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Guns, Germs, and Steel

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Guns, Germs, and Steel is a Pulitzer Prize-winning book by Jared Diamond arguing that the power and technology gaps dividing human societies developed not from cultural or racial differences but from differences in geography and resources.

This book has been criticized as an example of environmental determinism with racist implications -- not because it claims superiority of Europeans, but because it overlooks or obscures the importance of non-European knowledge and technologies (as well as labor) in European development see, inter alia, the geographer James M. Blaut's Eight Eurocentric Historians).