This is an English summary of the mandatory chapters to be read from the book 'Guns, Germs And Steel' by Jared Diamond. Contents: preface, prologue, chapter 4-7, 11, epilogue.
Argument Summary for Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond
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JARED DIAMOND - GUNS, GERMS AND STEEL. A SHORT HISTORY OF EVERYBODY
FOR THE LAST 13,000 YEARS
Preface - Why is the world history like an onion?
- Narrowly focused accounts of world history suffer from three disadvantages
1. Increasing numbers of people are interested in other societies besides those
of Western Europe
2. A history limited to developments since the emergence of writing cannot
provide deep understanding of the shaping of the modern world
3. A history focused on western Eurasia societies completely bypasses the
obvious big question: ‘Why where those societies the ones that became
disproportionately powerful and innovative?’
- The world history is an onion of which the modern world constitutes only the surface,
and whose layers are to be peeled back in the search for historical understanding.
Prologue - Yali’s question
- ‘Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New-
Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?’ - This book attempts to
answer Yali.
- Why did wealth and power become distributed as they now are, rather than in some
other way? For instance, why weren’t the Native Americans, Africans and Aboriginal
Australians the ones who decimated, subjugated. or exterminated Europeans and
Asians?
- Push back the question: A.D. 1500, when Europe’s worldwide colonial
expansion was just beginning, peoples on different continents already differed
greatly in technology and political organization. Political and technological
differences were the immediate cause of modern world’s inequalities. How,
though, did the world get the way it was in A.D. 1500?
- Push back the question (archaeological discoveries): Until the end of
the last Ice Age, around 11.000 B.C., all peoples on all continents
were still hunter-gatherers. Each new development appeared earlier
in Eurosia than elsewhere. Rephrase the question ↓
- Why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents?
- This book is not only for academic interest, but also overwhelming practical and
political importance.
- Objections to discussing this questions at all:
- If we succeed in explaining how some people came to dominate other people,
may this not seem to justify the domination? (A: Question confuses an
explanation of causes with justification or acceptance of results)
- Doesn’t addressing Yali’s question automatically involve a Eurocentric
approach to history, a glorification of western Europe, and an obsession with
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