Technology, Disease and Colonial Conquests, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries: Essays Reappraising the Guns and Germs Theories (History of Warfare, Vol 2)

The eight essays in this study reassess evidence about the plausibility of the widely accepted guns and germs theories which put forward firepower advantages and inadvertent disease importation as the two main causes of European imperial expansion overseas during the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. All argue that these theories are important but oversimplified.
The effectiveness of firepower and disease impacts on specific groups of New World indigenes were always conditioned by time, place, and cultural characteristics. Long range communication control was sometimes more important. Above all, motives driving invasions and conquests were often more influential than means and methodologies.

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George Raudzens is Research Associate, formerly Associate Professor of History, at Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia. He has written many journal articles on European imperial and military history and his other books are The British Ordnance Department and Canada's Canals, 1815-1855 (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1979) and Empires. Europe and Globalization, 1492-1788 (Sutton Publishing Limited, 1999).