There's plenty on other factors in the literature he just ignores, but here's my favorite quote:
"What Diamond glosses over is that just because you have guns and steel does not mean you should use them for colonial and imperial purposes. Or handing out smallpox-infested blankets from sick wards...Second, Diamond’s account seriously underplays the alliances with native groups that enabled European forces to conquer and rule...The Jared Diamond of Guns, Germs, and Steel has almost no role for human agency–the ability people have to make decisions and influence outcomes. Europeans become inadvertent, accidental conquerors. Natives succumb passively to their fate."
That quote comes from this article "Real History vs. Guns, Germs and Steel":
http://www.livinganthropologically.com/anthropology/guns-germs-and-steel/
I’ll preface this by saying that I’m a fan of Jared Diamond, but also have significant criticisms. With that said, I think the criticism in the excerpt above has two main flaws.
First of all, there’s the distinction between describing behavior and prescribing it. What the above criticism misses is that Diamond is purely engaged in the former, not the latter. The latter is not particularly relevant to an analysis of why X culture triumphed over Y culture.
With that said, colonialism and imperialism are long-standing features of human history. Human populations have long expanded into new territories, colonizing them and displacing and/or massacring and/or absorbing those already present. Paleolithic populations of Homo sapiens sapiens did this to Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) in Western Eurasia for a host of biological and cultural reasons. Whether or not we had a moral right to do it is irrelevant to explaining why, how, and when we did it. Ditto for the Bantu expansion in sub-Saharan Africa, or the Indo-European expansion in Europe, Central Asia, South Asia, and the Middle East.
Second, while it’s interesting and worthwhile to look at how European colonial projects made use of indigenous allies-cum-proxies, it’s the greater pattern that still needs to be explained—and Diamond’s thesis has a great deal of merit here, though I will agree it does not tell the full story. It’s been many years, but I seem to recall him engaging with native allies in the case of Cortes’s conquest of Mexico and Pizarro’s conquest of the Inca Empire. He does not discuss the British conquest of India—probably a good thing, in some ways, because I do not think his thesis was complete enough to properly address that.
For the record, my main criticism of
Guns, Germs, and Steel is the lack of consideration it gives to institutions and the incentives they create. The same geographical area can give rise to a host of different societies with differing institutions, which in turn can lead to a variety of outcomes. Consider France under the Valois, the Bourbons, and then the Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, and the ways that institutional change created or accompanied broader patterns of social and political change.
The book
Why Nations Fail, by Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, is essentially the anti-Guns, Germs, and Steel, and it’s an absolute must-read for understanding institutions and how they affect societal development. To his credit, I think, Jared Diamond himself praised the book and acknowledged the merit of its thesis:
https://www.amazon.com/Why-Nations-Fail-Origins-Prosperity-ebook/dp/B0058Z4NR8/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1494925592&sr=8-1&keywords=why+nations+fail I'll add that I appreciate the nuance of the argument you make here, and your willingness to critique and see admirable aspects of Diamond's thought. Cheers!
