Collapse: How societies choose to fail or Succeed. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is my fourth book written for a broad public. It was first published in 2005, a revised edition with an added chapter on Angkor appeared in 2011, and National Geographic released a documentary film based on the book. Collapse has achieved almost as wide an international distribution as has Guns, Germs, and Steel, appearing in 31 translations, including Mongolian, Indonesian, and Bulgarian, as well as in all of the major languages of book publishing. Content. Collapse arose as an attempt to understand why so many past societies collapsed, leaving behind ruined or abandoned temples, pyramids, and monuments as romantic mysteries to baffle subsequent visitors and modern tourists. Why did societies that were as powerful as the Khmer Empire, and as brilliantly creative as the Maya, abandon the sites into which they had invested such enormous effort for so many centuries?
Thus, my book includes four sets of studies. Unsolved questions. Guns, germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies. Guns, Germs, and Steel, my best-known book, was published in 1997. It has been translated into 36 languages, including all the major languages of book publishing, as well as languages of small markets such as Estonian and Serbian. It won the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-fiction, plus numerous other prizes. I shall now summarize Guns, Germs, and Steel’s question, its answer, extensions and discoveries since its publication, unresolved questions, and criticisms. Guns, Germs, and Steel seek to answer the biggest question of post-Ice-Age human history: why Eurasian peoples, rather than peoples of other continents, became the ones to develop the ingredients of power (guns, germs, and steel) and to expand around the world.
An extraterrestrial being visiting the Earth 14,000 years ago could have been forgiven for failing to predict this outcome, because the human populations of other continents apparently also possessed advantages. Why did food production arise in only nine regions? Geographic determinism. The term “geographic determinism” is used by many scholars as a pejorative, to justify the quick dismissal of a proposed geographic interpretation of a human phenomenon. For example, the charge of geographic determinism is occasionally leveled at my book Guns, Germs, and Steel. What does this term mean?
Many human phenomena and characteristics – such as behaviors, beliefs, economies, genes, incomes, life expectancies, and other things – are influenced both by geographic factors and by non-geographic factors. Geographic factors mean physical and biological factors tied to geographic location, including climate, the distributions of wild plant and animal species, soils, and topography. Non-geographic factors include those factors subsumed under the term culture, other factors subsumed under the term history, and decisions by individual people. Image from The World Until Yesterday.
An Aka father and his child, from Africa’s equatorial forest. African History Disproves “Guns Germs and Steel” by Jared Diamond.