Where Europe expanded & New Guinea persisted

The model outlined in Guns, Germs, and Steel serves to a great extent as a corrective to ideological theories about the expansion and rise to dominance of European power in the 18th and 19th centuries, before its crest in the 20th. Jared Diamond famously gives a great deal of weight to biogeographical parameters. Charles C. Mann has taken Diamond’s wager, and raised him one. But as noted in the comments below the ascendancy of Europeans in a geopolitical sense is only Act I in this drama.

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