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.
