![]() ![]() ![]() The jokey sub-title of the book is ‘A short history of everybody for the last 13,000 years’ and that summarises Diamond’s approach – which is to find the answer to Yali’s question way back before the beginning of cities, writing or agriculture were dreamed of. In his introduction Diamond calls it ‘Yali’s Question’, after a New Guinea native he knows (Diamond has spent a lifetime studying the birds of New Guinea) and who once asked him: ‘Why did you white people develop so much “cargo” and bring it to New Guinea and we black people have so little “cargo” of our own?’ where ‘cargo’ stands for the full panoply of marvellous inventions the white man brought with him. It won the Pulitzer Prize, sold over a million copies, was universally praised for its skilful interweaving of a wide range of specialisms – biogeography, archaeology, anthropology, molecular genetics, linguistics and more – to answer an apparently ‘simple’ question. ![]() The 1990s saw an explosion of popular science books and Guns, Germs and Steel was one of the classics. We can rephrase the question about the world’s inequalities as follows: why did human development proceed at such different rates on different continents? (p.16) ![]()
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