American historian at Chicago who wrote The Rise of the West and Plagues and Peoples — arguing that world history must be understood in terms of interaction between civilizations (diffusionism) rather than the independent development of separate societies, and that infectious disease has been as decisive as warfare in determining historical outcomes.
Proposed interaction (not isolation) as the motor of historical change — The Rise of the West argues that civilizations advance through encounters with others, and Plagues and Peoples demonstrated that the encounter between populations with different disease histories determines conquest outcomes more reliably than military superiority.
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