Jared Diamond's 1997 Pulitzer Prize-winning account — arguing that Eurasian civilizations came to dominate the world because of geographic advantages (domesticable crops and animals, east-west axis allowing diffusion, resulting crowd disease immunity) not racial superiority — the foundational text of big history.
Creates the geographic explanation of civilizational inequality — Guns, Germs, and Steel provides the most evidence-based rebuttal to biological determinism available in popular form: Eurasian dominance follows logically from geography without invoking racial difference; the argument became the standard response to civilizational inequality questions.
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