Gone are the days when a historian like Howard Zinn could simply point out that the Europeans exploited, plundered, and enslaved Native Americans in their quest for gold, spices, and a connection to Asia.

Now, many popular accounts insist that what happened is more complicated. They argue that environments, diseases, and technology — rather than the expansionist avarice of Columbus and his band of rapacious explorers — should be singled out as key causes of American Indians’ extermination. And when they do introduce human agency into their analyses, it’s often on behalf of elite actors.

In Jared Diamond’s Pulitzer Prize–winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, for example, environmental factors are elevated to the “ultimate causation” in explaining why Columbus and other Europeans swept across the continent.