Except that in 1491 by Charles C. Mann, it turns out pre-Columbian America was at least on par with European society, and in some cases even surpassed it. The early days of gunpower weren't nearly as game-changing as commonly assumed: the Inca used a hemp-woven armour that was lighter, more flexible, yet just as strong as Spanish breastplates, and the Conquistadors ditched their heavy steel for it at every opportunity; the Inca had both the geography and the weapons to beat Spanish cavalry, but failed to consolidate them into a tactical discipline; John Smith broke his pistol rather than confess it was inferior to native bows and arrows. Often overlooked in Cortés's legendary conquest of Tenochtitlan is that most of 'his' army comprised Tlaxcalan allies.
Nor were they culturally deficient: when the Spanish sent in a special cadre of theologians for the express purpose of cultural conversion, they were caught off-guard by the intelligence of the Aztec priests, who spoke not in terms of particular religious belief, but of their role as community leaders and administrative anchors, pleading not to force Christianity on the population because it would be the death knell of social cohesion. English colonists frequently defected to native tribes, which they found were both more democratic and more just than the rigid class system of the homeland, to say nothing of the dictatorial rule of several of their erstwhile settlements. Contrary to popular stereotype, the native North Americans didn't live in some hippie-perfect natural balance, but employed a sophisticated form of forestry so alien to European farming that colonists mistook sprawling open-plot gardens for wilderness, and carefully-managed game as free-roaming herds. So the natives weren't limited to agricultural subsistence, either.
How, then, did Pizarro overthrow one of the most powerful empires on the South American continent with less than two hundred troops? What Diamond gets right is the catastrophic effect of European-imported diseases to a landmass never exposed to them. Prior to Columbus, there are estimates that over forty million people inhabited the Americas, and that at least two of the world's major metropolitan centres were American. The speed and scope of the initial malaria pandemic was so devastating that many communities died out long before Europeans first entered the region. And then the pandemic became endemic, suppressing population rebound for years afterward. Smallpox in Central America killed Huayna Capac and triggered the Inca Civil War and a general existential crisis within the empire—in short, Pizarro entered Peru at the perfect time to exploit the chaos.
The reason I'm talking about the Americas so much is that 'European' power only kicks off in earnest once the colonial economy takes root, setting off a whole new set of dominoes detailed in Mann's sequel work on the Columbian Exchange, 1493. It's the monopoly on those New World resources that enable the colonial powers to take on the rest of the world, and it was the devastation of the native populations through disease that allowed those early colonies to survive; recall that in the early years the English and French felt their position precarious enough that they drafted diplomatic treaties with individual tribes. While it's certainly not as simple as the following summation appears, as I see it: no New World colonies, no Euro-breakout; no Native depopulation, no New World colonies; no pandemic, no Native depopulation.
