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Guns, Germs, and Steel ::
It seems that the global economic expansion we saw in the 1990’s spawned a newfound interest and wide-ranging discussion of human history. That conversation took the form of articles, debates and books, some of which served to justify or celebrate global domination by a small group of rich nations and irresponsible global corporations, others of which worked to critique and warn against the increasing reach of those companies and kleptocratic governments. While Jared Diamond’s political stance is not particularly discernable in this book, he does provide a very instructive, fair-handed (i.e., non-Eurocentric) explanation for why things turned out the way they did for the many varieties of human societies that populate the globe.
Central to this book is the question: why did some nations wind up with so much of the wealth, while others wound up with so little? Diamond answers these questions with a broad description of human history, and shows that the dominance of some nations over others has much less to do with the innate intelligents and biological gifts of a few chosen people, and more to do with the environments in societies happened to find themselves. Quite simply, some areas of the globe have proven to be more conducive to development than others.
Ultimately, this book does two things. First, it provides a thoughtful and well-supported explanation of why we find ourselves in the current global political state, and second, by showing that dominance of one group of humans over another has everything to do with the environment in which a group of humans develop (or fail to develop), he shows the racism of more traditional conceptions of world history.
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