But we are still left with the fundamental question why all those immediate advantages came to lie more with Europe than with the New World. Why weren’t the Incas the ones to invent guns and steel swords, to be mounted on animals as fearsome as horses, to bear diseases to which Europeans lacked resistance, to develop oceangoing ships and advanced political organization, and to be able to draw on the experience of thousands of years of written history? Those are no longer the questions of proximate causation that this chapter has been discussing, but questions of ultimate causation
