Devereaux’s quote there is similar to the argument that Diamond puts forward in the epilogue of his book. Diamond argues that the geography of Europe, with lots of mountains and peninsulas, encouraged the formation of lots of smaller countries, while the geography of China encouraged one large empire. So while one emperor could end Zheng He’s voyages, Europe’s geography encouraged the countries to compete and experiment. Columbus was Italian after all, but had to go to the competing kingdom of Spain to fund his voyage.
I agree that that is a harder question! Diamond doesn’t devote a ton of space to it however, the book focuses on Eurasia compared to the Americas/Africa/Oceania, and not really on Europe vs other parts of Eurasia.
My point in bringing it up is not so say necessarily that Diamond is correct, it’s just that if you read Diamond’s critics you might think that half of the book is about Pizarro and half is about Zheng He—when it’s actually mostly about things like the types of grass that cows eat.
I’m just trying to show that we can trust Diamond not to cherry-pick evidence when writing this article about Tasmania.
Thank you for bringing this up—I’m sure that many people have seen those arguments and rate Diamond lower because of them. I have read each of those reddit posts over the years and have disagreements with them, I do not believe that, in it’s entirety, Diamond’s work is characterized by cherry-picking.
I find that arguments against Guns, Germs and Steel tend to be specifically about two chapters of the book, and also knock Diamond for pushing a monocausual explanation instead of a multicausual one.
The first chapter that’s most commonly criticized is the epilogue—where Diamond puts forth a potential argument for why Europe, and not China, was the major colonial power. This argument is not central to the thesis of the book in any way, and Diamond warns the reader that he’s speculating in this chapter, so I’m more than willing to look past it. I’m happy to see that none of the threads you linked to contain this line of attack, but it’s a common one I see online.
The other chapter that’s often the subject of attack is “Collision at Cajamarca” and focuses on Pizzaro’s conquest of the Incans. Again, I don’t think it’s fair to reduce a 400+ page book down to a single chapter. The main issue here is that Diamond seems to take Pizzaro’s account at face value—which I can accept as a valid criticism, but Diamond’s critics take this too far. These arguments downplay how important disease was to Pizzaro’s victory—and in some cases completely deny that Pizzaro and the Spanish won decisively. I see in those posts things like “The European conquest was hardly decisive” and “conquest was never a cut and dry issue”, citing later rebellions against Spanish rule. While it’s true that there were Indian revolts against the Spanish over the remaining centuries, the basic fact is that today they mostly speak Spanish in Peru and they don’t speak Quechua in Spain. I don’t think we can point to a few Indian revolts and claim that civilizations in Eurasia did not have an easier time conquering the New World than vice versa.
The final common argument is that Diamond focuses too much on “geographical determinism” and should instead find a variety of causes. I disagree with that line of thinking for the reasons outlined here.
Diamond’s approach is of the “rock falling down a mountain” genre. It’s much more likely that one big factor favored Eurasia, rather than lots of little things just happened to go their way time and time again. One of the few good arguments against Guns, Germs and Steel that I’ve seen is from LessWrong, and actually argues that in some places Diamond tries to find multiple factors, when in reality there are probably fewer!
In my mind a big portion of this hostility from historians comes from the fact that Diamond is himself, not an historian, and the historians aren’t happy that one of the most famous history books of the past thirty years came from someone outside of their field. You can see this hostility in some of those reddit posts. I don’t think it’s right to dismiss all of their arguments because of this, but I want to point out that they are not unbiased observers.
I would also like to link to this significantly more detailed defense of Guns, Germs and Steel. It does a much better job defending Diamond than I can here.