Connections & James Burke is entertaining, as is the schlep Jared Diamond of "Guns Germs & Steel" fame.
Burke & Diamond tease a narrative out of history and present
just-so stories to buttress their POV. Like I said, entertaining. Also heavily manipulative.
GGS: "Hey, there's a new* paradigm that
geography determines a civilizations' success! Who'd a thunk it?*"
Diamond argues that Eurasian civilization is not so much a product of ingenuity, but of opportunity and necessity. That is, civilization is not created out of sheer will or intelligence, but is the result of a chain of developments, each made possible by certain preconditions.
...
Hence Eurasia was able to support larger, denser populations, which made trade easier and technological progress faster than in other regions. These economic and technological advantages eventually enabled Europeans to conquer the peoples of the other continents in recent centuries.
* The "geography shapes it all" POV has been around so long it has acquired its own jargon:
environmental determinism.
Environmental determinism's origins go back to antiquity, when the Greek geographer Strabo wrote that climate influences the psychological disposition of different races. Similar ideas continued to be propounded up into the modern era.
Environmental determinism rose to prominence in the late 1800s and early 1900s when it was taken up as a central theory by the discipline of geography (and to a lesser extent, anthropology). Clark University professor Ellen Churchill Semple is credited with introducing the theory to the United States after studying with human geographer Friedrich Ratzel in Germany. The prominence of determinism was influenced by the high profile of evolutionary biology, although it tended more to resemble the now-discredited Lamarckism rather than Darwinism.
The fundamental argument of the environmental determinists was that aspects of physical geography, particularly that of climate, influenced the psychological mind-set of individuals, which in turn defined the behaviour and culture of the society that those individuals formed.