Guns, Germs, and Steel
1997 essay by Jared Diamond
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (subtitled A Short History of Everybody for the Last 13,000 Years in Britain) is a 1997 transdisciplinary nonfiction book by the American author Jared Diamond. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian and North African civilizations have survived and conquered others, while arguing against the idea that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of Eurasian intellectual, moral, or inherent genetic superiority.
It received widespread recognition in the popular science market for its interdisciplinarity, combining insights from biology, geography, anthropology, and history. In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and the Aventis Prize for Best Science Book. A documentary based on the book, and produced by the National Geographic Society, was broadcast on PBS in July 2005.
Synopsis
The prologue opens with an account of Diamond's conversation with Yali, a Papua New Guinean politician. The conversation turned to the differences in power and technology between Papua New Guineans and the Europeans who dominated the region for two centuries, differences that neither of them considered due to European genetic superiority. Yali asked, using the local term cargo for inventions and manufactured goods, "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 realized the same question seemed to apply elsewhere: "People of Eurasian origin ... dominate ... the world in wealth and power." Other peoples, after having thrown off colonial domination, still lag in wealth and power.
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