The European Quest for Empire

Diamond has little room in his work for things like religion, economics, politics and other ideologies that may have contributed to the european quest for empire. Remarkably, there's only a brief mention of capitalism, where it is listed as one of the ten plausible, but incomplete explanations of technical progress in europe. A book seeking to answer such questions would have had to add a fourth totem of western progress to its title and be called guns, germs, steel and cocacola. Diamond chooses to focus on historical examples when great indigenous empires were suddenly and dramatically conquered. But this can give the impression that european colonization happened quickly. On the contrary, it was largely slow