TOW #12 IRB Post: Guns, Germs, and Steel by Jared Diamond

        How did Europeans dominate the globe, stretching their empires from the tip of South America to the islands of Polynesia? Why did the Europeans dominate the world? Why couldn't it have been the Africans or the Aztecs? Jared Diamond, a renown biologist and author, sought to answer these questions. In his book Guns, Germs, and Steel, Diamond uses an anecdote and pictures to show that Europeans did not dominate the world through chance or through higher intellect, but through the environmental and geographical advantages the Europeans had.

       The entire book starts with "Yali's Question." Yali, a man from New Guinea working for independence from Australia a the time, met with Diamond. They discussed politics and civil issues until Yali posed the 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?" (14) This simple question not only speaks to New Guinea but to every conquered population in the world. The fact that whites dominated the world was true. This idea was the inspiration for Guns, Germs, and Steel, and is the question posed throughout the entire book. Diamond answers this question by bringing it to three things: guns, germs, and steel. The environmental advantages the Europeans had were the reason they were such successful conquerors, and this hypothesis all started from a New Guinean man's question.

     Diamond also uses pictures in order to create a understanding of different cultures and explains things through visual rhetoric for easier digestion. The two most prominent types of pictures Diamond uses are pictures of different people from different cultures and pictures of the earth its human populations. By showing pictures of people, Diamond can allow an understanding of the different cultures ranging from a French president to an Aboriginal Australian tribe member to a Japanese emperor. The pictures of the earth are used to support and strengthen Diamond's argument that it was geographical reasons that Europeans dominated the world. By showing the placement of different civilizations and populations around the world, the reader can see the history taking place, often a much simpler and easier task than reading.