Guns Germs And Steel Summary

Jared Diamond, uses figurehead Yali, a New Guinean politician, to shape his book, Guns, Germs, and Steel. Yali asks an essential question in which Jared Diamond formulates his work around. “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?” (14). Even though Yali’s question was only relating the differences between the New Guinean and European lifestyles and success, Jared Diamond was able to broaden Yali’s question to examine why the Europeans became so specialized, powerful, and wealthy while other peoples did not. To find the answer to Yali’s questions, Diamond began the book by mapping out the early migrations of people from Africa to all of the other continents, and from there he chose specific societies to focus on (24). Throughout the book, Diamond states his beliefs that the success of a society is not based on intelligence and ingenuity but instead on geography, food production, germs and immunity, the domestication of animals, and the discovery and use of steel. He successfully demonstrates this by comparing the different societies that come from the same ancestand explaining the characteristics that made the Europeans more successful. Diamond explains that it has nothing to do with Europeans genes or being more intellectual but instead it …show more content…
As stated, the reasons there was inequality in development among the societies is because of the technology advancement which is where steel comes from leading to advanced weaponry, where the words Guns come from, and also from the disease that spread among the societies, which is where Germs comes from. The European societies were able to conquer other societies because of the superior weapons (guns), their immunity to diseases that other societies fell to (germs). And their technology advancement, along with trade and transportation