ABSTRACT
A number of scholars studying global history have addressed the issue of the growth of the political, military, and economic geopolitical dominance of the West which emerged during the eighteenth century. While older works tended to credit the West's rise to its moral, philosophical, or intellectual superiority, more modern scholars have come to doubt these ascriptions and have located Western dominance in geography, climate, and historical contingency. Jared Diamond, in Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997), argued that climate zones, shaped by geography and latitude, helped determine the life ways of peoples of the earth. Alfred Crosby, in The Columbian Exchange (1972), examined the effects of the first encounter between Europe and the Americas, especially the biological consequences, elucidating the devastating effects of disease on Native American populations. In The Great Divergence (2000), Kenneth Pomeranz explores the reasons for the ascendency of the West rather than China by the eighteenth century, despite the latter's previous technological superiority.
