Reddit mentions: The best australia & oceania history books

Gather round my child, have you got your sippy cup?
Today we’re going to talk to you about Indentured Labourer history together with
a quick lesson on communication and understanding. After that you can have a little nap
and I’ll call your mother to tell her what a great job you’ve done today.

>Come off your high horse, not only you had ancestors that migrated. Maybe your ancestors were tricked but documentation has proven that some ancestors came after for work and they WERE PAID and WELL COMPENSATED more than they ever could be in India.

Yes, thank you for agreeing with me. My ancestors were tricked, there is no better evidence that
first hand accounts. Don't worry I've also got some written sources for you down the line.
I'm also glad to see you went out and did some research yourself by talking to a Jamaican.
I think you’re on to something here my friend.

Well paid and well compensated?
You’re understand of this history is laughable.

>Wy would one recommend it without reading it? Please do some reading and educate yourself.

Education, aaah, it should always start with spelling, nonetheless let’s ignore that because it’s semantics.
You’ve obviously misunderstood what I said, let’s take a trip down memory lane.
I said: ‘What sort of rebuttal is that? Have you read it? Do you know it?’
This was in reply to your: ‘I suggest you read a much better book…’

Now because of your misunderstanding, it is very evident that basic communication is not your forté,
we’ll forgive you because everyone deserves forgiveness and chance to right their wrongs.

When I wrote my aforementioned sentence, I was merely pointing out the fact that you haven’t read the book I’ve told you to read.
Therefore, your proposition of a better book is much maligned.
You can’t quantify if it’s better, you don’t know of the book I’ve asked you read.

So by that logic, if all you have is the account of one book, would it not occur to you to get a larger picture of the story?
Or does one book and one interview satisfy your education on indentured labourer history?
How about the account of a person—like myself for example—who’s studied this in-depth and also is apart of the history?

From what I understand, you are saying that my book and my first hand account doesn’t qualify as history for you because it doesn’t match the knowledge you have, thus we should throw it out.
I think from that alone, we can suppose that the idea of education, which simply means receiving information or knowledge about a particular subject, is not what you’re familiar with, or is something that you are unable to grasp.

>You need to learn to stop feeling sorry for yourself. A lot of the ancestors of the indians in the Caribbean came and made a lot of money. Some went back to Indian and some stayed and their descendents are much better off today than if they would have stayed in India.

Just quickly, less than 10% went back to India.

>Maybe your ancestors were tricked but don't go labelling everything with your victimhood.

>I even talked to someone from Jamaica today and she said her ancestors came from India to the Caribbean for a better life and there is no way in hell that she would ever go back to India. I talked to several people from Guyana and Trinidad that said the same. I am mixed and also have ancestors that came to the Caribbean for a better life. They were well paid and given land and some went back to India.

>Get real and stop the victim mentality.

Aha, this is the gold.

Please point out at which point I insinuated any victim stance or victim hood?
You’re inference shows your lack of cognisance. As a matter of fact, had you asked me, you know, perhaps took the socratic approach,
you would’ve known that my stance on the matter is similar to ‘your one Jamaican friend’.

I’m incredibly happy that I was born where I was.
Irrespective of that, I’m able distinguish fact vs fiction vs my feelings, something I’d meditate on if I was you.
It might help in your day to day communication and understanding that when we talk facts, we’re not all talking feelings.
I know it’s hard for little snowflakes like yourself but I’m hoping you can see the light so you can do better.

Listen more, argue less, be a better person.

You don’t know everything and sure you might’ve read a book and interviewed some people, and yeah you have some of the right ideas,
but I can tell you off the bat, you’re not informed on the subject and you lack true understanding of it.

At the end of the day, you’re sitting behind a computer desk and you haven’t lived it and you surely haven’t read your history on it, in depth.
Mostly because it probably doesn’t matter to you, but know this, I have because it matters to me where I’m from, because my history matters to me.

And because I’m kind, I’ve written a list of sources for you so you can understand this yourself, this is good education.

And while you’re out reading books, go pick up Crucial Conversations (Patterson, Granny, McMillan, Switzler), this will help in your communication skills.

>It has been proven that some indians were paid, were given land and they were NOT SLAVES. There is a huge difference between the African slaves and the Chinese and Indian "coolies" that came to work.

The fact that you use the word coolies so nonchalantly shows that you don’t understand it’s etymology.
It’s a racist term.

I’ll on concede on one point alone, you’re right they were not Slaves like African slaves, but they were very close to it.
As I mentioned earlier, In terms of payment, a lot of indentured labourers were not paid what they were owed.
This if fact, theres no way around this.

Just a quick FYI: The indentured labourer system came as a result of the abolition of Slavery.
The British had a problem, they wanted the same outcomes as Slavery but could not
go about it the same way, the indentured system was an improvised solution.

The greatest testament to my people is that they had courage, ingenuity and a lack of victimhood.
They held their ground and worked hard.
My grandmother alone worked till she was in her 60s as a single mother, selling dried peas on the side of the road.

Don’t ever call me a victim, I will slap that smug face of yours back to the screen behind your computer.

Now, here a list of sources that will help you understand this better:

https://academic.oup.com/ahr/article/119/5/1439/44606
http://girmit.org/?page_id=1152
https://www.amazon.com/Tears-Paradise-Suffering-Struggles-1879-2004/dp/0473171147
https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-3-319-52748-2_3
https://www.bl.uk/reshelp/pdfs/indiansoverseas.pdf
http://www.georgetownsvgrevisited.co.uk/indentees-who-were-they.php
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=jpqoAwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=Rb4pDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false
https://books.google.co.nz/books?id=4JgxpL4FCNUC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

There are many more where that came from.

I’ve taught you enough for now.
Go do some more reading and get further educated.

Mythology is awesome - most box bookstores (like B&N) have at least a small mythology section where you can get your hands on original sources like The Prose Edda and such. Joseph Campbell is pretty popular and whoever owns the rights to his work keeps cranking out reprints of his lectures, so those are usually good too (sometimes they sound too "self-helpy" though). Anthropology (particularly folklore) dips into the same vein, so people like Ruth Benedict are good to read too. I'll mention a couple of things that might pique your interest as well, since you won't usually find them on reading lists.

• If you like the theme of universalism among myths and how those symbols reverberate in the human psyche, try Anthony Steven's Ariadne's Clue. Steven's draws from Jung to make an analysis of mythological symbols and tropes in those stories.
  
  
• Some scholars feel like myths embody a prehistoric awakening of sentience and intelligence - basically that these stories are early blueprints for what makes us human. If you're interested in that, try The Origins and History of Consciousness (Erich Neumann, the author, was also a Jungian and heavily relies on archtype theory in this book).
  
  
• For just a good read, try The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin.
  
  
• If you're curious about myth construction, try Roland Barthes Mythologies. It's actually pretty accessible compared to the stuffiness of other academics and philosophers, and focuses on modern myths.
  
  
• Oh yeah! If you like Grail lore (the holy grail and Arthurian studies, which is more about legends than myths I suppose), Jung's wife wrote a book about it. Which I still need to finish. (ugh)
  
  I love mythology so I'm always excited to hear people talking about it.

How in depth do you want here? If you want stories that are interesting, original and accurate you should check out Grace Karsken's books. Good reading: http://www.amazon.com/Colony-History-Early-Sydney/dp/1741756375

Thats easily the best book, apart from kusaioshiri's suggestion of Leviathan. It's a cracker of a read.

On top of these good books, you could take a different route by taking one of these fantastic walking architecture tours, by passionate, practicing architects: http://www.sydneyarchitecture.org/

Or you could check out this free museum in The Rocks which is surprisingly good with lots of touchscreen interactive panels: http://www.therocks.com/sydney-Things_To_Do-The_Rocks_Discovery_Museum.htm

Mandatory mention of the consistently good Museum of Sydney run by the Historic Houses Trust. http://www.hht.net.au/museums/mos

I presume that by this question you are asking whether the British faced the threat that rival colonial empires might try to establish themselves in Australia – not that they faced "competition" from the indigenous population, which is a very different matter. If I'm wrong about this, perhaps you could clarify.

Britain was not the first state to "discover" Australia. Makassan fisherman from Sulawesi, in the Indonesian archipelago, regularly visited the northern and north-western coast from around the middle of the 17th century to collect trepang (sea cucumbers), which had become a popular ingredient in Chinese cookery. These men arrived in significant numbers, several thousand per season, and stayed for 4-6 months at a time in semi-permanent camps on the coast, occasionally even over-wintering. But they were able to establish largely friendly and collaborative relations with the local peoples, who often provided additional labour in season. So friendly were relations, indeed, that a small Aboriginal "colony", made up of adventurous Aboriginal men and women doing what amounted to contract work for ship-masters, existed in Makassar throughout the 19th, and probably the 18th, centuries. I wrote in much more detail about the trepang trade and the Aboriginal colony here. As a result, there was no need for any attempt on the part of the Makassans to forcibly seize land or establish permanent settlements.

With regard to the European side if things, it's plausible (though there is no firm evidence) that Portuguese ships reached the north-western tip of Australia from Timor, a voyage of only 400 miles, during the 16th century, and certain that Dutch ships encountered the north-east tip (the Cape York peninsula) in the first decade of the 17th century, and the southern part of what is now Western Australia in the 1610s and 1620s. The latter encounters were made by chance but the former were explicitly intended to discover whether Australia had resources or trade that were worth exploiting. Later, in 1629, two Dutch sailors who had taken part in the infamous Batavia mutiny, on a small group of islands off the western Australian coast, were intentionally marooned on the mainland as a punishment, but with the idea that a later ship would call for them. These men were instructed to make friends with the local Aboriginal tribes "in order to discover once, for certain, what happens in this land." I wrote at book length about the Batavia, including a chapter about the aftermath of the mutiny and about the two or more Dutch shipwrecks that cast other sailors adrift on the western Australian coast, here.

So the Dutch were certainly potential traders with, or colonisers of, parts of Australia almost two centuries before the British first sent convicts and settlers there. The reason they didn't press on with their exploration was that they had the misfortune to encounter two especially unwelcoming parts of the Australian coast. The Wik peoples of the Cape York peninsula were among the most hostile Aboriginal groups when it came to encounters with Europeans, and at least two Dutch ships lost a significant number of men to attacks by Wik warriors. This, and the fact that no ships touching on the northern coast found any evidence of resources worth trading, deterred further exploration.

The situation on the west coast was if possible even less promising. Dutch ships quite often encountered Western Australia in the period before the development of an effective way of determining longitude at sea. This was because the fastest route on their voyage from Amsterdam to their trading bases in Java involved exploiting the fast current that ran east across the Roaring Forties. If wind and current pushed the dozen or more ships that made this voyage each year west faster than anticipated, they would make a landfall somewhere on the southern part of the western coast. This is one of the bleakest parts of Australia - very sparsely populated, with only two or three small rivers making the ocean and breaking what is otherwise a more or less continuous run of almost 400 miles of vertiginous cliffs, backed by a dry, featureless hinterland, a sight described by one awed Dutch sailor of the 1620s as follows: "The land here appears very bleak, and so abrupt as if the coast had been chopped off with an axe, which makes it almost impossible to land." So unpromising did the prospects of making any money here appear that the Dutch never bothered to send a ship back for the marooned Batavia mutineers, and though Abel Tasman was sent to make a circumnavigation of the Australian continent in the 1640s, he executed his task while staying out of sight of land, other than encountering the southerly island today named for him – Tasmania.

The Dutch, therefore, made no further significant efforts to investigate Australia. We can conclude, then, that one of the main factors that left the continent free for British exploitation was simply luck; the British were the first to encounter the rather more promising stretch of Australian coast in New South Wales, well away from any Dutch landing spots. Even then, however, they saw Australia more as a useful site for a penal colony, designed to drain off the "criminal class" they had exported to the Americas before the American Revolution, than as a potentially lucrative colonial acquisition.

As a post-script, it's worth noting that things did change in the nineteenth century, when the acquisition of colonies became a higher priority for European states, and more organised attempts were made to find worthwhile areas for invasion and conquest. The reason that the British established the Swan River Colony in 1829 and annexed Western Australia was that they feared the French planned to set up a rival administration on the far side of the continent. A French expedition had been sent to explore the area and consider its suitability for exploitation in 1801-03.

Sources

Jaap Bruijn, "Between Batavia and the Cape: shipping patterns of the Dutch East India Company," Journal of Southeast Asian Studies 11 (1980)

George Collingridge, The Discovery of Australia: A Critical, Documentary and Historical Investigation Concerning the Priority of Discovery in Australasia Before the Arrival of Lieut. James Cook in the Endeavour in the Year 1770 (1895)

Femme Gaastra, "The Dutch East India Company: a reluctant discoverer." The Great Circle 19 (1997)

J. E. Heeres, The Part Borne by the Dutch in the Discovery of Australia, 1606-1756 (1899)

James Henderson, Sent Forth a Dove: Discovery of the Duyfken (1999)

Leslie Marchant, France Australe: A study of the French explorations and attempts to found a
penal colony and strategic base in south western Australia, 1503-1826 (1982)

Sure. I'm assuming that you mean historical texts, so here are a few -- but please let me know if you're looking for something else.

There's been a push in Pacific Studies in recent years toward writing broader regional studies, but I'm not really thrilled with any of the ones that have been produced so far.

Matt Matsuda might have done the best of them, although the book is so ambitious that it inevitably leaves a lot out. He wants to connect Oceania to the cultures of the Pacific Rim over a long sweep of time, and I think Pacific Islanders sometimes get lost in the mix. But it's a nice introduction.

I.C. Campbell did a general overview on Pacific history some years ago with some good material, but it's fairly conventional and arguably Euro-centric.

Then there's a recent book by Nicholas Thomas, whose other work is fabulous. There's not much of an argument here, and the focus is almost entirely on colonial contact. But it works reasonably well as a reader on Pacific history, with a bit of information on a lot of different histories. I hope that helps.

You might find some inspiration in open world car racing games. Fuel is the first game that comes to mind, but also the open world side of the Burnout games. The gameplay is literally travel; drive from A to B the fastest you can. And the world is open and various enough to make exploration interesting. It's not exactly what you're talking about, but it's related.

I love the idea of using Polynesian navigation as a jumping off point. The book Vaka Moana has a lot of useful source detail. Also have to work stick charts in the visual presentation somehow.

Any book by Mary Roach- her books are hilarious, random, and informative. I like Jon Krakauer's, Sarah Vowell's, and Bill Bryson's books as well.

Some of my favorites that I can think of offhand (as another poster mentioned, I loved Devil in the White City)

No Picnic on Mount Kenya

Guns, Germs, and Steel

Collapse

The Closing of the Western Mind

What is the What

A Long Way Gone

Alliance of Enemies

The Lucifer Effect

The World Without Us

What the Dog Saw

The God Delusion (you'd probably enjoy Richard Dawkins' other books as well if you like science)

One Down, One Dead

Lust for Life

Lost in Shangri-La

Endurance

True Story

Havana Nocturne

Pidgin is a legitimate language on its own, although it is certainly based on and influenced by English. It’s a creole language, not a dialect. It’s not actually a pidgin because those are by definition not spoken by anyone as a first language, whereas Pidgin is a complete language learned by people from birth.

Here’s a web page from UH on Pidgin. Notice the term “Hawaiʻi Creole” and not “Hawaiian Creole”; it’s from Hawaiʻi but not really based on Hawaiian. There’s also a paper on Pidgin and education in Hawaiʻi by Da Pidgin Coup, a group of linguists at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa who study Pidgin.

Sakoda and Siegel have a nice little introductory grammar. The first couple chapters are good background info that addresses your questions and more. If you’re in Hawaiʻi you should be able to find this in any of the UH bookstores as well as some other places. Try read em.

Al Schütz also has an excellent book Voices of Eden which is a detailed history of the Hawaiian language. It includes some discussion of Pidgin and the earlier Hawaiian-based pidgin which was replaced by Pidgin.

Read Killing Keiko its an amazing read for anyone who thinks that "setting all the whales free" is a simple option. A must read for anyone who cares about whales under human care. Everyone I know in the marine mammal community has a copy.

They don't have anything to do with Canadian politics specifically but two very interesting books that I just finished.

1. Origins of Political Order, Francis Fukuyama
   
   
2. The World Until Yesterday, Jared Diamond
   
   Diamond's new book has opened my eyes on the value which traditional societies can provide to modern one's today. A really thought provoking book. Fukuyama is one of my most trusted authors on topics including sociology and historical development, the book focuses on political institutions and their development specifically through China and the Middle East (because that was where it all started).

> The Maoris were left alone for decades as they gradually had extended contact with Europeans, and were eventually approached by the British when that contact turned abusive in the 1840s to accept British sovereignty in exchange for British protection.

Its not really that simple

Maori is a strongly tribal culture (tribes are called Iwi), and in response to British fears of French settlement, the United tribes of NZ were set up, and declared their independence as an entity to have formal contact with the crown. This lead to the writing and signing of the Treaty of Waitangi - which was written in two versions Maori and English. The two versions are vastly different, (and many maori cheifs did not have written communication skills as Maori is originally a spoken language). Many signed the treaty on the understanding of what was explained to them, and signed with the shape of their Iwi moko (tattoo) The two versions are arguably very different. Anyway, the treaty initially led the way to willing sale of land by maori, but eventually maori became less willing to sell - but the demand for land was increasing as more settlers arrived (in some cases buying their land before they left England) the government engaged in some less than ethical land transfer, in some cases "buying" from people who did not own the land they sold (maori are a tribal culture, arguably they assume "guardianship" (Kaitiatitanga) rather than property, land is collectively "owned" if you will. This was the benining of the Maori Land Wars, (which apparently is where the brittish got the idea of "trench warfare used in WWI) but also included the Parihaka maori Peace resistance..

For anyone interested, could I recommend The penguin history of New Zealand by NZ historian Michael King
, it should be required reading for every Kiwi.

As a fan of Path of Exile, I recommend

Paradise in Chains by Diana Preston

https://www.amazon.com/Paradise-Chains-Bounty-Founding-Australia/dp/1632866102

And

For The Term of His Natural Life by Marcus Clarke

https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/1519465823/ref=mp_s_a_1_4?ie=UTF8&qid=1518773049&sr=1-4&pi=AC_SX236_SY340_QL65&keywords=Marcus+Clarke&dpPl=1&dpID=51PJ1nJ6PlL&ref=plSrch


Or in the spirit of Abyss League

Lovecraftian or SCP Foundation writings

First, for a proper, basic understanding of what makes people happy on the most fundamental level, and what social structures support that best, I think anthropology is a good place to start. I recommend The World Until Yesterday by Jared Diamond, which is an overview of modern primitive societies suggesting the social structures humans evolved. The idea is that anything contrary to the evolved structure risks being contrary to the human organism itself, and thus can be a cause of stress. Specifically, daily life in "Western, educated, industrial, rich, and democratic" (WEIRD) societies is in fact an aberration compared to how we evolved to live.

Obviously, any return to primitivism would be absurd, so next you would want to look into sociology, political science, psychology, and any number of other sciences to figure out how to apply just the benefits of primitive social structures in a modern, progressive, open society manner that guarantees human rights and diversity.

Personally, I think that the way humans will organize themselves in the future, assuming we even survive the next few centuries, will be a global network of massively distributed communities, each small in population and run via direct democracy, which is reminiscent of tribal social structures, but with all the benefits of the modern Internet, technology, medicine, science, etc.

Edit: mobile app messed up the formatting

It's out of print, but if you have a Kindle look out for John Birmingham's Leviathan. It's probably the best popular general history of Sydney.

Looks like a good read. I finished The Brotherhoods recently, which wasn't bad. (link goes to Amazon)

It tries to be pretty neutral, but the guy was riding with some pretty heavy people, so it's slanted in favour of bikers really.

Interestingly enough, when you try to visit the author's site (Authur Veno dot com) it has been compromised and tries to redirect you to a site hosting malware. I wonder if that is because he pissed someone off. That is not the link I posted above, by the way.

If you can get a hold of this book;

leviathan: the unauthorised biography of Sydney

There is a huge chunk in there, devoted to Bligh, The rum rebellion and the nature of power in Sydney.

Not to mention it's a fantastic balls n all history of Sydney.



>My man points about various realms of Polynesia and Micronesia being better off before European conquests stand, though.

Oh I completely agree with that.

As an Australian, I am constantly annoyed at the condescending, paternalistic attitude we take towards the pacific islands.

In that case, if you want to explore the subject further, the books of James Churchward I mentioned earlier are a good place to start.

This link will tell you a bit about him. You can find a Kindle edition of his first book about Lemurea (which he called 'Mu'—hence the use of the word by the pop group video you posted a link to) on Amazon: The Lost Continent of Mu. His other books are still available in various editions, new and second-hand.

I hope that's of help?

I recently took a cross country flight and was reading "The Lost Continent Of Mu" by James Churchward. Fascinating book, but I was particularly struck by how he allowed his own bias into his descriptions of the perfect society of Mu.

There are many things he made clear he didn't know, but he was sure to (multiple times) let the reader know that among this great society of equals, the WHITE MEN were the rulers.

Read that a last sentence a few times. And now you know how 'history' works. He's discussing a society that generated the sum total of ancient art and mythology by interpreting dead languages from literal stone tablets... but he still couldn't imagine a society where men ruled as true equals.

If you want to learn more about this incredible story, I highly recommend Batavia's Graveyard by Mike Dash. It gives an amazing amount of insight into the events preceding the horror of the voyage as well.

And yeah, how is there not a movie about this yet.

Non-fiction for sure. I do really like history but sometimes its just too dense. I like to switch it up with non-fiction (or some sci-fi) that are kinda self-contained and only relate tangentially to larger events or just a lighter biography. Thinking Shadow Divers, The lost city of Z, Lost in Shangri-La, At Ease - Eisenhower or An American Doctor's Odyssey

This is a great book if you want to know more!

https://www.amazon.com/We-Navigators-Ancient-Landfinding-Pacific/dp/0824815823

Batavia's Graveyard is about a mutiny on one of the Dutch East India Company's ships in the 17th century. I loved the book and never want to get on a boat ever again!

Michael King wrote a great book, the Penguin History of New Zealand

For non-fiction that reads like fiction, check out Lost in Shangra-la . It is amazingly well researched.

As an addendum to this, I would strongly recommend the book Batavia’s Graveyard: The true story of the mad heretic who led history’s bloodiest mutiny by Mike Dash also known as u/mikedash for a very engaging and comprehensive academic book about this incident and the people involved in it.

It is very dry and info-dense, but I highly recommend reading We The Navigators.

It details a wide range of navigation and landfall techniques used by pre-western contact Pacific Islanders.

I used to really dislike Sydney, then I grew to love it for (rather than despite) all of its foibles. It's a mean, crass, dirty town and that's why it'll always be so close to my heart. Read Leviathan, The Unauthorised Biography of Sydney sometime.

Here are some links for the product in the above comment for different countries:

Amazon Smile Link: Batavia's Graveyard


|Country|Link|
|:-----------|:------------|
|Spain|amazon.es|
|Mexico|amazon.com.mx|
|France|amazon.fr|
|Germany|amazon.de|
|Japan|amazon.co.jp|
|Canada|amazon.ca|
|Australia|amazon.com.au|
|Italy|amazon.it|




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this one was a good read.

Batavia's Graveyard is a good read about this event.

Leviathan by John Birmingham is a good read: http://www.amazon.com/Leviathan-The-unauthorised-biography-Sydney/dp/0091842034

There's a great book called "lost in Shangri-La" about this.

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Shangri-Survival-Adventure-Incredible/dp/0061988359

Try this one and you have a little left over for something else.

http://www.amazon.com/Lost-Shangri-Survival-Adventure-Incredible/dp/0061988340/ref=amb_link_356763542_3?pf_rd_m=ATVPDKIKX0DER&pf_rd_s=center-6&pf_rd_r=1PH8N1KYP59FYZXACN4Q&pf_rd_t=101&pf_rd_p=1313957462&pf_rd_i=283155

You need to read this book: https://www.amazon.com/We-Navigators-Ancient-Landfinding-Pacific/dp/0824815823

Lost in Shangri-La?

The Polynesians were masters of navigating the open ocean, the Summer Islanders are partly based on them. Along with celestial navigation, they could read the ocean currents and the sky (reflections on clouds) for clues that land could be nearby over the horizon.

We The Navigators: The Ancient Art of Landfinding in the Pacific

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We,_the_Navigators

https://www.amazon.com/We-Navigators-Ancient-Landfinding-Pacific/dp/0824815823

Bruce Chatwin is my fav... here are thoe ones I've read thusfar....

In Patagonia




The Songlines

On the Black Hill


Utz

http://www.amazon.com/Leviathan-unauthorised-biography-John-Birmingham/dp/0091842034

Evolutionary there's advantage in exterminating males (including male children) and abduct and rape the females during wars.

See e.g. http://www.amazon.com/The-World-Until-Yesterday-Traditional/dp/0670024813 for a description of an environment we've evolved to fit into.