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In this “artful, informative, and delightful” (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion –as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war –and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major adva… More >>
Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies
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I think some of the reviewers here didn’t read the book closely enough to understand the context of some of Diamond’s arguments. He never says that biogeographical effects are the ONLY causes history. His main purpose is the search for the ultimate, extremely general causes for the broadest of trends in human history and prehistory.
By the time the Mongols roared across Asia, or the Moguls invaded India, many cultures around the world already changed so much that bioregional factors, though seminal in the creation of these broadest trends, weren’t nearly as important as the political, religious and economic ones. He is not ignoring religion and so on but, he states plainly several times that isn’t his focus. He is looking for ultimate causes–before humans had extremely advanced mental concepts like religion.
He also wanted to point out the devastating influence of disease on history. It was surely the European germs that did most of the conquering of Native Americans. The guns and horses were almost incidental. Later on, once Europeans had established themselves, then we can focus on economic and political systems. But we can’t ignore the effects of the diseases unleashed on the Americas. These plagues gave the Europeans a very lucky boost that catapulted them beyond the wealth and power of China, India or the Middle East–long before the Industrial Revolution made this gap obvious.
Another thing that some people seem to be having trouble with is his assertions about the native intelligence of tribal peoples around the world. (If you read the book, you notice that he is not just saying this about the New Guineans.)
He takes pains to point out what he means by this. He not talking about some mysterious genetic superiority of tribal peoples. It’s all straight up culture. Tribal culture forces people to be better generalists than they’d have to be in literate civilizations. They can’t rely on embedded support structures like books for memory or experts for obscure fields. They have to be pretty good at a lot things. Otherwise they die. They have to be better at memorizing things because they can’t count on computers or books to remember things for them. Living in a dangerous, wild environment makes them cautious and aware of all that is going on around them. That was all he meant. The circumstance of tribal peoples force them, only in very broad ways and only on an individual basis, to be smarter and more curious than civilized people.
And in the end it does them no good. Because civilized societies are SMARTER than tribal societies. That is why tribal society has been steadily disappearing over the millenia. They just can’t compete.
Finally, of course the book is repetitive. In fact he sums up his argument in the preface of the book. You needn’t even read the rest if you don’t want to. The rest of the book consists of him reiterating his points from different angles to point out the objections he has managed to answer and the many questions that still remain. He is just following scholarly practice and exposition–just to make things clear that he has thought about this.
He knows that his theory can’t explain everything. In the epilog he points out that China, India and the Middle East are good counter examples to his idea. They each had an expansionist rise to great power–a time when they were unafraid to try new ideas and explore new ways of doing things. If the highly complex forces of economics, politics, religion had arrayed themselves differently. We might all be speaking Arabic now. Or Cantonese. Europe was just lucky to be in the right place at the right time for things to come together as they did.
Rating: 4 / 5
In one compelling volume, the famous biologist Jared Diamond tackles the most important question of global history: Why did Europeans come to dominate the New World?
This question has been answered by others before; Diamond’s idea that Europe’s geography is the cause (“geographical determinism”) has also been proposed before. Any student of history can drag up a case or two of this thesis. Baron Montaigne, for example, proposed that Europe’s primacy stemmed from its superior government, which could be derived directly from the coolness of its climate.
The deep significance of this book is that Diamond’s thesis is not simply idle speculation. He proves that the Eurasian land mass had by far the best biological resources with which to develop agricultural societies, and was thus more able to form large, coherent, and powerful social entities.
To support this idea, Diamond introduces thorough set of well-researched data on what kinds of plants and animals are necessary to support a farming society. He investigates the biological resources available to potential farmers in all parts of the world. The people of Eurasia had access to a suite of plants and animals that provided for their needs. Potential farmers in other parts of the world didn’t– and so their fertile soil went untilled.
After establishing this strong foundation, Diamond falls into repeating ideas about the formation of large-scale societies. These ideas, while unoriginal, are still compelling, and Diamond presents them in a very clear and well-written way.
His other major original contribution comes when he discusses the diseases that helped the Old World conquer the New. Building on his earlier chapters dealing with Old-World domesticated animals, he shows that these very animals were the sources of the major plagues (such as smallpox) which virtually annihilated New World populations. The fact that Old Worlders had immunities to these diseases was a direct result of their agricultural head-start.
Along with these monumental contributions to History, this book has its drawbacks. If you’re looking for a narrative explaining Great People, Great Events, or Modern Ideas, you will be sadly disappointed. Diamond’s thesis offhandedly assumes that it is difficult to believe Shakespeare’s plays or Newton’s laws could have been written by hunter-gatherers.
If you are looking for reasons why Europe came to dominate the world, rather than, say, China, Diamond presents mixed results. He mentions the 14th century self-isolation of China, but does not analyze it. He also brings up the odd theory about the relationship between the coastline lengths of Europe and China and trade potential; this idea is provably wrong.
If you are looking for a book that explains the world’s history of the past 500 years, look elsewhere. Guns, Germs and Steel exhausts itself by effectively, coherently, fundamentally, definitively, and entertainingly explaining the preceeding 15,000.
I do not hesitate to recommend this book to anyone with an interest in world history. The scholarship is first-rate, and the thesis is incredibly significant. The technical details, while complete, are presented in a very easy to understand way, and Diamond’s writing style is fun and engaging. It fully deserved the Pulitzer prize.
Rating: 5 / 5
According to Diamond, four factors are responsible for all historical developments: 1) availability of potential crops and domestic animals, 2) the orientation of continental axis to facilitate the spread of agriculture, 3) transfer of knowledge between continents, and 4) population size.
Diamond states that “those four sets of factors constitute big environmental differences that can be quantified objectively and that are not subject to dispute.” Fair enough, but what *is* subject to dispute is that there might be some other factors at work. Thomas Sowell in Race and Culture does a good job of developing the thesis that the exchange of information among European cultures, facilitated by Europe’s plentiful navigable rivers, was the key to Europe’s technological and economic rise. David Landes in the Wealth and Poverty of Nations attributes China’s conscious decision in the 1400′s to isolate itself form other nations as the key event (decision) that caused it to lose it’s technological advantage and fall behind Europe. (Diamond briefly touches on 15th Century China in the final chapter, but manages to boil this as well down to an accident of geography.)
This is unfortunate, because the book contains a wealth of excellent material which is excellently explained. Many of the core causes which Diamond explores ring very true, and his points are persuasively argued. The connection between the development of agriculture and the subsequent unequal rise of military capability worldwide is very convincing. But convincing though they may be, reading these theories one can’t shake the sneaking suspicion that Diamond is selectively presenting evidence which he’s has found to support his previously drawn conclusion, and neglecting evidence which runs counter.
Diamond plants these doubts through his sometimes-careless prose. Consider the following statement, which he includes in the introduction to his chapter on the rise of food production:
“My fellow farmhands were, for the most part, tough whites whose normal speech featured strings of curses, and who spent their weekdays working so that they could devote their weekends to squandering their weeks’ wages in the local saloon. Among the farmhands, though, was a member of the Blackfoot Indian tribe named Levi, who behaved very differently from the coarse miners – being polite, gentle, responsible, sober, and well spoken”
I thought for a moment that I’d wandered into the script for “Dances With Wolves.” Note that had this statement been turned on its head – had he, for example, recounted an unflattering anecdote about Native Americans or Hispanics -my instincts would immediately warn me that the author’s biases might be influencing how he chooses to present the evidence. I myself am a Black American, I’m all too painfully aware that we’ve had to wade through some pretty grim stuff penned by authors clutching at straws to support their racist white supremacist views of the world. In this case Diamond does the reverse by aiming his negative bias towards Caucasians, but if I’m truly interested in unbiased science then my skepticism should remain the same.
That I lead with these criticisms is evidence of my disappointment in what could have been an excellent book, and indeed much of it *is* indeed excellent. This is a book that taught me much and has indeed changed my view of world history in many ways. I do recommend this book – the details are good and many of the theories ring true, but in the same breath I would warn against accepting Diamond’s conclusions in their entirety without a bit of skepticism.
In summary, Guns, Germs, and Steel contains an important feature which David Landes’s Wealth and Poverty of Nations so conspicuously lacks: a grand unifying theory which links the disparate growth rates of diverse societies worldwide. But Diamond’s tidy conclusion that world history is simply a deterministic result of geography and nothing else is not entirely satisfying, especially in that it might cause us to be complacent about the future. I accept that accidents of geography have had a huge effect on mankind, and Diamond convincingly argues this. But culture and human decisions do matter. Diamond argues that human ingenuity is simply the result of the accident of having a larger population from which to draw innovations – but societies that internalize this philosophy do so at their considerable peril.
Rating: 3 / 5
GUNS, GERMS, AND STEEL is a persuasive discourse of competitive plausibility regarding the challenging question why population groups on different continents experienced widely divergent paths of development. Contrary to the voluminous objections cited in the many of the reviews below, Professor Jared Diamond, clearly an enthusiastic proponent of environmental determinism, presents a set of premises consistent with evidence provided from a wide range of disciplines, but he does not attempt to answer the question of genetic diversity, including differentiated intelligence, among racial groups as many reviewers have inferred. If anything, implicitly, the author appears to support promulgations of differentiated intelligences; he sets out to demonstrate intelligence was not the root cause to Eurasian dominance.
On at least two occasions Diamond, without equivocation, stated he found on average the New Guinean to be more intelligent than the average European or American. He was prompted to undertake this investigation as a result of a question posed by a New Guinean friend – Why white people developed so much cargo (material goods) and brought it to New Guinea while the indigenous had so little. Diamond summarized his findings as follows: “History followed different courses for different peoples because of differences among peoples environments, not because of biological differences among people themselves.”
Beginning 13,000 years ago, the author illuminated the conditions or circumstances that may have facilitated growth for some groups and inhibited the same for others. Diamond accepts the out of Africa theory for the dispersion of Homosapiens to the other continents (for purposes of his treatise Europe and Asia are indivisible), and like the old axiom of real estate, the importance of location, location, location becomes readily apparent. For Diamond, food production is the ultimate cause of variable rates of development for different peoples. He illustrates how the abundance of wild plants subject to domestication and availability of large mammals served as immediate factors to transition from hunter/gatherer bands and tribes to sedentary agriculturally based chiefdoms and states.
Diamond lists what he proposes as proximate causes to European dominance:
1) Germs – based on close proximity to domesticated animals, immunities were developed infectious strains Europeans would carry to other areas, resulting in the decimation of non-immunized populations. In turn, those groups had few autochthonous diseases that would affect the invaders.
2) Invention of writing- relatively sedentary lifestyles facilitated devotion of more time and effort to the creation of methodologies to control and coordinate commerce. These systems eased transfer of information among society members, and had further implications to the establishment of hierarchical political organization.
3) Axial orientation of the different continents – east/ west orientation was conducive to transmigration of people, products, and technologies. Plants best suited to specific climatic conditions were readily transferable; geographic encumbrances were less severe and population isolation was not as significant.
4) Establishment of hierarchical organizations – food production instigated the growth of artisan classes focused on technological improvement, leisure classes devoted to functions unrelated to subsistence, organization of massive armies comprised of professional soldiers, and religion, which allowed individual groupings to live together under codification without killing one another.
5) Continental Isolation – Landmasses that were separated by geographic or ecological boundaries were under less pressure to develop or adopt new ideas, products or technologies from competing civilizations.
Some of the author’s theories were not defended as successfully as others. His explanation why Sub-Saharan Africans were unable to identify species (the water buffalo and Zebra are two prime examples) that may have been used in farming and commerce seemed rather weak. Capture, taming and subsequent selective breeding for temperament seems as viable here as he indicates was the case on the Eurasian plains for other species. Similarly, he does not offer a convincing argument regarding the American Indian’s failure to domesticate the Bison, although the inference seems to be the lack of cultivatible plant life was certainly a factor.
Overall, Diamond provides a compelling theory of the differences in development rates among different peoples, linking a wide set of factors that are not generally considered in parallel in the historical record. For anyone with even peripheral interest in the evolution of different societies, this is an enthralling book.
Rating: 5 / 5
As an avid reader with absolutely no previous contact with the field of anthropology, I found this book to be mesmerizing. Jared Diamond has achieved great success with “Guns, Germs and Steel” (national best-seller, Pulitzer Prize), but it has also made him the target of strident, often venomous criticism…
Diamond’s general thesis is that the West conquered the world rather than vice versa because of a fluke of nature. In short, Eurasia was home to an important number of crops and animals that readily lent themselves to successful domestication. This domestication resulted in mass food production, which the author claims is the “ultimate” cause of Western dominance. Food production, in turn, led to a number of “proximate” causes related to the rise of the West: farms and animal herds led to stationary populations and excess food to support a specialized class of bureaucrats and soldiers; it also increased population density, which, along with close contact with animals, led to germs and the subsequent genetic resistance of Westerners to those diseases. Finally, Diamond concludes, the unique East-West axis of Eurasia and the absence of any impenetrable geographic barriers fostered the spread of new crops, technologies, etc., which gave rise to many competing communities, whose competition further increased the western lead over the rest of the world.
Diamond’s arguments are persuasive on the surface, and even the biggest skeptic will have reason for pause after reading his book. However, the final chapter reveals that he can’t really resolve a fundamental question: why did Europe, rather than the Middle East, India or China come to conquer the world? Almost the entire book is dedicated to explaining why the Eurasian landmass was blessed with the prerequisites for large civilizations rather than the Americas, Africa and Australia. His terse explanation for why Europe in particular dominated leaves much to be desired and explained.
In this reviewer’s opinion, the recent book by classicist Victor Davis Hanson (“Carnage and Culture”) provides a plausible epilogue for Diamond’s piece. Hanson completely and explicitly rejects Diamond’s geographic determinism, but I don’t think the two theses are incompatible or in any way mutually exclusive. In fact, it seems to me that Diamond and Hanson support one another, as the latter’s assertion that the war-making efficiency of liberal democracies beginning in the Hellenistic period explains Europe’s ultimate triumph.
In closing, as an introduction to anthropology and a cogent depiction of one school of thought on the rise of the West this book is marvelous. Approach it with an open-mind, reflect on the thesis and the supporting evidence, and then draw your own conclusions. Love it or hate it, you owe it to yourself to read this book.
Rating: 5 / 5