In 's
book , he talks about an encounter he had with a Guinean chief named Yali.
Yali asks the now famous question, "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?" Before we
look into the theory, let's break down the question: what Yali is really asking is why the
Western World ("white people"), which includes Western Europe and the United States,
has better goods, services, and technologies ("cargo") than the rest of the world, for
example, places like Papua New Guinea. This is also a concept known as Western hegemony, or
dominance. Why did Europe become dominant over time and not places like Papua New Guinea?
Diamond writes Guns, Germs, and Steel in part to answer that question, and
the main answer is the concept of geographic determinism.
Geographic determinism, sometimes called environmental determinism, is the idea that
the success of a civilizationwhy it may have more cargois contingent on its
geography. For an article that discusses this, please check out the link below. Diamond and
others in the geographic determinism camp believe that a nation's location on earth, its access
to oceans, raw materials, certain climates, and physical barriers, impacts how it is able to
develop. In the aforementioned and linked article, "Location, Location, Location and How
the West was Won," Professor Ian Morris of Stanford University makes the argument that
because Western Europe was situated on the Atlantic Ocean, and once Atlantic trade overtook the
Silk Road's trade in the 15th century and beyond, it propelled Europe to dominance. Diamond
argues that because Western Europe and the United States enjoy a favorable climate, relatively
few natural barriers (there's not a massive mountain chain blocking off the continent like, say,
the Himalayas in Asia or the Andes in South America), and an even distribution of plant and
animal species, it was able to develop quickly and with interactions between the different
populations.
Diamond makes the argument that on island nations, there was
less interaction, and on continents that run north-south, there is too much
biological diversity and natural boundaries, thus preventing long-distance trade. Proponents of
geographic determinism would use the argument that these factors led the West to gain hegemony
over the rest of the world once technologies like navigational instruments, gunpowder, steam
power, and medicine enabled them to conquer continents.
For more information,
or a nice, quick, visual way of understanding geographic determinism, please check out the video
linked below, which succinctly summarizes Diamond's theory.
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