Ah yes, that comparison makes sense.
The prologue to Guns, Germs, and Steel outlines what Diamond sees as the most common explanations for the differences between peoples, and then uses the rest of the book to show why they are wrong and to offer a different explanation.
... (read more)Probably the commonest explanation involves implicitly or explicitly assuming biological differences among peoples. In the centuries after A.D. 1500, as European explorers became aware of the wide differences among the world's peoples in technology and political organization, they assumed that those differences arose from differences in innate ability. With the rise of Darwinian theory, explanations were recast in terms of natural selection and of evolutionary descent.
Today, segments
Devereaux’s quote there is similar to the argument that Diamond puts forward in the epilogue of his book. Diamond argues that the geography of Europe, with lots of mountains and peninsulas, encouraged the formation of lots of smaller countries, while the geography of China encouraged one large empire. So while one emperor could end Zheng He’s voyages, Europe’s geography encouraged the countries to compete and experiment. Columbus was Italian after all, but had to go to the competing kingdom of Spain to fund his voyage.
I agree that that is a harder question! Diamond doesn’t devote a ton of space to it however, the book focuses on Eurasia compared to the Americas/Africa/Oceania, and... (read more)
Thank you for bringing this up - I'm sure that many people have seen those arguments and rate Diamond lower because of them. I have read each of those reddit posts over the years and have disagreements with them, I do not believe that, in it’s entirety, Diamond’s work is characterized by cherry-picking.
I find that arguments against Guns, Germs and Steel tend to be specifically about two chapters of the book, and also knock Diamond for pushing a monocausual explanation instead of a multicausual one.
The first chapter that's most commonly criticized is the epilogue - where Diamond puts forth a potential argument for why Europe, and not China, was the major colonial... (read 579 more words →)
This is a linkpost for the article "Ten Thousand Years of Solitude", written by Jared Diamond for Discover Magazine in 1993, four years before he published Guns, Germs and Steel. That book focused on Diamond's theory that the geography of Eurasia, particularly its large size and common climate, allowed civilizations there to dominate the rest of the world because it was easy to share plants, animals, technologies and ideas. This article, however, examines the opposite extreme.
Diamond looks at the intense isolation of the tribes on Tasmania - an island the size of Ireland. After waters rose, Tasmania was cut off from mainland Australia. As the people there did not have boats, they... (read 1060 more words →)
I did not intend to imply that historians were writing racist explanations for why Europe was able to colonize most of the world - sorry if that is how it came across! Instead, I believe those views were common among mainstream society. Part of that is because there had not been a cohesive, insightful, and popular alternate explanation.
McNeill is indeed one of the few historians who were investigating this question - and unfortunately I haven't read any of his work. However, I don't think that Jared Diamond was just repeating McNeill's argument because the back of my copy of Guns, Germs, and Steel has this excerpt from a review that McNeill gave... (read 441 more words →)