Guns, Germs And Steel: The Fates Of Human Societies by Jared Diamond (1997) 440 p.
On the 18th of January 1788, the forerunners of a Royal Navy fleet under the command of Captain Arthur Philip made landfall on the east coast of Australia, after a gruelling eight month voyage. By the 26th of January this fleet, comprising of eleven ships and 1, 332 sailors, marines and convicts, had sailed north to Port Jackson, founded the tiny settlement that would eventually become Sydney, and established the first permanent European presence on the Australian continent.
Over the next two centuries, approximately half a million Aboriginals would die. Whether from organised massacres or introduced British diseases or even a genocidal “breeding out” policy that the dominance of the British settlers enabled them to enact, the Australian Aboriginals were completely and utterly at the mercy of their technologically superior invaders.
The same sad story has been played out hundreds of times across the globe. Indigenous groups of the Americas, Africa, Australia, South-East Asia and the South Pacific have been Europe’s whipping boys for hundreds of years. Even today, in nations such as Australia and the United States, these natives are stuck on a much lower socio-economic rung than the ancestors of European settlers. Why wasn’t it Australian Aboriginals who built vast fleets, sailed to the other side of the world and got all up in Britain’s grill? Why did they remain primitive hunter-gatherers while Europeans invented cool stuff like the moveable printing press, flintlock rifle and hot-air balloon?
For many years the assumptive answer was that Europeans were simply genetically more intelligent, a superior race to any other. Diamond slaps a great big RACIST stamp on this assertion, and proceeds to explain exactly why Eurasia wound up as big man on campus by tracing technological developments back to their earliest roots.
The core argument he makes is that certain parts of the world have more domesticable plant and animal species: for example, Eurasia had awesome big mammals like the horse and the cow, which provided one with a sweet ride and a tasty dinner respectively, whereas Africa got stuck with the lion (which will eat you) the hippo (which will eat you) and the zebra (which willl bite you and not let go until it dies). Likewise, Eurasia had easy crops like wheat, which you can grow by just tossing the seeds around the field all day and then sitting around wanking until they grew, whereas North America only had corn, seeds of which you had to pain-stakingly plant individually under the hot sun – with no beasts of burden to help you plow. (Oh, and living around herds of animals all the time? That’s what helped us build strong immunity to diseases which originally developed in those animals, which we then unleashed on people who weren’t quite so lucky to have as many shivering, plague-ridden pets.)
Thus Eurasia was able to grow a hell of a lot more food, which led to higher population densities, which meant Spaniards and Russians and Chinese had a whole bunch of people sitting around inventing shit or deciding to build an empire, whereas in the depths of the Amazon every able-bodied man was hunting and gathering from dawn till dusk just to stay alive. I’ve generalised what was already a very general argument, but this is the gist of it.
Diamond makes a lot of outrigger arguments supporting this – even the axes of the continents were supposedly fundamental to human development. Eurasia is largely oriented west-east, while the Americas are mostly north-south, with a particularly narrow gap at Panama. This made it a lot easier for technologies (particularly animal domestication and crop development) to spread, because they were travelling along lines of latitude latitude to similar climates and day lengths – whereas anyone trying to plant Mexican corn in Canada would starve to death when the seeds sprouted expecting a Cancun paradise and instead found themselves in Manitoba. Likewise, Chinese innvations could wind up in Britain via India, the Black Sea or Russia, whereas the only way for North America and South America to contact each other was through a very long, thin stretch of land that was mostly impenetrable swampland.
Guns, Germs And Steel needs to be evaluated on two levels: its worth as a theory, and its worth as a book. My professional scientific analysis of Diamond’s theory is “pretty good I guess.” Naturally he’s looking at things through an extremely wide window (15,000 years wide, to be precise) and makes a lot of sweeping generalisations and oversimplifications, but this is inevitable and Diamond acknowledges that. I feel that certain elements of his theory are wonky; he focuses on geography to an almost bizarre degree, even arguing that China’s historical unity is because it is mostly flat, while Europe has all these rivers and mountains and shit that empires can’t possibly cross and forge into a megastate. Shit, I just spent decades assembling this massive legion and now there’s a five-metre deep river between us and Gaul, better ride all the way back to Rome instead of chopping down that forest and building some rafts. And I’m no expert on China either, but I’m pretty sure there’s a lot of rivers and mountains there too. On the whole, though, he convinced me that geography played a significant (not a total) role in explaining why history played out the way it did: whites just got lucky.
As a scientific book, Guns, Germs And Steel is a fairly easy read. It’s certainly accessible to the layman, even if extended chapters on the distribution of cereal crops and carbon-dating archaeological sites might cause you to nod off on the subway. Jared is certainly no Bill Bryson – he doesn’t have the knack for peppering his writing with witty observations and jokes – but he’s readable to anyone with a passing interest in history. I suppose a large part of the appeal of this book is simple curiosity, because he does pose an interesting question: how come some ethnic groups ended up in the cotton fields with chains around their necks, while others were sitting on the porch in a rocking chair sipping mint julep? On the other hand I just managed to summarise an answer that question in about 399 less pages than he did, so if the finer details don’t intrigue you than maybe you should just check out some other fine Pulitzer prize winners.
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August 5, 2009 at 11:27 pm
William George
About China being flat:
Historically, it’s population centers have been along the rivers with vast stretches of nothing too difficult between them. So when the Mandarin culture was the first out of the gate with the agriculture and ability to make trade and/or war, they had a pretty easy time of getting where they needed to go. So even when the various Chinese empires fell, there was enough cultural mixing to maintain to illusion of a unified culture.
That the Romans were able to do what they did seems amazing until you realize that all of it’s territories were more or less self-governed. Like Mandarin in China, Latin became the language of the empire. But there was hardly a span of a few decades between rebellions and invasions for Rome. Considerable effort and money was put into maintaining the trade lines, and when that stopped, things reverted very quickly to the way it was before the Roman language overlay.
So really, Diamond’s views still hold up: China’s geography made it easier to maintain trade and cultural ties. Whereas Europe required a lot of effort to hold together and even at the best of times, it was rough-going.
August 5, 2009 at 11:30 pm
William George
At least, this is how my barely remembered Asian and European history classes laid it out to me. Been a long time since I did any schoolin’…
August 5, 2009 at 11:39 pm
Lane Conaway
Finally a book I read before you did.
If you liked this book, you may be interested in Collapse, the follow-up. I think the theory is much shakier (easier to draw generalizations about all of societies that prospered in GG&S than a half dozen examples of collapsed societies – the old line about the happy being alike and the unhappy being different holds true) but the narrative is more engaging since much of the book is devoted to case studies rather than themes. Plus, it’s a lot more interesting to read about bloody battles over the last tree on Easter Island than crop transport over an east-west axis.
August 5, 2009 at 11:40 pm
sunrise
(real name above – stupid inability to remember to use internet handle)
August 6, 2009 at 10:22 am
grubstreethack
Case studies sounds much more interesting. I don’t have a very good theoretical mind.
August 6, 2009 at 11:08 am
Alex
Does any part of the book rest on the “superior” religions of the West that efficiently went in and undermined the native superstitions? Technology obviously shows how superior a society is, but wasn’t it the urge to spread the good word (besides natural resources) that lead to widespread colonization?
August 6, 2009 at 6:13 pm
William George
No. Religion was a political excuse for the people back home.
It was/is all about money.
August 6, 2009 at 10:28 pm
sunrise089
Conventional wisdom says it was the three “G’s” – God, Gold, and Glory. Basically lots of people wanted to make money and find success in the time where wealth was still largely tied to land (much easier to get a big ‘ol piece of land in the new world than in the old), plus a lot of warrior types had just finished pushing the Moors out of Spain and wanted some more action, plus a fair amount of people really did want to preach to and convert the natives, and of course they used a wide variety of methods, some savage.
It isn’t fair to totally dismiss religion’s role though – early colonization took place before the post-enlightenment’s secular humanism philosophy had really taken hold, so while voices in the Church urged plenty of tragic acts and policies, they were also almost alone in actually being willing to stand up for the native peoples and argue for their welfare.
August 11, 2009 at 5:21 pm
John from Daejeon
You might want to read Shawn Matthews’ “Korea Life Blog” and review it. It probably would have helped had you done it before coming here though. It’s available from lulu.com. It’s really quite good.
Let us know how everything turns out.
June 12, 2010 at 10:48 am
chen019
Diamond’s book is a little out of date on genetics. Recent studies have shown that there was an increase in genetic change with the development of agriculture and population expansion in eurasia. Some of these changes appear to relate to neurological function (see papers by Benjamin Voight, Bruce Lahn or Scott Williams).
New York Times science writer Nicholas Wade’s book ‘Before the Dawn’ covers some of this, as does the more recent ‘The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution’.
June 17, 2010 at 2:19 am
DAY 50: Crash « Gentlemen of the Road
[…] the middle of the day doing nothing. Look, I’m as left-wing as they come, and I’ve read Guns, Germs & Steel. But still. You come to these places, and you have to […]