-clip- Diamond's downplaying of culture plays a good role, too: it suggests that it wasn't any kind of "cultural superiority" (or racial superiority) that led to the European conquest of most of the world or any kind of "cultural inferiority" (or racial inferiority) that led to the American Indians (etc.) being conquered. Compare this to C. Northcote Parkinson's "East and West," in which the inherent superiority of the "West" plays a major theoretical role. Talk about Eurocentrism!
JD ^^^^^^ CB: I'm a Euro-peripheralist. I think you gotta leave culture in there, and say that it was European culture's moral _inferiority_ ( not superiority) coupled with the unfortunate coincidence of technological, and derivatively military, superiority that led to Europeans conquering the Western Hemisphere and the rest of the world , essentially. Diamond's approach sounds a little too much like "The Environment made the Europeans do it", i.e. conquer the world. Recall, as I am sure Diamond does, that the Chinese had gunpowder first , and for culturally superior reasons did not set about to militarily conquer the world. The Europeans did not conquer the world over the last 500 years because of the unique characteristics in their struggle with the _natural_ environment of Northwest Asia prior to 1400.
