This post seems to be riddled with inaccuracies and misleading statements. I'll just name a few here, since documenting all of them would take more time than I'm willing to spare.

For most of history, China was the center of civilization. It had the biggest cities, the most complex government, the highest quality manufacturing, the most industrial capacity, the most advanced technology, the best historical records and the largest armies. It dominated East Asia at the center of an elaborate tribute system for a thousand years.

This is simply false. China sometimes had the biggest cities and sometimes did not. In the early Roman imperial period, for example, the biggest cities in the world were Rome, Alexandria, Seleucia and Luoyang. Only one of those cities was in China. The same pattern holds later in history also; for example, at the height of the Abbasid Caliphate Baghdad was the biggest city in the world, at the height of the Ottoman Empire Constantinople was the biggest city in the world and so on.

It's also a big stretch to say that China "dominated East Asia" for a thousand years. Sometimes China was dominant, sometimes it was not.

Western Europe was a backwater's backwater. It had few cities. Most people lived on the countryside. Technology regressed after the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

There's no evidence for the claim that technology regressed after the fall of Western Rome. There were not as many big cities in Europe as there were in the time of Western Rome, but where do you get the impression that technology went backwards in this period?

The technical reason Britain won was the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution started in Britain. Guns and ships require lots of iron. The Industrial Revolution gave Britain the best guns and the best ships.

This is misleading at best. In most cases the reason European armies were able to defeat local armies was not that the locals lacked the equipment the Europeans had; indeed they could buy that equipment from Europeans on the open market! Both sides in the Taiping rebellion were armed with modern equipment for the time, for example. Especially when it came to land battles, the reason European armies were superior was for organizational reasons. They were better led, individual soldiers were better trained and more capable, soldiers were better able to coordinate their actions with each other, et cetera.

This is still true, by the way: the United States and Saudi Arabia often use the very same equipment for their military since the Saudis buy the equipment from the US, but if the US army actually had to fight the Saudi army the Saudis would lose without even putting up much of a fight. That's what happened when the UK went to war with China in 1839.

Britain started the Opium Wars right after the China had just finished fighting both sides of multiple civil wars including the Taiping Rebellion and the Dungan Revolt.

This is incorrect. The Taiping Rebellion began in the early 1850s, while the First Opium War (as you cite in your post) began in 1839 and ended in 1842. Ditto for the Dungan Revolt, it occured well after the end of the First Opium War.

European hegemony was caused by the Industrial Revolution was caused by high labor value relative to material costs was caused by discontiguous empires was caused by long-range trade.

This explanation clearly would have been extremely unpersuasive ex ante, so there's no reason for us to take it seriously ex post unless we somehow got a lot of detailed evidence about all the causal links mentioned in this speculation. We didn't get any such evidence, so this explanation should just be dismissed unless someone can give a stronger argument for it.

What I don't like about this post is that everything in it is stated as fact, while at best it consists of implausible speculation (at worst of outright falsehoods).

Jared Diamond makes a persuasive case for

Note that GGS is considered very poorly by historians as far as I understand, see e.g. this AskHistorians comment:

The quick and dirty answer is that modern historians and anthropologists are quite critical of, if not borderline/outright hostile to, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Put bluntly, historians and anthropologists believe Diamond plays fast and loose with history by generalizing highly complex topics to provide an ecological/geographical determinist view of human history that, in the end, paradoxically supports the very racism/Eurocentricism he is attempting to argue against. There is a reason historians avoid grand theories of human history: those "just so stories" don't adequately explain human history.

Given our natural tendency to avoid speaking with authority on topics outside our expertise, academic analysis of GG&S is somewhat wanting. To work around this issue, /u/snickeringshadow and I constructed several point by point refutations in another history-related community. I will quote a bit from both analyses because they illustrate many of the critical issues permeating GG&S, though I'll just discuss three of the issues.

First, Diamond notoriously cherry-picks data that supports his hypothesis while ignoring the complexity of the issues.

In his chapter "Lethal Gift of Livestock" on the origin of human crowd infections he picks 5 pathogens that best support his idea of domestic origins. However, when I dived into the genetic and historic data, only two pathogens (maybe influenza and most likely measles) on his hand-picked All Star team could possibly have jumped to humans through domestication. The majority were already a part of the human disease load before the origin of agriculture, domestication, and sedentary population centers. Diamond ignored the evidence that didn't support his theory to explain conquest via disease spread to immunologically naive Native Americas.

Also, he cherry-picks history when discussing the conquest of the Inka...

Pizarro's military advantages lay in the Spaniards' steel swords and other weapons, steel armor, guns, and horses... Such imbalances of equipment were decisive in innumerable other confrontations of Europeans with Native Americans and other peoples. The sole Native Americans able to resist European conquest for many centuries were those tribes that reduced the military disparity by acquiring and mastering both guns and horses.

This is just patently false. Conquest was not a simple matter of conquering a people, raising a Spanish flag, and calling "game over." Conquest was a constant process of negotiation, accommodation, and rebellion played out through the ebbs and flows of power over the course of centuries. Some Yucatan Maya city-states maintained independence for two hundred years after contact, were "conquered", and then immediately rebelled again. The Pueblos along the Rio Grande revolted in 1680, dislodged the Spanish for a decade, and instigated unrest that threatened the survival of the entire northern edge of the empire for decades to come. Technological "advantage", in this case guns and steel, did not automatically equate to battlefield success in the face of resistance, rough terrain and vastly superior numbers. The story was far more nuanced, and conquest was never a cut and dry issue, but Diamond doesn't mention that complexity. The Inka were conquered when Pizarro says they were conquered, and technology reigns supreme in Diamond's narrative.

This brings us to a second issue: Diamond uncritically examines the historical record surrounding conquest.

Pizarro, Cortez and other conquistadores were biased authors who wrote for the sole purpose of supporting/justifying their claim on the territory, riches and peoples they subdued. To do so they elaborated their own sufferings, bravery, and outstanding deeds, while minimizing the work of native allies, pure dumb luck, and good timing. If you only read their accounts, like Diamond seems to do, you walk away thinking a handful of adventurers conquered an empire thanks to guns and steel and a smattering of germs. No historian in the last half century would be so naive to argue this generalized view of conquest, but European technological supremacy is one keystone to Diamond's thesis so he presents conquest at the hands of a handful of adventurers.

Finally, though I do not believe this was his intent, the construction of the arguments for GG&S paints Native Americans specifically, and the colonized world-wide in general, as categorically inferior.

To believe the narrative you need to view Native Americans as fundamentally naive, unable to understand Spanish motivations and desires, unable react to new weapons/military tactics, unwilling to accommodate to a changing political landscape, incapable of mounting resistance once conquered, too stupid to invent the key technological advances used against them, and doomed to die because they failed to build cities, domesticate animals and thereby acquire infectious organisms. When viewed through this lens, I hope you can see why so many historians and anthropologists are livid that a popular writer is perpetuating a false interpretation of history while minimizing the agency of entire continents full of people.

Instead of GG&S try...

Restall Seven Myths of the Spanish Conquest

Mann 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

MacQuarrie Last Days of the Inca

And if you would like to hear more about infectious disease spread after contact... Kelton Epidemics and Enslavement: Biological Catastrophe in the Native Southeast, 1492-1715

or this one: 

Yours is a common conundrum. Look through any /r/history thread mentioning Diamond and you will see dozens of people who find our critiques pedantic, and that, in a general sense, Diamond’s thesis makes sense. This is a very difficult attitude to address, because it’s rooted in a fundamental misunderstanding of how social sciences work. The attitude evaluates the ideas of popular authors from a utilitarian, practical approach: if the thesis is useful and helps makes sense of the world, it has value. We researchers take an inductive approach: if your methodology and facts are wrong, your thesis can't be right, no matter how much it "makes sense."

For this reason, I’m kind of sick of talking about Diamond’s theoretical bents and ideologies. The standards by which scholars and the public evaluate them are so different that we have to address an entire epistemological orientation.

But before we get anywhere, let’s start at the very beginning: the central thesis of GG&S:

1. Europeans decisively conquered the Americas
2. with a potent combination of guns, germs, and steel
3. which they had, and the Americans did not, because of several ecological factors.
4. This is why white people have all the “cargo.”

Anthropologists, archaeologists, and historians critique this thesis because numbers 1, 2, and 4 are simply incorrect.

1. The European conquest was hardly decisive. Furthermore, the difference between hemispheres wasn’t all that great.
2. The greatest weapon Europeans had was neither guns nor steel, but native alliances, which you seem to have read about. Similarly, the titular germs were not inherently devastating. Epidemics started after European intervention in the form of slave trades, forced resettlement, or the like. Diamond's depiction of European arrival is mostly incorrect.
3. White people having the “cargo” is a result of colonial practices of the newly globalized world. Colonialists typically worked with local elites to exploit already disadvantaged populations

That leaves us with number 3, which is what I presume you are asking about. How do local mammals, available crops, etc. play into the development of civilizations? The shorthand for this mechanism of historical processes is environmental or geographical determinism. As I’m sure you’ve seen on the sub (if not, do a quick search for “determinism”), there’s dozens of questions that pop up regularly:

• How much does Diamond rely on it? How central is it to his thesis?
• Where do we draw the line between “were able to” and “did?” If Diamond proves the ability to conquer, how does that relate in any way to the actual conquest event?
• What then is the reason the Spanish had ships and the Aztecs didn’t? And so on.

Again, I’m kind of sick of this. I and many other flairs have discussed these questions in good faith with people whose ideas are not going to change, and I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve dug myself into some holes. You’re right. There’s not many books or articles out there that offer a sound, thorough rebuttal of Diamond’s brand of environmental determinism.

And I, for one, couldn’t care less. Why?

I have better things to do than critique explanations for events that never happened.

Let’s suppose I’m reading a lab report from a student. Tommy writes that when he mixed two clear liquids together, a purple solid formed at the bottom of the beaker. Tommy determines that this solid is a chemical called Purple. The report has some figuring to show that the only two clear liquids that combine to form Purple are Chemical A and Chemical B. “Great job!” I write on Tommy’s paper.. and then I turn to the photographs he has attached of the lab. Silly Tommy! The solid in the photos is obviously green, and there are bright yellow bubbles.

I’m now stuck with a dilemma. What do I make of the reaction Tommy’s come up with? Is he a good scientist? There’s sound internal logic in the reaction he has plotted. Chemicals A and B do make Purple when mixed. But at the same time, thinking the solid was purple and missing the bubbles is so outrageously ignorant and unobservant that Tommy obviously has some work to do. Did he even do the experiment?

This is where we stand with Diamond. Just as Chemicals A and B do in fact make Purple, environmental determinism is not inherently a flawed historical mechanism. Abundant, stable, and nutritious fish populations on the Peruvian coast encouraged early sedentism in South America. Close access to obsidian, iron, gold, or other commodities gave many polities trade privileges. Wheels are dumb in mountains. The divergent developments of cultures across seven continents can of course, in some ways, be attributed to their environments- wild seed sizes, protein content centrality, and all.

At the same time, Diamond pins the present state of the world, the difference in “cargo,” on events that never happened. Just as Tommy’s report extrapolated causes from a flawed version of an event, Diamond extrapolates causes for a conquest that didn’t happen. (Let’s not get into the teleological flaws of such histories.) In a world where conquistadors bested Aztecs with with guns and Spanish friars set up missions in communities devastated by plague, Diamond’s arguments would matter. But this is a world where Tlaxcalans bested Aztecs, and Spanish friars set up many failed missions before gaining a foothold and witnessing entirely disrupted populations fall to disease afterwards.

Thus, even if we validate with absolute certainty that the Eurasian continent gave its residents greater contact with domesticated animals, and that larger wild seed sizes were able to support larger urban populations, and that these in tandem gave Europeans a increased resistance to disease it wouldn't matter. History as Diamond describes it still would not have happened. It never did. The given effects did not happen, so we must question the validity of the causes.

If you're arguing that Ross Perot became president in 1992 instead of Bill Clinton, it doesn't matter if you think that Clinton's campaign was sabotaged by the Chinese or that Perot personally changed all ballots to votes for him: he didn't win, so why debate what made him win? In the same way, I'm not going to waste my time critiquing Diamond's brand of environmental determinism because it explains events that never happened.

To provide some resources about your other questions:

• The simplest and most common critique of Diamond is that he’s reliant on environmental determinism exclusively. There are 5000 ways to study history, and choosing just one is never good.
• Beyond Germs which you can pick up for a decent price, dismantles the idea that pre-existing factors caused native depopulation by disease. Diseases killed, yes, but primarily as a result of European practices post-contact. Mass resettlement into compact and unsanitary reduccion towns, disruption and destruction of traditional foodways, abusive forced labor in mines and hacienda plantations, and other factors all enabled diseases to assault an already weakened populace. Resistance had little to do with.
• On a similar note, the most deadly diseases did not originate from domesticated mammals.
• The “unequal development” of Eurasia and the Americas was not that unequal. There’s also no reason to assume they should have followed similar, and most “advanced” things are really just “more European.”
• I would take a look at “World Systems” theory as an idea behind the development of the modern balances of power and wealth.

or this one:

I thought I’d throw in my 2c’s and tell you exactly why I, personally, have issues with Diamond. I’m mainly going to focus on the Conquest of the Americas, because it is my area, and this was also the ‘turning point,’ as identified by Diamond himself.

The big challenge with debating Guns, Germs, and Steel, is that Diamond is not exactly wrong. The points he raises are valid. Disease and technology did play a role in the European domination of the world. The problem is that Diamond makes several basic, let’s call them assumptions, regarding some parts of his argument, especially revolving around agriculture and writing. In addition, there are several points that Diamond completely ignores or dismisses, such as Native disunity and human agency.

Let’s begin with the big set piece, Cajamarca. Diamond uses this set piece as a vehicle to demonstrate his arguments. To him, the Incas are defeated by a combination of technology and literacy. However, his portrayal of the incident is incomplete, and myopic. My first question is, why this incident? Why Cajamarca, and not Otumba, a battle against the Aztecs? This might seem like a bit of a nit-picky question, but the Aztecs were the first major Native American Empire to fall to the Spanish. This war basically created stereotypical views on the clash of culture. However, dealing with the Aztecs would bring up two points that contradict his argument. First, there is the belief that Motecuhzoma mistook Cortes for a returning god. Now, historians have largely dismissed the idea that the Aztecs thought the Spanish gods. However, dealing with the issue brings up the question of human agency. Second, the Conquest of Mexico took place in the midst of an Indigenous civil war, with the Tlaxcalans playing a prominent role in the conflict. Both of these challenge Diamond’s thesis of Environmental Determinism. It doesn’t help that the Aztecs inflicted some serious defeats on the Spanish, most notably La Noche Triste, questioning his technological argument. So he shifts his attention to Cajamarca, where these issues are less noticeable.

As for Cajamarca itself, Diamond makes two big mistakes. First, he presents it as a battle, when it really was not. Atahualpa’s retinue was unarmed and unarmoured. It was less a battle and more of a massacre. At that point the technological difference hardly matters. Second, he makes assumptions about Atahualpa’s intentions, blaming his decision to meet Pizzaro on a lack of a literate culture. Atahualpa could not see the obvious trap because he was not well read enough to know about deception. This view is problematic for several reasons, but the most important here is that it makes assumptions about Atahualpa’s intentions. The truth is, we don’t really know what Atahualpa was thinking. However, I have read some (secondary) sources that imply that Pizzaro and the Inca were discussing rebellions in Peru, and Atahualpa may have thought that Pizzaro was a mercenary offering to fight for him. Unfortunately, I’m not an expert on the Incas, so I’ll leave the guesswork there. Suffice to say, Diamond’s assertion that Atahualpa was ignorant is highly dubious, to say the least.

There are lot of other little things wrong with Cajamarca. For example, Diamond states that Conquistadors wore steel armour (most did not), that Native armour couldn’t protect indigenous warriors (it could), and the idea that technological adaption was restricted to a few indigenous groups, (it was actually pretty common). Basically, Diamond’s demonstrative example is a pretty poor choice. But let’s change tracks here and look at his points more generally.

Guns and Steel:

The easiest part of Diamond’s argument to understand are his technological points. After all, the power of a sword of gun can be demonstrated, tested, measured. However, the issue is much more complicated than it seems. While there is no doubt that Spanish steel swords were effective weapons, the Conquistadors were definitely better off with them, there is the question over exactly how effective they were in practice. The Aztecs for example, had the macahuitl, their obsidian swords. Although not as effective as a steel sword, they were still dangerous weapons that were capable of killing a horse in a single blow. They also came in two-handed varieties, which were longer than Spanish swords. Thus, the Aztecs fought the Spanish on relatively even terms, and it is not clear that the steel (though stronger than obsidian), would have been enough to make up the difference.

A lot of other Spanish weapons were much less clearly advantageous, often having serious limitations. Gunpowder weapons were slow, inaccurate, clumsy, and frequently lacked powder. They were useless in the wet, and noisy. Crossbows were more effective, but suffered from slow fire rates. Native bows were not quite as damaging, but nevertheless, they were still powerful. Furthermore, they could be fired several times for each crossbow bolt. Horse too, often regarded as the Spanish ‘ace up the sleeve,’ were much less effective than reported. Central Mexican warriors often stood their ground against cavalry, even to the point of grapping the riders’ lances. In any case, the Spanish only had a limited supply of these weapons, so it is hard to know if they really had an appreciable effect.

Conversely, Native societies proved far more adaptable than Diamond realizes, both technologically and tactically. Although Diamond is well aware of technological adaptation (he has a whole chapter on it), he tends to downplay it with the Spanish Conquest. Yet, many native peoples, especially Mesoamericans, responded to Spanish technological challenges with technological and tactical innovations of their own. The Aztecs used captured Spanish swords to make pikes to counter enemy cavalry. They also armoured their canoes to protect them against bolts and gunshot. They even attempted to use Spanish crossbows against them. Tactically, they switched to raids, urban warfare, night attacks, and ambushes. Nor were the Aztecs unique. The Mapuche in Chile rapidly adopted Spanish arms, eventually fielding pike and cavalry squadrons in battle. In general, it took less than two decades for Native Americans to be as heavily armed as their European opponents. Obviously, technology was an advantage for the Spanish. But it became less of an advantage every moment of those critical years. Eventually, European technology pulled ahead, but the Conquest of the Americas was already over at that point. Of all the factors, it was probably the least decisive.

Germs:

Germs seems like a slam dunk for Diamond’s arguments, and to be clear, I don’t doubt that Diamond is right here. Diseases did play a major role in the Spanish Conquest. My objection is that Diamond portrays a very simplified narrative. By which I mean he notices the disease, but does not seem to fully realise its consequences. Let’s look at the Inca civil war. Now Diamond certainly acknowledges that the Incas were in the midst of internal strife. Yet he doesn’t use this knowledge to better understand the events of Cajamarca. He seems to regard the Inca civil war as a simple and completed affair, a side show to the Spanish Conquest. Yet, the Inca nobility was still fighting each other when Atahualpa was imprisoned. Atahualpa even had his rival, Huscar, killed despite being a hostage at the time. Atahualpa’s successor himself was assassinated. This may explain why Atahualpa agreed to meet Pizzaro. It may explain why the Inca army did not immediately attack. They didn’t know who was in charge.

A similar pattern occurred in other conflicts, such as the Conquest of the Aztec Empire. The smallpox plague did not just kill Aztecs, it broke apart their political system. The same pattern repeated across the Americas. Native states could never form a coherent defence against Europeans because disease kept undermining their political structures.

But wait, there’s more. The way historians, Diamond, and people more generally, have regarded disease is also kind of problematic. The great plagues are usually viewed as somehow separate, from the rest of the colonization process, even though Europeans are acknowledged to be the ultimate source. However, even as disease facilitated the conquest, the conquest facilitated the germs. Generally, disease was devastating in the short term, but populations, if left alone, could recover in time. Spanish policies, including slave raiding, mission systems, coercive labour, and congregation, prevented this. Famine that resulted exacerbated the plagues, as starving people fell vulnerable to illness. In the US, thousands of Native peoples died as a result of US policies, even if the killer was technically a germ. Those who died in the reservation system were not the victims of virgin soil epidemics, which had long since passed. Colonial policies often created conditions for pathogens to thrive, even if the Europeans had no real control over the bacterium itself. This complicates Diamond’s argument, as this particular problem is rooted in the Colonial experience, and not from the origins of agriculture, as Guns, Germs, and Steel argues.

Books:

One part of Diamond’s argument revolves around the benefit of literacy. Personally, I find this assertion questionable. The first problem is that there is no way to quantify the advantage of writing. Especially as most conquistadors, including Pizzaro himself, were illiterate. Second, how does this argument account for peoples such as the Mongols, who routinely crushed (not just defeated), literate societies. In the context of the Americas, groups like the Mapuche resisted fiercely, despite being supposedly illiterate. Third, many indigenous groups, illiterate or not, used advanced and complex tactics. Fourth, the Inca were literate, using their quipu as a form of book. This argument is weak, and I think should be dismissed.

Agriculture:

Agriculture is an incredibly important part of Diamond’s argument. Yet, even here he makes some critical errors. First, he greatly underestimates the amount of land in the Americas that was under cultivation. Partly, Diamond is a victim of recent archaeological discoveries, which show that Indigenous societies throughout a much larger portion of the Americas (including Brazil, Columbia, and large parts of North America), farmed. Not only that, they were much more connected than Diamond realises, complicating his east/west, north/south argument. However, a bigger problem is that Diamond does not fully understand the nature of agriculture in the Americas. He seems to think that it was less productive and efficient (largely due to animals) than European agriculture. The opposite is true. European agriculture was typically unproductive and underdeveloped, partly because of animals. Using Spain as an example, many Spanish lords preferred to raise stock, including sheep, because it was more profitable than agriculture, using prime agricultural land for their private wealth. Mesoamericans on the other hand used chinampas and wetland agriculture to produce huge food surpluses. The Aztec Empire may have had double the population of Spain.

The Aztecs were not unique in this. High intensity agriculture was practises all over the Americas, including in Peru. In the American South-East Hernando de Soto claimed to have passed through 12 towns in a single day. Even Brazil was filled with densely populated communities. So why is this important? Two reasons. First, it complicates Diamond’s deterministic narrative. After all, if the Americas were ‘blessed’ with superior crops (such as maize and sweet potatoes), then why didn’t this count for more? Second, because it was the introduction of these crops that fuelled a population boom in Early Modern Europe. Maize in particular became an essential part of the diet in the Mediterranean, while the potato became the staple of northern and central Europe. Without these crops, Europe may not have been able to sustain its colonisation of the rest of the world, although I admit this point is debatable. This is a problem for Diamond’s argument, as it implies that one of the key components of European superiority does not rest with the origins of agriculture, but on events that occurred after 1492.

Native Disunity:

Of course, this is only what Diamond talks about. There is also a huge amount that he barely addresses. The main issue here is Native disunity, a topic Diamond dismisses relatively quickly. Fortunately for me, a lot of research has gone into this question, and so I don’t need to belabour it too much. Suffice to say, native assistance, either passive or active, was present at almost every step of the Spanish Conquest and was also a feature of North American colonisation. The most famous example is of course, Tlaxcala, however other groups were just as important. Another example may be the Mohawk in New England. During King Philip’s War, the aforementioned King Philip attempted to recruit the Mohawk as allies. However, the British managed to flip them to their side, by claiming that Philip intended to attack them. The resulting Mohawk attack was the worst defeat Philip ever suffered, and it probably cost him the war. I could list more examples, but enough has been said of this. Diamond barely even tries to explain this away.

Agency and Opportunity:

And this is the most difficult section to talk about. There is a problem with ascribing events to ‘culture’ as such arguments can easily descend into racism. To avoid this, we perhaps should think of these events in terms of circumstances. So how did individuals make their choices, and how did this affect the outcome of European colonisation? Well, Motecuhzoma may be a good person to start with. Why didn’t he respond more aggressively to the Spanish? The general explanation (he mistook Cortes for a god) has long been discredited. Perhaps we should ask, why would he? Motecuhzoma’s Empire was powerful and prosperous, why would he feel threatened by a motely bunch of adventurers. Furthermore, Cortes presented himself as the ambassador from the King of Spain, and so Motecuhzoma treated him as such. On the other hand, the Spanish had a long history of befriending, and then betraying, friendly native lords, which Motecuhzoma couldn’t have known. This came to a head during the Toxcatl massacre, where several thousand unarmed Aztecs, many of them high ranking officials and officers, were slaughtered. The Spanish also seized Aztec nobles as prisoners, only to execute many of them during their flight from Tenochtitlan. These strategies, developed during the early years of the Spanish Colonial enterprise, played a key role in weakening native societies.

In north America, the settlement at Massachusetts was facilitated by Massasoit, leader of the Wampanoag. The Wampanoag had been weakened by disease and subjugated by the Narraganset (again we see a disease having an effect greater than the casualties it caused). To regain his political and economic strength, he allowed the English settle in his territory, so he could control trade with them, a decision that eventually backfired on the Wampanoag.

The problem with the agency argument, is that it contradicts Diamond’s determinism. In theory, though we may never know for sure, it was possible for Indigenous people to make different choices, that would have changed the outcome of the Conquest. If Atahualpa had taken armed men to Cajamarca, maybe his body guard could have put up greater resistance, enough for the Inca to escape, or even defeat the Conquerors. Maybe if Motecuhzoma had sensed the danger posed by Cortes, he could have intervened before it was too late.

Conclusion:

The ultimate problem with Guns, Germs, and Steel, is that it treats the European domination of the globe as a single, albeit drawn out, event, whose outcome was determined more than 10, 000 years ago. The colonisation of the world was not a single process, but lots of little ones, between which the position of Europe to the rest of the world keeps changing. Europe encountered the Americas before it became modern, and was a very different place after the mid-17th century than when colonisation began. Indeed, it was transformed by its colonisation of the Americas. The ‘Europe’ that met the Aztecs was different from the ‘Europe’ that colonised Africa. As a result, it is hard to argue that there was a set group of factors that explained Europe’s eventual victory. The USA defeated the Plains Indians thanks to its population and technology, but these factors were irrelevant during the Spanish siege of Tenochtitlan three and a half centuries earlier. Conversely, native allies and disease were not critical in the defeat of the Sioux or Comanche, while they were all decisive against the Aztecs.

To expand on these points, we are used to the narrative of history pointing to European supremacy, yet there were many times when Indigenous people defeated Europeans, and I don’t just mean in the odd battle, here or there. I’ve already mentioned the Mapuche and how they were never conquered by the Spanish. Well here is an example where Guns, Germs, and Steel did not win. It wasn’t until the 1880s that modern Chile came to dominate Mapuche territory, long after the virgin soil epidemics had ended and the population was fully familiar with European weaponry. A similar set of events played out in Northern Mexico during the Chichimeca War. The nomadic peoples of Northern Mexico defeated the Spanish in a 60 year war and had to be culturally absorbed. Even then, nomadic peoples like the Comanche and Apache plagued New Spain for centuries. This presents an important irony in Guns, Germs, and Steel. The people closest to the Spanish (in terms of technology and society) were ‘easier,’ to defeat than nomadic people who were much further ‘behind,’ them. Diamond’s argument doesn’t really account for this, as it implies that a ‘break in the chain,’ could have changed the outcome, contradicting its essential determinism.

None of this means that Diamond’s points are completely wrong. Disease certainly weakened native societies. Weapons gave Conquistadors some important victories. However, the impact of these factors varied between conflict and over time, and Diamond ignores other critical factors that help explain Europe’s rise.

I think this post presents a plausible explanation for why Europe colonised the world. I think my problem is that there are numerous other explanations with a great deal of supporting literature and argumentation and I don't see much if any engagement with the alternative explanations in this post. In other words, I feel this post is trying to convince me of a certain answer without acknowledging the existence of other answers.

A few more specific thoughts:

Your model of why Europe wins:

• Europe could choose when to fight by virtue of having long range ships = fights China.India at the most opportune times
• Industrialisation => geographically separated empire => more industrialisation due to labour shortages and cheap raw resources
• Christopher columbus = discovery of the new world = colonisation begins

I think there are a few problems with this model. First, long range ships and being able to devote enough resources to fight and win wars half way around the world are stupendous technological feats other civilizations were not capable of. I think you need an explanation for why Europe was first able to do these things while China/Arab states were not.

Secondly, the idea that a colonial empire speeds up industrialisation may or may not be true but a few things don't line up:

• European states without empires also industrialised rapidly
• Britain started industrialising well before it had a substantial empire. in 1740, the "empire" was basically some parts of the US and Canada with negligible economic output compared to the mainland.

Finally, the idea that Columbus was necessary for colonisation to happen is something I'm skeptical of. Yes no discovery of America = no colonization of America but I don't quite see why European colonization of other parts of the world was contingent on columbus.

Also, a few other popular explanations of why Europe pulled ahead:

• Many competing states with a natural geography full of barriers stopping any single empire from forming and dominating = more competition/experimentation = more progress
• Property rights and a strong trader/merchant class with a large degree of influence on government vs religious+millitary rule in the arab world. (Note this doesn't apply to all of europe, more to the UK and netherlands. Doesn't explain the success of other European nations)
• Unique geographic features such as minimal natural disasters, large amounts of arable land, good climate, lots of large animals and good crops => higher pop density => more innovation and growth
• European christianity being in a better state, somewhat de to the reformation, and that having ripple effects throughout society in terms of norms etc...

The technical reason Britain won was the Industrial Revolution. The Industrial Revolution started in Britain. Guns and ships require lots of iron. The Industrial Revolution gave Britain the best guns and the best ships.

See also the post "Why Europe" where historian Bret Deveraux possible factors other than just the industrial revolution that affected Europe having better guns than Asia, e.g.:

Chase notes, very persuasively, that firearms just weren’t a very good answer if your major threat was steppe nomad horsemen. Sure, firearms c. 1800 would do the job, but no one directing resources in 1550 could know that. So societies where the major threat was other agrarian states with big infantry armies invest heavily in firearms while states whose major threats are nomads do so to a lesser degree. Since – in a way no one could realize in 1550 – firearms had the potential for much greater power in the long run, Western Europe (one of the few areas of the belt of complex agrarian societies running over Eurasia that did not have major steppe nomad threats due to Eastern Europe being in the way) found itself, by mostly dumb geographic luck with the ‘killer app’ of the 1600s and following. In short then, Chase argues that Europe’s military advantage (and thus its dominant position) was a consequence of environment – being relatively shielded from regions of Steppe which would give rise to dangerous nomads – which in turn motivated European to embrace the new technology (guns) with greater long-term growth potential. The weakness of the thesis is that other places similarly insulated (namely Japan) didn’t have an indigenous military revolution (though they adopted it enthusiastically when it showed up), while Mamluk Egypt, which in this formulation ought to have been as eager on firearms as the Ottomans very clearly wasn’t for what seem pretty clearly to be cultural reasons (Chase anticipates and attempts to fend off this argument, but it is one of his weaker arguments in an overall excellent book).

His overall view:

my own view of the evidence is something of a hybrid of most of these models explaining the rise of Europe. The rapid European development of firearms-based warfare created a feedback loop in terms of state centralization (cannon and muskets broke the power of the rural nobility, enabling centralization, which enabled more cannon and muskets, repeat until state-building complete then let dry; see Lee, Waging War (2016), ch. 7&9), while the fragmented agrarian state-on-state warfare in Europe encouraged firearm development particularly leading to an uncommonly effective military package (though not an unbeatable one in the 1600s and early 1700s) corresponding fairly substantially to the elements of Parker’s military revolution. That package enabled European states to set up and hold on to port-and-fort toeholds on other continents they might otherwise have lost (though early on, often only at the sufferance of local rulers, a balance of power that shifts almost imperceptibly until it shifts all at once). The networks of global trade and exploitation that created – because empire must be a product of military strength first – in turn fed a second feedback loop, providing the resources for greater intensification of both state power and economic development which then fed into the industrial revolution. The products of that second cycle, emerging in the late 1700s and the early 1800s, at last proved sufficient to overwhelm the large, complex agrarian states of Eurasia which had, up until that point, generally been able to maintain rough parity with Europe.

Mercantilist trade policy compelled the British colonies to send raw materials to the British Isles where they would be turned into manufactured goods to be sold to the colonies. Heavy industry were built in London at the expense of development in the colonies.

In A Farewell to Alms, economic historian Gregory Clark argues otherwise. IIRC he says Britain tried setting up factories in India, but found the workers there too unreliable, so the very inefficient alternative of shipping the materials to the UK then back again as finished goods was a fall-back position.

His wider thesis is that worker productivity was higher in the UK due to cultural and genetic changes which had spread 'middle-class values' down through the population and led (in part) to the Industrial Revolution.

I don't think the facts support the 'discontiguous empire -> peasants can't walk to the capital -> labor shortage' argument. The British Empire had continual migration from Britain to the colonies. Enslaved labor was likewise sent to the colonies.

Rather than a contracted labor supply, I think Britain experienced an increased labor demand due to quickly obtaining huge amounts of arable land (and displacing the former inhabitants rather than subjugating them).

You may also enjoy Why the West Rules - For Now, which also addresses environmental, rather than institutional, factors. As Kaj_Sotala notes, these kinds of books are often entertaining reads but just-so stories.

There is much to discuss here, but I'll just focus on what's missing: Rome. Unless you agree with Donna D2 from TikTok, Rome existed, it's a civilizational ancestor of America, Russia, and Western Europe, and it's an essential part of why Europe conquered the world. 

The Industrial Revolution was just getting started. It hadn't yet exploded into unstoppable exponential growth. The empires of Europe were weaker than the empires of India and China all the way up until the Industrial Revolution.

I haven't heard about the industrial revolution being exponential, and that word gets thrown around a lot now.