Why Did Europeans Dominate the World? A Short History of Civilization (1999)

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Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies is a 1997 transdisciplinary nonfiction book by Jared Diamond, professor of geography and physiology at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). In 1998, it won the Pulitzer Prize for general non-fiction 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. The book attempts to explain why Eurasian civilizations (including North Africa) 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. Diamond argues that the gaps in power and technology between human societies originate in environmental differences, which are amplified by various positive feedback loops. When cultural or genetic differences have favored Eurasians (for example, written language or the development among Eurasians of resistance to endemic diseases), he asserts that these advantages occurred because of the influence of geography on societies and cultures, and were not inherent in the Eurasian genomes. Diamond was not the first to argue that environmental factors had a decisive influence on human history. In the late 1850s Henry Thomas Buckle sought to discover laws that governed history, and wrote that favorable climate and soils, and the plentiful food they produced, were important contributors to a population's accumulation of wealth. He believed that freedom from natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods made people less prone to superstition and therefore more likely to make rapid intellectual progress.[7] In the 1930s, the Annales School in France undertook the study of long-term historical structures by using a synthesis of geography, history, and sociology. Scholars examined the impact of geography, climate and land use. Although geography had been nearly eliminated as an academic discipline in the USA after the 1960s, several geographically based historical theories were published in the 1990s.[8] In addition, environmental history has arisen as a field taking account of man's activities in nature. Critics of the book argue that it is derivative of the work of such cultural evolutionists as Leslie White, Julian Steward, and Ester Boserup, who analyzed the relationship between agriculture, economic and political growth; and such historians as William McNeill and Alfred Crosby, who analyzed the relationship between agriculture, European expansion, and disease. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guns,_Germs,_and_Steel