Conquests And Cultures

Customer Reviews

• Excellent

  Great book. The author really presents a fascinating read that informs the reader about the ways our life is affected by things that happened hundreds of years in the past.

• hatred of light skin blacks in Philadelphia

  In the nineteenth century Philadelphia most m*lattoes (brown skin blacks,light skin blacks,biracial people)married m*lattoes and most blacks (dark skin blacks)married blacks (this is from the book).The book doesn't mention that dark skin blacks were considered n*groes and later blacks of any skin color were considered n*groes.This is the best book.I'm a light skin black. I've lived in Philadelphia (ninth-poorest US city,black majority)for many years.In Philly many dark skin black young adults still won't date a light skin black,sometimes brown skin blacks will.There are few light skin black and dark skin black young adult couples in Philly.I've lived cities that weren't like this.The terms m*latto and n*gro are now considered racist.

• This is a good book

  I can't think of anything that I've read like it before or since.
  
  Essentially, it does the job of filling in some of the details about what happened after some of the conquests of one group by another. It was not a text that evaluated whether conquests were "good" or "bad," but about the actual results of what happened. For example: He details at some length the differing responses to colonization of Irish and Scottish people (the former didn't take to it well while the latter did). This is something that goes a long way to explaining why Ireland became a separate country and Scotland stayed part of the Kingdom.
  
  It was well worth reading because it gave CONCRETE information about what actually happened in many of these cases rather than babbling about "colonial powers" or "rights of self determination."

• Encyclopedic in scope, but what's the point of it?

  I love thomas Sowell's books. Whatever he tells he tells it fascinatingly, if he mentions it it's because its relevant, it's something to make you think, and what is more important in a writer: he makes you look at things from a new perspective. Not here, though. This book is huge in scope but... what the point? He tells us, in parallel, the devolpment of different cultures and civilizations of the world, to compare them. But comparison alone doesn't do the trick when you have to go through so much data and so many pages. I felt tempted to skip the whole thing and go to the conclusion, but even here it is not a conclusion... it's a summary of it all.
  
  I don't want to discourage readers, though, because Mr sowell is one of the finest thinkers in the planet. He's got his feet on the ground as a true great conservative man he is.

• Big-picture history

  CaC is a series of case-studies looking at the interplay between (as the title indicates) conquest and cultural evolution. I enjoy "big-picture" history but, because the author tries to cover so many examples, the analysis seems to be just a touch shallow. Of course, CaC was probably intended as an overview to demonstrate a larger dynamic.
  
  The most interesting section is the discussion of African slavery. I hadn't realized what a relatively small part the European powers played in the over-all slave-trade. I thought the treatment was fair--neither Euro-bashing nor revisionist.
  
  The other topics were a little more familiar and not quite as interesting. (As I mentioned, the treatment not especially thorough. I flipped through a few parts.) Overall, CaC is pretty good--not great--but worth the time to read for the novice or amateur historian (especially if you're not familiar with the "Annales" school of history to which Sowell is obviously indebted).