ABSTRACT
Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel occupies a prominent place on undergraduate reading lists in international history, politics, economics, geography, sociology, and numerous other disciplines. Guns, Germs, and Steel is now more relevant for its use of "comparative methodology" on the grandest of scales. The American historian Stephen Wertheim, in a review of The World Until Yesterday, wrote, "Guns, Germs, and Steel attacked the notion that racial superiority explained Western global pre-eminence, a view taken seriously by almost no one who's taken seriously". The economist Nathan Nunn contributed the chapter "Shackled to the Past: The Causes and Consequences of Africa's Slave Trades" to Diamond and Robinson's Natural Experiments of History. The challenge Diamond and his fellow scientists of history pose today tends to focus on the difference between cultural anthropology and science. In the book Questioning Collapse, the American anthropologists Patricia McAnany and Norman Yoffee bring together a number of responses to Diamond.
