Prof Andrew Jotischky – A Long View of History
Jared Diamond, Guns, Germs and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies is a book written by a scientist specialising in evolutionary biology, but it asks fundamentally important questions about the human past.
The central question he poses is why Europe colonized the New World, Africa and the Pacific, rather than the other way around. Beginning in prehistory but sweeping through to our own age via the early modern ‘Columbian Exchange’, Diamond explains the historical relationship between food production, the domestication of animals and the development of culture and technologies. It’s a hugely ambitious, confident and very readable book that will inspire you to think about History in a completely different way.
Three questions to consider:
- How does Diamond explain the divergence between different regions of the world?
- How much do differences in technology shape the development of different societies?
- What are the pros and cons of efforts to write a grand sweeping history of the human past? What gets left out of this kind of story, and how might a historian look at things differently?
