Guns, Germs, and Steel :: History, European Dominance

All through history, there is a ubiquitous theme. In life’s perpetual cycle, the Europeans always manage to overshadow the other civilizations. Why is it that the Europeans dominated the other races? Throughout Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond desperately attempts to answer Yali’s question asking â€Å"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† (Diamond, p. 14)? In the Epilogue, Diamond summarizes his answer to Yali’s question essentially attributing the environment for the success of the Europeans and discredits racial superiority of any sort (Diamond, p.405). Although other factors contributed to the rise of the European civilization, the environment was the main factor. Some specific factors falling under environment that affected the European civilization are geography, food production, and diffusion and population. The geography of Europe contributed to its dominance over the other civilizations. The Chinese appeared to have it all. They had a rise of food production, the largest human population in the world, and developed writing and most of all they were unified country (Diamond, p.411). The European coastline was highly indented with five large peninsulas which all evolved independent languages, ethnic groups, and government. China has a much smoother coastline with land that is less scattered compared to Europe (Diamond, p.414). â€Å"Europe’s geographic balkanization† and discord among the states developed hundreds of competing, and ambitious states (Diamond, p.416). States were kept on their toes to try to out due what another state had previously accomplished because they knew â€Å"if one state did not pursue some particular innovation, another did, forcing neighboring states to do likewise or else be conquered or left economically behind† (Diamond, p.416). Chinaà ¢â‚¬â„¢s unification based on geography led to their demise. Their government isolated them from the outside world and rejected all imports including technologies leaving them dramatically underdeveloped in a world of technologies (Diamond, p.416). Food production also affected Europe’s dominance over the other civilizations. As stated in chapter 18, â€Å"the former absence of food production in [the Americas] was due entirely to their local paucity of domesticable wild animals and plants, and to geographic and ecological barriers that prevented the crops and the few domestic animal species of other parts of the Americas from arriving (Diamond, p.356). Domestication of animals varied among the continents because of differences in continental areas and the Late Pleistocene extinctions.