I offer a simpler criticism of Diamond: the historical commentary doesn’t deal in anything deeper than high-school public education as of the early 2000s, errors and all. This is the root of the “uncritically accepts” complaints. Historians don’t hold him in contempt because he isn’t a historian—it is because he seems not to have even checked the state of historical scholarship at the time of writing, much less seriously engaged with it. The book would have been much better, and much less despised, for the additional effort of one good review or summary article for each topic on colonialism he addressed.
I offer a simpler criticism of Diamond: the historical commentary doesn’t deal in anything deeper than high-school public education as of the early 2000s, errors and all. This is the root of the “uncritically accepts” complaints. Historians don’t hold him in contempt because he isn’t a historian—it is because he seems not to have even checked the state of historical scholarship at the time of writing, much less seriously engaged with it. The book would have been much better, and much less despised, for the additional effort of one good review or summary article for each topic on colonialism he addressed.