Politics & Power Quote by Jared Diamond

Diamond is doing what he does best: pulling the rug out from under the “great man” story of history and replacing it with barnyard biology. The line lands with the cool audacity of a spreadsheet that knows it’s more devastating than a battle scene. By tying measles, TB, influenza, and smallpox to livestock, he reframes conquest as an accident of proximity: the people who lived cheek-by-jowl with large domesticated mammals didn’t just invent plows and empires, they incubated pathogens that would later function like invisible cavalry.

The intent is explanatory but also corrective. Diamond is arguing against moralized or racialized narratives that treat European dominance as evidence of superior civilization. The subtext is blunt: the “advantage” wasn’t virtue, it was an ecological lottery ticket cashed in through tragedy. Living with cattle and pigs is presented as a long, grim apprenticeship in infectious disease, producing population-level immunity over generations. When those germs crossed the Atlantic, they met immunologically naive societies, and the asymmetry did the rest.

Context matters because Diamond is writing in the shadow of debates about why some regions industrialized and conquered while others didn’t. His move is to make the Columbian Exchange less about ships and steel than about microbial time horizons. The sentence about the Americas’ lack of domesticated species is quietly provocative: it suggests that what looks like “underdevelopment” can be the flip side of not having the wrong animals in the first place. It’s an argument that makes history feel less like destiny and more like exposure.