Guns Germs And Steel

Guns Germs And Steel episode 3: So far, Jared Diamond has demonstrated how geography favoured one group of people – Europeans – endowing them with agents of conquest ahead of their rivals around the world. Guns, germs and steel allowed Europeans to colonize vast tracts of the globe – but what happened when this all-conquering package arrived in Africa, the birthplace of humanity?     Jared’s journey begins on a steam train in Cape Town, designed to carry civilization to the heart of the so-called ‘dark continent’. In the Cape, Jared discovers a landscape and way of life that feels […]

Guns Germs And Steel episode 1: Jared Diamond’s journey of discovery began on the island of Papua New Guinea. There, in 1974, a local named Yali asked Diamond a deceptively simple question: Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo, but we black people had little cargo of our own??     Why were Europeans the ones with all the cargo? Why had they taken over so much of the world, instead of the native people of New Guinea? How did Europeans end up with what Diamond terms the agents of conquest: guns, germs and steel? It