Conquests and Cultures: An International History Paperback – 30 April 1999

This book changed the way I think about the world. Terrifically well sourced material and factual evidence around subjects like slavery, differences between cultures, social norms and geography as determining factors in a nations prospects and fate, paint a picture of a world that at times seems utterly cruel but also intelligent and at the mercy of an environment we've been struggling against for all of human history. It's brilliant and challenging. Read this book.

Brilliant take on our planet and why societies have developed the way they have. Bringing geography economics history ect. And incorporating everything so you gain a real depth of knowledge about human nature and our cultures, specifically Britain, Africa, Eastern Europe and the Western hemisphereDr sowell is a gem and his thorough explanations of societies and their development really would help us understand eachother better and heal historical wounds of opressed people.Whether through trade, conflict, colonisation ect. Different humans have made contact,exchanged ideas and goods, and in the LONG TERM have enriched eachothers lived

Reading the others twos as well…brilliant brilliant brilliant !!!!!PS: why am I imposed how many words to use for the review ,?

I wish I had been taught history in this form in school. Understanding how the world has worked and why fills lots of gaps in my knowledge of politics, systems, people. Wonderful writing.

What a pity Dr Sowell is not better known. I only discovered him on You Tube a few months ago and have bougoht as many of his books as I can afford. Reading him is a whole new education.

Luv the book. Thanks for the excellent service.

Intelligent and thought provoking in these difficult times.

I have great respect for Tom Sowel and have read many of his books and watched many of his utube hoover institute appearances , but his conclusions in this book around cultural diffusion by which he really means technical scientific diffusion i find laughably.In the last chapter he concludes that the British like the Japanese borrowed most if not all according to him the innovations and inventions from other cultures , he's really big on the Chinese and Islamic sources of all these wonders , he writes the " the British got their London from the Romans ,their ships from Spanish galleys their cannons from the French etc. etc. . well London may well have been established by the romans but Anglo Saxons didn't rate it much as the capital of the most powerful of the Saxon states in the middle ages was Wessex and their capital was Winchester, English ships were largely built upon Viking ideas and morphed into much smaller vessels than the huge cumbersome Spanish galleon which is why they proved to be a disaster for the Spanish Armanda , English guns were much smaller and more accurate and the cannon was invented long before the French so it was hardly a French invention more likely Chinese,He then goes on with this British hit piece to say that the Lombard’s created the financial system ,I'm sure Adam smith had nothing to do with it , and the Dutch gave us clocks ,I'm sure Harrison and his son who solved the longitude problem got all their ideas from the Dutch, the steam engine of course wasn't invented by Thomas Newcomen and late improved by James watt it was the Chinese and the Arabs or the moors,apparently the British didn't display any originally they simple showed a lot of promise in pinching other ideas and making them better, this is such a load of codswallop, i can’t imagine why such an intellect as Sowel would have such an opinion,Roman London was buried under earthen ruins even before the Anglo Saxons took over the country and taking this argument to its ultimate conclusion; did the Saxons in Germania get Berlin from the romans as well .Islam so often credited with scientific discoveries actually got most of their ideas and science and philosophy from the byzantine Greeks and the Persians, and the Chinese according to him hated and treated with contempt all things military , even though the art of war was written in china and the killing zones of the great wall are there to see to this day .The discovery of the antekikya clock Greek 2000 years old makes the Islamic astrolabe look like a toy, did radar come from the Chinese , or jet engine from Arabia , the hovercraft , the spinning jenny, Colossus, the first large-scale electronic computer, came of course according to sowel from perhaps well maybe china as well .He also betrayed his hidden contempt for the British by stating that 40 % of all the worlds invention were invented by them in the nineteenth century and 80% of the same was invented by America what? apart from the transistor, heavy than air flight, washing machines, and many other domestic appliances including the refrigerator there isn't much left, if any nation can be accused of appropriating others ideas it’s the USA , German rockets ,British and German jet engines ,British radar, Scottish submarines and aircraft carriers, well you get my point, tesla for instance was a Serb ,he didn't just come up magically with a AC motor design when he entered the USA he was a Serb genius already while in Serbia lol, no doubt Edison who family had Viking roots would have come up with the same ideas regardless of where he was geographically, the wright brothers would have come up with an aeroplane even if they had a bike shop in Hertford England and tested it on Dartmoor rather than kitty hawk USA, He goes on to excuse Africans from any kind of innovation over 40,000 years because of the geography of Africa in its sub Saharan region, well the Arabs didn't seem to have much trouble building a mosque in Timbuktu or enslaving & trading with Africans for over the last thousand years or more ,I suspect there is something going on in Sowels mind other than logic here ? he appears to be doing the same thing as leftist woke activists do in accusing white Europeans of pinching all they invented , but using sleight of hand is essentially taking an opposite approach, where the left try to tear down western civilisation and accuse it of pinching others inventions in order to demoralise white Europeans in particular the British Anglo Saxons or English who he appears to resent ,and by doing so make them, feel that there is nothing special or unique about their achievements and inventions, he does the same only by suggestions that given the correct geography even Africans would be budding Isaac newton’s and perhaps ruling the planet and colonising mars etc. ,imagine that ,the next time you hear swan lake by TchaikovskyHe pinched that from wo flung dung in 3rd century china!!!

One of the best books I’ve read in a while.

Argomentazioni lucide, spesso stimolanti, sorrette da una conoscenza dei fatti impressionante.

Read this book if you enjoy nuance, careful analysis and diving into the complexities of topics like the varying fates of cultures. Do not read Sowell if you are into simplistic explanations, mono-causality or assigning blame to non self-selected groups. Do read this book for its clarity, for the questions it asks and for the factual reliability of one of the great scholars of our times.

It is a wonderfull aproach to understand the history of the world. The argument is that conquerors and conquered play a structural role in the narrative of of how cultures change. I loved it.

This book is a good historical narrative, backed up with lots of data, a steady (definitely not shrill) sense of ethics and an understanding of the scope of human behavior.I think modern people look back at conquest and colonization, and tend to dismiss it as all equally evil, without much analysis. We sometimes even prefer to not talk about it. This does a disservice to understanding what actually happens. This book is a fascinating comparison of several different eras of conquest and colonization. I walked away with several great little lessons about history that are not at all obvious, among them:1) When the imperial power withdraws, even peacefully, the colonies tend to become worse off, economically (and in some cases, much worse off). This is in part due to the exodus of human capital from the colony, and in part due to the retributions against those who stayed. Also, good governance is really hard and utterly non-intuitive.2) Those pushing for independence from the colonial power tend to be natives newly-educated in the colonial power's system, while the locals who are least connected to the colonial power tend to be much more indifferent.3) Some imperial powers spread, culturally and militarily, because local groups don't hate them nearly as much as they hate their neighboring tribes. A lot of narrators, influenced by the idea of the noble savage, regularly skip this. Animosity between neighbors can be severe.4) There are many examples of groups of people, who, painfully aware of their backwardness, decided that enough was enough and that they were going to improve their lives. And some succeeded tremendously - as in the Scottish Enlightenment. Mr. Sowell argues that there are cases of people, disadvantaged by geography, history, and culture, who improve their lives far beyond what any sociologist or geographer would predict.I am not a historian, so I lack the specialization to deeply evaluate each case study in his narrative. But as a person who likes to read history, I found this readable, full of data, and persuasive.As a side note, Mr. Sowell's writes about "negative human capital", which is very interesting, and deserving of more attention. I do not know if he originated the idea.