Pieter Bruegel the Elder, The Harvesters, 1565. The Met, Open Access (CC0)
W.W. Norton
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Why some societies conquered and others were conquered.
$20.00
Available · worldwide delivery
- Author
- Jared Diamond
- Publisher
- W.W. Norton
- Published
- January 2017
- Pages
- 0
- Format
- Paperback
- Size
- Standard
- Language
- English
The Library Essay
Latitude Beat Aptitude
The question came to Jared Diamond from Yali, a New Guinean politician he knew, who asked why Europeans had so much cargo and New Guineans so little. Diamond's answer, worked out across this 1997 book, refuses every explanation from race and finds the causes in geography: which continents happened to hold plants and animals worth domesticating, and whose east-west axis let crops, livestock, writing and immunity to disease travel with them.
The book won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 1998 and has been argued with by historians and geographers ever since, which is the usual fate of a large thesis plainly stated. It remains the most read modern attempt to explain the shape of world history from its starting materials.
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