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SectionII
Geography, Ecology, and Uneven Development
Jared Diamond
1 works24 hours
A single work, and a corrective. Leaders routinely overestimate intention and underestimate inherited conditions. No society chooses its geography, its rivers, its disease environment or its initial inventory of domesticable species — and those conditions shape population, trade, military capacity, institutional development, and the speed at which knowledge can travel.
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Treat it as a model, not a complete causal theory. Geography influences history; it does not write it.