Guns, Germs, and Steel

The book begins with a question from Yali, a local politician Diamond met in New Guinea: why had Europeans brought so much cargo to New Guinea, while his own people had so little? Diamond takes the question seriously and widens it. Why did wealth and power end up distributed as they are, and why did Spanish soldiers led by Francisco Pizarro capture the Inca emperor Atahualpa at Cajamarca in 1532, and not the reverse?

His answer works backward through layers of causes. The immediate ones were guns, steel weapons, horses, ships, writing and, above all, diseases such as smallpox that devastated people who had never met them. Behind those, he argues, lay the beginnings of farming. Some regions, especially the Fertile Crescent, happened to have wild plants and large animals that could be domesticated. Farming produced food surpluses, dense populations, specialists, states and germs passed on by livestock. Eurasia's long east-west axis also let crops and ideas spread across similar climates, while the Americas and Africa, running north to south, made that harder.

Detailed and occasionally slow, but full of memorable examples. About 480 pages. Winner of the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.