ABSTRACT
BEST SELLERS ABOUT global economic history are rare, but Jared Diamond (1997) had one with Guns, Germs, and Steel, an attempt to answer, “Why did history unfold differently on different continents?” (9). In particular, he is concerned with a theme highly relevant to the indigenous populations of the Americas: “Literate societies with metal tools have conquered or exterminated the other societies” (13). In his view, understanding how this occurred helps answer in turn a question put to him by Yali, a local politician in New Guinea, who wanted to know why the white Europeans, like Diamond, arrived in his country with so much “cargo,” the material goods, ranging from tools to soft drinks and luxury items. Why did they have so much while his people had relatively little? Diamond takes this as a departure point for explaining what social scientists usually call “underdevelopment.”
