Starting off by attempting to answer a question posed by Yali, a Papuan, about why Europeans had more cargo than his countrymen, the book seeks to explain why Eurasian civilizations as a whole had survived and conquered others. This it does while firmly refuting the belief that Eurasian hegemony is due to any form of inherent European intellectual or genetic superiority.

Sweeping in its scope, as the alternative title — A short history about everyone for the last 13,000 years — suggested by the author proclaims, the book traces European superiority in the last 500-odd years to geographical characteristics of the last 13,000 years. Jared Diamond uses five geographical factors spread across the 13,000 years to explain why Eurasia in general and Europe in particular dominated the world scene.

A) Grains — Eurasia is home to grains which are amenable to farming and thus organised agriculture. This led to a generation of surpluses, which resulted in surplus time. And society, politics and culture grew from that quirk.

B) Geography — The East-West axis of Eurasia gave enough geographical spread for these agricultural practices to diffuse, cross-pollinate and develop further.

C) Livestock — Eurasia accounts for 13 of the 14 animals so far domesticated by mankind. They thus provided food, acted as farm hands, enabled better and faster transportation, contributed to better warfare and thereby provided an unassailable advantage. Another big contribution is the passing of disease-causing germs from livestock to people, which over generations led to higher levels of immunity among Eurasians, which they used with deadly effect when they conquered the Americas.

D) Climate — The temperate climate in Eurasia was more hospitable to human settlement, and thus the continent accounted for 80% of the world population for quite a long stretch in historical time, and this gave enough space for a positive reinforcing loop to take place.
These four factors, according to Prof. Diamond led to a generation of surplus, creation of immunity, provided resources for further development and gave a stable population the opportunity to build on their successes. The successive developments led to organisation of societies, evolution of politics, writing, literature and technological development. Hence Eurasia remained the pre-eminent continent until 1500 AD. 

 Till this point in the book, Prof. Diamond is on a stronger footing, and makes compelling reading. Then, when he attempts to explain how instead of other Eurasians, it is the Europeans who went on to dominate world history, he enters shaky ground. He argues that Europe’s topography led to political fragmentation, encouraging sharp competition among states, and eliminating the possibility that a single ruler could prevent some innovation or discovery from taking hold. China, on the other hand, was predisposed towards unity by its relatively homogeneous geography, by its lack of difficult mountains, by its “connectedness”, to use Diamond’s term. This reasoning doesn’t stand up to scrutiny when you consider that the fact that the other politically-fragmented Eurasian sub-continent — India – did nothing of that sort. Though its warring states fought bitterly and were colonisers (at least in the Indian Ocean), they   were subjugated for extended periods of time. European dominance could be better explained by political milieu, economic exploration, the role of the church and a series of historical accidents, but then that is not what Diamond’s focus is.

Prof. Diamond also commits another faux pas. As Steve Sailor identified - “He confuses between genetic superiorities (plural) and genetic supremacy (singular)”. Different geographies make different demands on their human inhabitants and these result in differences in their genetic make up. Despite military superiority, Europeans repeatedly failed to settle equatorial West Africa, in part because they lacked the malaria resistance conferred on many natives by the sickle cell gene.

The other missing link is the complete absence of human ingenuity in Diamond’s narrative. Culture, politics, religion and value systems all interact and reinforce this innate quality. In his excitement to give geography its rightful place, Diamond inadvertently consigns the rest of these crucial factors to historical oblivion.

But these criticisms are in the nature of nitpickings. In an era when causality gets restricted to the immediate past, and history being ignored, a book which takes the risk to examine causality over nothing less than 13,000 years has to be read for the sheer audacity of its scope. That the book does justice to it at least for the first 12,500 years partially is
reason enough to go and buy it.