There’s a question in the history profession that if sufficiently answered could not only reshape how we conceive ourselves, but reveal the best course of action for politics around the world. What makes the West strong? While there are many answers, the most popular of these has been Jared Diamond’s "Guns Germs and Steel." You’ll see his argument all over the place, including a NatGeo documentary. But of course it has its detractors, to the point that some historians consider it pseudohistory. Now I think that’s going too far, but there are enough problems with his thesis that we can’t take it as the final answer to these questions. So let’s talk about that.

errata
10:32 not "Blaut's theory" but "Diamond's theory" (thx PunkSci)

Check out the #ProjectAfrica playlist:    • Project Africa  
Mr. Beat's video:    • Burundi and Rwanda Compared  
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references:
James M. Blaut, Eight Eurocentric Historians: The Colonizer’s Model of the World, Volume Two (New York: The Guilford Press, 2000), 149172. https://amzn.to/2YFt0iQ

Michael C. Campbell and Sarah A. Tishkoff, "African Genetic Diversity: Implications for Human Demographic History, Modern Human Origins, and Complex Disease Mapping," Annual Review of Genomics and Human Genetics 9 (22 September 2008): 403433.

Jared Diamond, Guns Germs and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies (New York: WW Norton, 1997). https://amzn.to/2GK6AqI

Martin W. Lewis and Karen E. Wigen, The Myth of Continents: A Critique of Metageography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). https://amzn.to/2H0ylv7

Richard York and Philip Mancus, “Diamond in the Rough: Reflections on Guns, Germs, and Steel,” Human Ecology Review 14, no. 2 (2007): 157162.

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