Guns germs and steel - Navigate Obscurity Navigate Obscurity

Why did societies develop in different ways and how did certain societies manage to dominate over others throughout the years? The advantages of the dominators are usually down to guns, germs and steel, but why were not those things equally available across societies? Jared Diamond argues that such inequalities are not caused by qualitative differences amongst the people themselves, but are instead dictated by their environments. From the availability of wild animals and plants for the development of food production that allowed the rise of populations, to the particular geography of a society’s environment that allowed or inhibited contact with others and the transfer of goods, ideas, and diseases, it is these external environmental factors that resulted in the wild societal inequalities we ended up with in the last few centuries.

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