Environmental determinism has served to validate a Eurocentric world history for several centuries, and it continues to do so today. This essay looks briefly at the historical marriage between environmental determinism and Eurocentric history, then develops a detailed critique of the environmental determinism put forward in two recent world‐history books: Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel (1997) and David Landes's The Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1998).
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J. M. Blaut (1999) studied this question.
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