In 1972, the author Jared Diamond was walking along the beach in New Guinea when a local friend Yali asked him, “Why is it that you white people developed so much cargo and brought it to New Guinea, but we black people had little cargo of our own?”

Why is it that people of Eurasian origin (including those who have settled in North America) control most of the world’s wealth and power today? Moreover, some ethnic groups, like the indigenous peoples of Australia, the Americas, and Sub-Saharan Africa, no longer hold their homeland but have been subjugated or even wiped out.