have distorted the true facts and bases of those cultures. Sowell isn't totally to blame (or perhaps at all) for this of course. However, this reviewer got the impression that what Sowell wanted to say and what he ended up including in the book were quite different. Is anyone who has taken a standard college level history course covering the collapse of the Roman Empire and the development of Europe surprised to hear about the regression of both England and a good portion of the rest of Europe after the collapse of Rome? Is it a great surprise to find out there was domestic turmoil in the African states finally abandoned by British and French colonialism? Sure, it may be surprising that a slave or two was actually educated and not entirely poverty stricken. Yes, maybe a Mohawk actually had a civil encounte with a French or British soldier. But come on, do we really need to be reminded that the Iraqois were a collection of several Indian tribes? Unfortunately, this book is nothing more than a brief history of selected societies which in one way or another have had past and present impact upon other historians. The closest Sowell comes to anything truly illuminating is in his brief descriptions of some of the population and literacy figures for the cultures described after their "conquering superiors" had left them alone or were overthrown. I expected alot more scholarship from Sowell.
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Summary: Politically incorrect, and it's about time.
Review: Why do some societies advance and succeed, while others stagnate? While Europe created great mercantile empires and scientific advances, Africa and the Americas never advanced beyond a primitive level. Sowell's insight and intellect (he holds a PhD in Economics, and is a Senior Fellow of the Hoover Institute) come to the fore in this well researched and presented argument that successful societies are the products of a combination of geography, history, and "accrued cultural capital". From the Roman conquest of Britain to the European colonization of Africa and the New World, from the Chinese to the Mayans, cultural clashes throughout history have influenced the course of social development, sometimes for the worse, sometimes for the better. It's often too easy to blame European exploitation for the ills of the third world. Sowell shows that, more often than not, colonialism cost the colonizing power more than it received. This book should be required reading for students of history, sociology, and economics.
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