Guns, Germs, and Steel

Diamond asks why Eurasian societies came to dominate the world and answers that geography and environment, not race or culture, were decisive. The availability of domesticable plants and animals, and the east-west orientation of Eurasia, gave its peoples an early lead in farming, technology, immunity to disease and state-building.

The book won the Pulitzer Prize and has been enormously influential. Historians and anthropologists have criticised it for environmental determinism and for flattening the role of human choice, so it is best read as a bold hypothesis rather than a settled answer.