Guns, Germs, and Steel

Synonyms

Civilization division; Development of civilizations; Evolutive competitions of civilizations; History of civilizations

Definition

Comprehensive historical analysis of how environmental pressures shaped the development of the societies, playing a key role in the supremacy of the Eurasian peoples, aided by weapons, germs, and steel.

Introduction

Guns, Germs, and Steel, written by Jared Diamond, was published in 1997. The book attempts to answer Yali’s question, a New Guinean who quizzed him about how Europeans had colonized New Guinea within 200 years and why they developed so much goods, but they had little goods of their own. By historical explanation, the book intents to understand the interactions among disparate people and how it shaped the modern world through the reverberations of conquest, epidemics, and genocide. The history’s broadest pattern question is why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents.

One of its main ideas is that all...