Guns Germs And Steel Thesis

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Yali, a politician who was a native inhabitant of New Guinea, became an acquaintance of Jared Diamond when Diamond visited New Guinea in 1972 to work on his study of birds. During their time spent together discussing “the rapid pace of political developments” (Diamond 14), Yali asked one of the most controversial questions about history: “‘Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?’” (Diamond 14). After 25 years, Diamond developed a thesis as an answer to Yali’s question in his 1997 book Guns, Germs, and Steel: Rather than racial or biological differences, it was mainly the differences in physical geography of different civilizations, such as the east-west …show more content…
However, Diamond’s thesis in Guns, Germs, and Steel is erroneous because it was mainly the inventions of the Industrial Revolution, particularly the steam engine and the cotton gin, that really separated the European West from the rest of the world and enabled European global domination. Diamond presented the causes of European global domination in his thesis as relating to the varying physical geographies of different continents. According to his thesis in Guns, Germs, and Steel, the continents had different abilities to generate food surpluses and, therefore, enabled agricultural societies to increase food production and develop technologies, leading to the development of more complex societies. The “geographic and ecological barriers to diffusion of technology were less severe in Eurasia than in other continents” because of its east-west axis (Diamond 262). Diamond stated that the east-west axis of Eurasia contributed to the rapid spread of domesticated plants and animals, further agriculturally and technologically advancing sedentary societies. However, it cannot be entirely concluded that this was how Europe dominated the rest of the world, because he is referring
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