I’ll say that I think it’s better than the standard American education on world history, which is a pretty low bar to clear. There are probably better books to recommend to someone interested in the question “why is European society so dominant in the world today”, but someone whose read GGS has a better picture of the answer to that question than someone whose only history lesson on the topic is the chapter on the Atlantic slave trade they did in eighth grade.
At the very least, they’re prepared to talk about material conditions shaping societies - as opposed to someone who read The Bell Curve or something like that. The shortcomings of GGS are mostly in how heavily it elevates the things it talks about while ignoring a lot of other things it could have chosen to talk about instead, leading people to think that the shape of the world’s societies were totally predetermined by plate tectonics rather than that being just one of many, many factors in shaping them.
There are probably better books to recommend to someone interested in the question “why is European society so dominant in the world today”
Das Kapital, for instance. :lea-smug:
At the very least, they’re prepared to talk about material conditions shaping societies - as opposed to someone who read The Bell Curve or something like that.
Honestly, the loudest arguments I’ve heard about GG&S tend to be *anti-*materialist. They boil down to “Europe didn’t dominate because of technology or immune-exposure, they dominated because of Racism!”, which… okay, yeah kinda? But also the tools that afforded domination globally created the social incentives to develop racist views. If Cortez had ended up like Magellan and the American Natives sent back a boat full of Novel Influenza to ravage Europe for a century, New World Colonization would have failed and nobody working out of a university in the Tribal State of Massachusetts would be talking about White Supremacy as a serious theory of history.
