Guns, Germs, and Steel
In a 1992 review, he disagreed with Francis Fukuyama's argument in "The End of History and the Last Man" that the end of the Cold War meant that the American model of a capitalist liberal democracy had become the "final form of human government", as Fukuyama put it. In 1997 he disagreed with the central thesis of Jared Diamond's "Guns, Germs, and Steel" for overlooking the importance of human "cultural autonomy" in determining human development versus Diamond's focus on environmental factors. In 2003, he coauthored "The Human Web: A Bird's-eye View of World History" with his son and fellow historian J. R. McNeill.