Born into a Jewish family that later converted to Protestantism Karl Marx grew up in the Rhineland, at his time one of the most progressive regions of the not-yet-unified German nation.

Picking up studies in law which then served as the overall concept for what today would be considered humanites – or Gesellschaftswissenschaften as would be the German term – Marx completed his studies with a dissertation in philosophy on the Differences Between Democritean And Epicurean philosophy of Nature. Besides being heavily subsidized by Friendrich Engels whose father was a wealthy factory owner, Marx technically worked as a newspaper editor and correspondent throughout his life.

After the first newspaper Marx worked for had been shut down down due to the Karlsbader Beschlüsse – censorship edicts that were issued to reestablish Europe’s aristocracy-based order after the bourgeois revolution of 1848 failed – Marx emigrated first to France, then to Belgium and ultimately to London where he died at the age of 75.

A Communist avant la lettre, his writing soon turned from radical democratic to anti-bourgeois. His early works culminated in publications such as the Holy Family (1845),

a radical critique of the disciples of the late philosopher Hegel, the Poverty of Philosophy (1847), a rebuttal to the Philosophy of Poverty (1846) by French philosopher Pierre Proudhon whom Marx accused of having a limited understanding of Hegel, to the revolutionary Communist Manifesto of 1848.

It is in the brief, but brilliantly written Communist Manifesto that Marx discusses the emergence of capitalism from a distinctively European point of view. The opening line stating that that “Europe is haunted, haunted by the spectre of Communism”, sets the frame for the following analysis, i.e. a predominantly European frame, and has become somewhat of a household phrase in academia.

In the Communist Manifesto all of history is discussed with Europe as the center stage. Side-views to other historical scenarios are simply left out.

For Marx, it was in Europe that the three Estates of the Tennis Court Oath have merged into two, the Bourgeoisie and the Proletariat. All occasions that would hint at the near end of the Bourgeoisie, like pauperism, Marx witnessed with his bare eyes in Europe.

Guerrilla warfare, indigenous movements or other working class-related movements like you would find them today in Colombia, Mexico or Papua New Guinea was no concept Marx ever thought of. A fact that has to be held against him: all movements only remotely resembling a proletarian revolution have had peasants as their social carrier — and not urban factory workers like Marx had thought.

The history of man, for Marx, is the history of man’s society, and the ‘final battle’, the historical chance for man to step up and “consciously make his own history”, as he put it, was something that — if it happened at all — would implicitly happen in Europe.

At the beginning of his famous “Protestant Ethics” Max Weber (below) would later refer to himself as a “son” of the modern European cultural realm – Karl Marx has done the same, only he did it implicitly.

The real reason how such a division came about, according to Marx? — Brutal physical violence. The transition of a feudal society with peasants living on the land that sustained them to an industrialized one where peasants have become workers finds its root in violence and displacement. Displacing people from their land and thus parting them from their means of production has been a century-long, violent process.

The German historian, religious historian, sociologist and politician Max Weber is often described as the ‘Bourgeois antipode’ to revolutionary Marx. An assertion that is both true – and utterly false at the same time.

It is true as Weber comes from an entirely different academic background: While Marx drew heavily from French materialism where matter is the only real entity, an assertion that Marx expanded when he declared man’s society the actual human ‘matter’ that in history had been transforming itself through revolutionary class struggles, Max Weber stands in the tradition of Neo-Kantism where not mindless matter, but an active, ultimately reason-

inspired relation to the world was the focus of analysis. Therefore, simply considering Weber an intellectual opponent to Marx does not do him justice. Even though from a completely different academic angle Weber analyses capitalism from a subjective point of a view, focussing on the internal motivation that led to the rational working regime we call capitalism. In that sense, it would be false to put Weber into mere opposition to Marx as Weber was basically picking up on a blind spot in Marx’s analysis: the so-called subjective factor in the development and, almost more importantly, the sustainment of capitalism.

Indeed, a subject-based outlook on capitalism was something Marx ultimately considered useless. Already in 1845, in the German Ideology, an anthology which Marx co-authored together with his fellow in exile, Friedrich Engels in Paris and that was only published in 1932, he found clear words as what to think of any society’s self-attribution:

Whilst in ordinary life every shopkeeper is very well able to distinguish between what somebody professes to be and what he really is, our historians have not yet won even this trivial insight. They take every epoch at its word and believe that everything it says and imagines about itself is true.

If one wanted to analyze capitalism by referring to what those time-bound individuals of any epoch had to say, write and criticize about themselves one would always end up in a fallacy. For Marx, analyzing the objective aspects of society, that is the means and relations of production which could not be altered by interpretation or dogma, was key to an unfiltered understanding.

Max Weber, however, sees things differently. While he surely does not fall for any positivist fallacy, either, Weber focuses on the inner strivings that led certain social groups to develop different morally based approaches to labor. Far from proclaiming a mere history of big men or losing oneself in psychological assumptions Weber found a way to establish a sociologically-induced explanation of  capitalism. For Weber, any economic regime would ultimately comes down to a certain work ethic. This work ethic, says Weber, is something that in non-secular societies has been profoundly, if not exclusively, been shaped by religious beliefs.

It is this analysis of work ethics that Weber first introduced in his groundbreaking study The Protestant Ethic And The Spirit Of Capitalism. Published in 1904/05 the study was heavily influenced by a trip through the United States that Weber had undertaken in the previous year. Visiting the numerous Protestant sects in the New World and experiencing first hand the unique blend of a pious yet so industrious lifestyle only seemed to enforce Weber’s thesis, namely that there is an incoherent correlation between Capitalism and Protestantism.

This very notion, today widely referred to as the Weber thesis, also defines Weber’s perception of Europe. Of course, Weber’s Protestant Ethic is well-known for stating that “(…) Capitalism has existed in China, India, Babylon, the Ancient World and the Mid-Ages”. But what may look striking at first is immediately put into perspective. Weber adds right away that while capitalism may have existed throughout all ages, the type of capitalism one would encounter in Ancient India and Ancient China in fact was about either hoarding riches in the proverbial treasure box or they were linked to conquest and overpowering. Once gained through violence, riches were then wastefully spent with no remorse. A fact that led Weber to labeling these rudimentary types of capitalist behavior “adventure capitalism”, i.e. the type of behavior you would find in warlords, Conquistadores or audacious businessmen like Jakob Fugger.

Drawing a continuous line from the ‘Materialist’ Marx to the ‘Idealist’ Weber to the New England scholar and professor of geography Jared Diamond seems an impossible endeavor.

A physiologist by trade Diamond does not focus on mind- and soulless matter, nor does he try to bring a sociological version of moral philosophy into the equation. As a physiologist it is living organisms that make up for the center of his academic interest. This being said, could there be any wider gap to bridge than that between organisms that by their nature have no concept of economy and an industrial mode of production, i.e. capitalism?

Things get a lot clearer once you dive into the first chapter of Diamonds well-received book of 1997 titled Guns Germs and Steel. In the first chapter of the book that, among others rewards, in 1998 won him the Pulitzer Prize, Diamond lays out the very question he seeks to answer with his monograph.

The very question answered in Guns, Germs And Steel is one that Jared Diamond named ‘Yali’s Question’: while doing research in Papua New Guinea Diamond was approached by a local politician who asked him for the reason why Diamond’s part of the world had so much in wealth, infrastructure and resources,  a conglomerate of opportunity for which New Guineans adopted the Spanish/American term cargo, while his part of the world had so little.

Diamond’s answer to Yali’s Question goes far beyond the 500 years that make up for the time frame for the analyses of Marx and Weber. In fact, the genuine and multidisciplinary way in which Diamond fruitfully combines

physiology and geography allows to reconnect with the already mentioned Neolithic Revolution and the invention of agriculture: It is one of Diamond’s great merits to have delivered a valid explanation as to why Western Eurasia – in regard to Europe Diamond mostly argues from a geographical point of view where Asia and Europe are considered part of the same landmass, Eurasia – was the one continent to give birth to a farm-based way of life.

What is that explanation about? If one wanted to comprehend the settlement of man from a purely physiologist perspective then the whole century-long process can be described as the domestication of both vegetal and animal organisms. This definition of agriculture relates to Europe in the specific sense that Europe was the only continent equipped with, if you will, the genetic makeup in animals and plants that would allow for a successful domestication in the first place.

Take the continents of Australia and Oceania, for instance. Due to classic natural selection this part of the world is not inhabited by a single animal apt for pulling a plow or nurturing man with eggs and milk or even keeping man warm with its wool. Not a single native mammal of such qualities is found on the whole continent of Australia The same is true for the continent of Africa where there are animals that would make excellent working animals (elephant, zebra). Yet the elephant and the zebra, like many other African species, both share the character trait that they are simply indomitable and/or will die in a captive state. The same would also be true for South America with the Llama and Alpaca being the only larger mammals of the whole continent, providing for nothing more than their mere wool.

Compare to that the relative ease and fruitfulness with which the Eurasian horse, sheep, goat, cow and pig have been domesticated and you will begin to fathom how much influence the mere distribution of organisms has had on the economical development of a region.