Guns, Germs, and Steel

Why did history unfold so unequally? Why did some peoples develop guns, steel tools, and the writing and states that let them conquer others, rather than the other way around? In Guns, Germs, and Steel, physiologist and geographer Jared Diamond sets out to answer a question posed to him by a New Guinean friend named Yali, and in doing so offers a sweeping, cross-disciplinary account of the last thirteen thousand years of human history.

Diamond's central argument is that the broad patterns of history were shaped not by differences in the peoples themselves but by differences in their environments — above all the availability of domesticable plants and animals, and the orientation and geography of the continents. Societies with early agriculture developed denser populations, resistance to epidemic diseases, and the technologies and political organisation that accompanied food surpluses; those advantages, accumulated over millennia, produced the inequalities of the modern world.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Guns, Germs, and Steel is an ambitious and widely debated synthesis of geography, biology, linguistics, and anthropology — a book that reframes world history as a question of ecology rather than of innate difference.