Summary Of Guns Germs And Steel

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Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond discusses the past 13,000 years, and answers many questions posed by historians, and particularly a question posed by a New Guinean politician by the name of Yali, whom Jared Diamond had met by chance in 1972. Yali had asked Diamond, “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 question inspired many others, such as why Europeans and Asians dominated all other cultures instead of vice versa, and why wealth and power were distributed the way it was. Jared Diamond’s book answers these questions by using several major themes that are valuable to understanding our world’s history, including conquest, the development …show more content…
In chapter 2, A Natural Experiment of History, the story of the Maori people enslaving and killing the Moriori people in 1835 on an island 500 miles from New Zealand is detailed. A larger, more powerful group like the Maori overtaking a smaller, more docile one such as the Moriori is not strange to us. In fact, conquest is very frequent in world history. However, it is not always the larger group that conquers the lesser one. The entirety of chapter 3, Collision at Cajamarca, is dedicated to depicting the story of how Francisco Pizarro, a Spanish conquistador, captured Incan emperor Atahuallpa using only 168 soldiers, while Atahuallpa had over 80,000 men. This was greatly attributed to Pizarro’s men being equipped with cavalry and better weapons. After their win in Cajamarca, Pizarro and his men went on to Jauja, Vilcashuaman, Vilcaconga, and the Inca capital Cuzco, where they had similar success, which were made possible due to smallpox brought by Spanish settlers. This epidemic caused a civil war after which the Incas were divided and weak. The title of Guns, Germs, and Steel is derived from the factors that allowed Pizarro and many Europeans to conquer Native Americans instead of vice versa; “military technology based on guns, steel weapons, and horses; infectious diseases endemic in Eurasia; European maritime technology; the centralized political organization if European states; and writing” …show more content…
Hunter/gatherers dominated the world up until about 11,000 years ago when countries began food production, which Jared Diamond described as “domesticating wild animals and plants and eating the resulting livestock and crops” on page 86 of Guns, Germs, and Steel. However, not everyone adapted to become farmers at the same time or in the same way. While the Chinese developed it on their own, the Egyptians were inspired by their neighbors. Some cultures, like the Aboriginal Australians, never acquired this superior form of obtaining food. consequently, if and when continents began farming contributes to their diverging
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