The biologist and geographer Jared Diamond makes a similar case in his classic Guns, Germs, and Steel. His main goal is to explain why it was societies within the band of latitude that runs from China to the Mediterranean Sea that developed the first civilizations, but he also suggests that Europe rather than China came to dominate the modern world because Europe’s peninsulas made it easy for small kingdoms to hold out against would-be conquerors, favoring political fragmentation, while China’s rounder coastline favored centralized rulers over petty princes. The resulting political unity
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