Politics & Power Quote by Jared Diamond

Diamond lands the punch with an almost accountant-like imbalance sheet: Europeans arrive with guns, steel, and, most lethally, microbes; Native Americans have nothing comparable to “return.” The line works because it takes a history often narrated as heroic “discovery” and reframes it as asymmetric biological exchange, closer to a hostile takeover than an encounter between equals. The surprise he signals with “It’s striking” isn’t sentimental. It’s forensic: if contact was a two-way street, why were the consequences so brutally one-directional?

The intent is to steer readers away from moralized explanations (civilization, virtue, destiny) and toward structural ones: ecology, domestication, and long-term exposure. In Diamond’s broader argument, Eurasia’s dense cities, livestock companionship, and trade networks functioned as involuntary disease incubators. The Americas, with fewer domesticated animals and different settlement patterns, didn’t generate the same reservoir of crowd diseases. “Evolved” does extra work here, implying slow, impersonal processes that outlast any individual choice.

The subtext is uncomfortable: much of the conquest was effectively “won” before battles began. Not because Europeans were inherently superior, but because their pathogens were. That framing simultaneously demythologizes European prowess and risks flattening human agency, making catastrophe feel like a natural accident rather than a political and moral event. Diamond’s sentence walks that tightrope: it exposes the hidden engine of empire while inviting debate over how much determinism we can tolerate before responsibility slips out of view.